eBay Hacks

Streamlining Communications

Use templates to send prewritten emails to your bidders.

As a seller, it is your responsibility to guide your bidders, helping them send payments and complete your transactions. You are the teacher as well as the seller, and — unfortunately — you’ll get blamed when something goes wrong.

The email you send to your winning bidders after an auction has ended, as discussed in [Hack #66], must communicate several different pieces of information, including the total amount to pay, the methods of payment you accept, and how to actually send payment. As a busy seller, you’ll want to do everything you can to simplify this task so that notifying dozens or even hundreds of bidders takes no more time than notifying a single one. Here are three different approaches that offer three different levels of automation.

The Simple Approach

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, sellers have different needs and different capabilities. The simplest way to streamline repetitive emails is to use the Stationery feature of your email program (instructions for Eudora and Outlook follow).

• Eudora (http://www.eudora.com). To start, go to Tools → Stationery. Right-click an empty area of the Stationery window, and select New. Type the subject line and body text that you’d like to send to an average bidder, and close the Untitled window when you’re done. Eudora will prompt you for a filename in which to save the stationery; thereafter, your stationery will appear in the Stationery ...