Here we are again with another tutorial on how to reduce customer emails on eBay. We are first focusing on eBay features and how they may help you, as sellers, to reduce those emails. If you are having problems with answering too many emails or you are starting to feel the pressure of upholding customer relations to get the all important positive feedback, I am quite sure you agree that most of the communication is unnecessary and can be handled much more easily. If you want to know how, you have come to the right place!

ASQ (Ask Seller a Question) is a group of features in eBay that helps sellers do that. These features can be found under Account -> Site Preferences and it helps sellers to classify and answer emails or even automatically redirect them to a previously prepared FAQ.

Ask Seller a Question (ASQ)

First of all you can define the questions that are asked by buyers by clicking on the edit link next to “Customize the question types that buyers can choose from”. This will help you define the categories based on your experience and possible questions that you might receive.

Second it is possible to show the questions asked by prospective buyers in each listing to avoid answering repetitive questions. This can easily be done by changing the default of “Show questions posted on each listing” to yes.

Third and maybe the more interesting part comes to FAQs. These are Frequently Asked Questions prepared by the seller (you!). There are three methods to display the FAQs.

The first one is to simply click on the link next to “Customize my frequently asked questions and the Ask a Question page” and customize your FAQ on eBay. The interface is not very user friendly though it might do the job.

eBay FAQs Screenshot

The second way is redirecting your buyers to a third-party website such as Parature (www.parature.com) and Hosted Support (www.hostedsupport.com). These are paid services and the interface is again not very nice. These are ok websites but I am not sure if anybody wants to pay for such service.

Create Custom FAQ with Scrobbld

The third one is what Scrobbld is offering sellers and we are quite proud of it. The interface is very nice and it is AJAX driven! That means you can make sections for questions, write new questions, change orders in categories or question without a single refresh on the page. Changing the order of questions and sections can be done by drag and drop. It is impressive and I am sure you will love it, we do! Anyway it comes for FREE! Check it out for yourself and enjoy many more features of what Scrobbld is offering you.

[flashvideo filename=http://blog.scrobbld.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/scrobbldfaq.flv height=240 width=500 displayheight=240 /]
(view the video in fullscreen mode for added clarity)

Avoid unnecessary communications and you are on your way to better feedback, more free time and a big increase in sales.