The Internet may be changing the way vehicles are sold, but the world hasn’t stopped spinning quite yet.  Even online, superior service and strong customer relationships close sales.

In your online listings, as in all of your sales, your customers expect to see strategically-priced, professional-looking offerings.  What elevates the best online listings is the behind-the-scenes service and support provided by a knowledgeable dealer.

Devoting yourself to properly managing your listings will help eliminate buyers' concerns, ensuring their comfort and willingness to do business with you.  As the top sellers on eBay Motors continue to show, managing listings from start to finish and handling each bidder as you would any prospective customer is the single best way to build sales, increase bids and drive up profits.

Tips from Top Sellers

• Be available – Schedule time each day to check each of your listings and any e-mails you’ve received from potential buyers

• When possible, assign someone to act as your dealership’s eBay Motors salesperson

• Know your market – Track price and conversion trends online to establish a strategy for listing inventory on eBay Motors

• Know ALL your prospects – Communicate with each bidder for all your listings to ensure they are financed, able to complete the transaction and fully understand your terms of sale

In addition to verifying buyer interest, dealers often find that regular customer contact also helps cultivate leads, generate more sales at higher margins and up-sell revenue-boosting products such as service agreements and financing options.

Managing Pricing
Although the vast majority of your listings management effort will be simply communicating with prospective buyers and helping them to bid confidently, it is also important to be able to manage the pricing for your online listings.  The flexibility to revise or change your pricing approach is one of the great advantages of an eBay Motors listing.

Depending on the state of your listing and your communications with prospective buyers, you can:

• Lower your Reserve or Buy It Now price to help attract price-conscious bidders

• Add a Buy It Now price to help interested bidders quickly purchase your vehicle

• End a listing early, should the vehicle sell on your lot while the listing is still active

• Relist an item that did not sell – there is no additional listing fee if the item sells when relisted

Be aware that changing your price while a listing is live will affect your current bids.  If you drop the Reserve or Buy It Now price below the current high bid, the high bidder will still be allowed to confirm or cancel his or her interest in the vehicle.

While sellers on eBay Motors are free to end a listing before the reserve is met in order to sell off the lot, dealers must be careful not to sell the same car twice. Once the reserve is met on an eBay Motors listing (or a listing without a reserve receives its first bid), the listing is considered a legal contract and the dealer is required to sell the vehicle to the winning bidder. Your sales staff should be notified when the reserve has been met on an eBay Motors listing and should remove it from your lot inventory.

Although creating your vehicle listings may be the first step when selling online, it is far from the last.  Taking care in communicating with your prospective online buyers, answering their questions and being open to negotiating your pricing will help increase your sales, build your reputation as an online seller and ultimately, enhance your profitability by encouraging more buyers to bid more confidently.

Vol 4, Issue 1