Against auction fraud

Auctions are a great place to sell or buy and for a vast majority of seller and buyers it's serves a real perpose since live online auctions are very popular. Sometimes things can go wrong and most people would believe it’s the buyer that’s most likely to get defrauded of his money on ebay. After all the buyer is mostly the one exposed to scams since he must pay at the end of the auction risking to never see any product arrive at his door. But sellers are commonly victims of scames. Here are a few common scams that sellers fall for every day.
The easiest scam sellers may be victims of is the “I Never Bought Anything” scam. A simple call to his credit card’s issuing bank to report that his card is being used fraudulently is all a buyer needs to do to reverse the credit purchase. The bank will, without investigation, reverse the transaction, often debiting the sellers account after the product has been shipped out. Online services like ebay and paypal will help protect the sellers from this type of scam. Providing all the detailes of the transaction to bank investigators is the only defense to this scam by allowing the sellers to prove the purchase was legitimate. Ebay also provides a deterrent by allowing the sellers reputation to be tarnished by the seller, victim of fraud, buy giving him the means to post negative feedback to the buyers ratings.
Bouncing checks have been going on for years. Here the buyer issues a check that won’t have the necessary funds to be covered by the buyer’s bank due to insufficient funds. It can take up to 2 weeks for a check to clear. The seller having sent the goods before the check cleared gets scammed only to realize later that the check bounced and the goods are gone. This scam is easilly avoidable by the seller who waits for the check to clear before shipping the merchandise. Some sellers refuse this type of payment and make it clear in the auction description.
Pay pal is an effective payment methode and one that is quit populare on the web not just eBay. Since all you need is an email and password to steal a PayPal accounts from an inexperienced users this is fairly commun. PayPal tries to protect against the frudulent use of accounts by offering a mailing address for each PayPal account that matches the one held by the credit card issuer. The scammer will try to get his goods shipped at a different address so you need to be causious of any atempts to shippe at a different address especcially if their willing to pay a higher price for overnight shipping. The danger or the seller here is that you may have your payments reversed from you once the fraude is discovered.
This certainly dosen’t cover all the potential buyer fraudes used on ebay but these are the most common and are the ones you can easilly get caugh with if you are too trust worty. When in doupt don’t hestate to communicate either the officials at eBay and PayPal and get some advice from them so you can limite the dammage cause by scammer, while at the same time continuing to deliver a quality service to your legitimate buyers.

The web is a very fast paced environment that changes on a daily basis. Many people are focused on building value here but some are trying to exploit surfers and mine away some value away from those who build it. There are so many type of spamming techniques and more and more spamming tools that everyone is becoming more vigilant especially Google in what they will accept, even our online auction site is a venue for spammers to promote their sites and services so we all need to be careful but at the same time we don't want to over burden the legitimate users with complex forms and capcha images. All of us as website owners need to be aware at the opportunities we are exposing to the spammers and opportunists out there. Spammers are only a nuicance but phishers are a real threat.

I get so many fake email from look-a-like sites that try to get me to login to some fake forms on the web (look at the urls for legitimacy, for example if it dosent begin with http://www.paypal.com IT'S NOT PAYPAL) that I no longer follow links from email anymore. We spend a lot of energy and money to build up our credibility and profitability so we need to all join in and educate our visitors of the threats we all face on the web and make really difficult for scammers and phishers to succeed off our backs.

Live long and prosper

A selling compelling description

Success in any marketing depends on compelling customer to act now. Creating an effective online auction listing is a selling process like any other. In sales a successful sales person learns to read his customers, put himself in his shoes and get in his head to foresee how he should adapt his strategy to improve his chances of closing a deal with him. Advertising needs to do the same. By learning your target customer's mindset, effectively, you're able to position your product to succeed through an effective auction listing. This may seem like it's impossible to achieve, with all the products that are available to sell. But time and time again power sellers have demonstrated that focusing on niche segments, improves your success with online auctions dramatically. Only by analyzing others and learning about your segments needs and wants, can you effectively communicate to your market with an effective sales copy.

So it's important to learn about your audience and find out as much as you can about them as well as the details and features of your product. A great place to start is by looking at other similar listing. Look at the ones getting the bids versus the ones not getting them. Looking at sales histories to see what details seem to constantly be in place for successful auctions and which ones aren’t. Visiting blogs and forums to see what aspects seems to be a major concern with your type of item, with your target audience, and what features are their most valued. The time you take here to learn, will pay off by contributing in the creation of a listing sales copy offering greater convergence (an enthusiasm to take action) for your posted items.

Create a simple sales page that is well documented and do not get carried away with distracting colors, animation, and any thing that takes away the focus on your sales copy. I see a lot of people trying to show off their HTML knowledge adding colors, graphics, and yes, sometimes some animation. This doesn't provide any benefit to your listing and can in fact deter to promote your item because it fails to promote trust and goodwill.

The actual page copy should breathe, so break complex sentences into shorter, clearer sentences that arouse the curiosity rather than satisfy it. Provide a text that reads well and provide readers a smooth transition that builds up their interest and demonstrates your expertise in the matter. Write compelling description by focusing on the desired benefits. Lay them out into heading and subheadings. Always support your claims with documented facts using real facts and numbers (like 6 instead of a half-dozen for example). So as you trigger the emotional response to buy now, supply them with the logical reason’s as well. Now that’s a mouthful, so lay out your objectives and put your imagination to hard work into creating an effective sales copy, focused on providing a compelling call to action.
Finish with a call to action. Unfortunately, many marketing letters don't end with a call to action. You’ve build up all this desire and enthusiasm and you’re not caching in. What do you want your readers to do? Now you’ve motivated people to want to take that next step, you need to show them that final step. Like “Bid now!”, “Do this!”, “Do that!” there are so many good examples, check other listing you will find lots of them.