Growing Your eBay Customer Base

The vast majority of people who buy things on eBay are customers. But as any successful eBay businessperson knows, they aren’t just buyers. You must remember that the customer is king, the key to maintaining a great feedback rating, and the key to ongoing business that can keep an eBay fundraising venture afloat. Cultivating ongoing relationships with satisfied buyers is the key to ongoing business.

To those who sell on eBay to benefit charity causes, customers are even more special: they are donors as well as buyers. They’re people who keep you going and make your activities possible. As anyone who has participated in one of eBay’s community forums can tell you, the internet is a wonderful place to develop close relationships with individuals who share a common goal or interest, in other words, develop relationships with a wide online community.

On eBay and the internet, caring for and nurturing donors is as important as it is in the offline world. eBay gives you several options to maintain good relations with other members. The most important is eBay’s well-known feedback system, which rewards trustworthiness and punishes dishonesty.

You can also volunteer information that helps your donors providing them with the URLs of web sites they might like to visit, on eBay or elsewhere, or answering questions on the message boards. At the very least, you’ll gain the respect of your donors by responding quickly to e-mail inquiries, and making payment and shipping easy. It’s all about helping people to do the right thing.

Donor Support
If you’re affiliated with a charity, you already know about growing your donor base. It boils down to being nice to your donors: inviting them, nurturing them, thanking them, and giving them special access and possibly other benefits.

On the web (and by extension, on eBay), nurturing donors is the same as providing a high-Ievel of customer service. But customer service on the Web is different than in other venues.

Nonprofits, like other organizations that sell on eBay or online, need to take into account the special way online consumers behave. In the traditional offline world, customer service is a matter of answering questions and solving problems with orders. Customer service representatives make themselves available to field questions and problems as they arise.

Customer care on the web isn’t a matter of publishing a phone number or e-mail address and waiting for consumers to send you questions. Such basics are important, but it’s more a matter of making information proactively available to buyers. The customer is in charge on the web, not the seller. Customers choose to view your items for sale or visit your web site; they choose to make a bid or a donation, or go elsewhere with their money.

Many eBay sellers who receive questions from prospective bidders answer those questions quickly. But they go a step further, also. They also publish the questions and answers as additions to their sales descriptions. This reduces the number of similar questions you receive, which saves your volunteers some work; it also raises the level of customer support you provide, which makes prospective buyers more likely to purchase from you.

When you receive a question from a bidder through eBay’s message system, you have the option of simply responding to the buyer privately, or adding the question and your response to the body of your sales description.

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The Island of Penang Malaysia

Situated on the north-western coast of the Malay Peninsula at the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, Penang Island covers an area of 292 sq km (112 sq mi). The island is separated from mainland Malaysia by a channel of sea varying between 3 km (1.9 mi) and 13 km (8 mi) wide, and they are linked by the 13.5 km (8.4 mi) Penang Bridge, one of the longest bridges in the world.

The island has the oldest British settlement in Malaysia, which was founded by Captain Francis Light in 1786 while he was searching for a docking place for ships of the East India Company. Captain Light made a treaty with the Sultan of Kedah who gave him permission to colonize the sparsely populated island.

Penang today is a fine mixture of old and new: bustling, industrial port meets historic Old Town. In the capital, Georgetown, modem skyscrapers tower above one of the largest collections of pre-war buildings in south-east Asia. Colourful produce markets compete for space with high-tech electronics manufacturers. There is also a fascinating mixture of cultures here. Hundred year old churches, Chinese temples, Indian temples and mosques stand side by side.

In the middle of the bustling modern city is Penang Hill (Bukit Bendera), at almost 900 m (2,953 ft) high, with its cool, clean air. From its summit there are amazing views of the town, the island, and even the mountains on the mainland when the sky is clear. There is a Swiss-built funicular railway to take visitors to the summit, which creaks its way up through the beautiful tropical forest. At the top of the hill there is a cafe, a Hindu temple and a mosque.

If you want to escape the busy city, there are other attractions on the island, including plenty of lovely beaches, some quaint fishing villages, beautiful stretches of forest and cascading waterfalls. Among the less crowded beaches are Muka Head, Pantai Keracut, Monkey Beach, Pantai Acheh and Gertak Sanggul.

Penang Island is enriched by its numerous ethnic communities, among them Malays, Chinese and Indians, which live side by side in harmony to create a multi-faceted culture. Each community maintains its cultural identity through religious festivals and cultural shows, including angsawan, Boria, flag processions, the Chingay Parade, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, the Hungry Ghosts Festival and Thaipusam. This succession of colourful festivals unravels throughout the year and when one big celebration is finished, another begins.

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