Your eCommerce Customers Are Your’s,,,Or Are They?

June 30, 2008 · Filed Under Internet Marketing, amazon, eBay, ecommerce 

While thinking this morning about building a new database of listeners to our radio program I hit upon another thought in internet marketing that is changing rapidly.

When you sell your product on one of the many big named venues such as Amazon or eBay, is the buying customer yours or the sites? Many might be surprised at the answer.

eBay recently announced that it was changing the policy for the About Me page, removing the ability for sellers to link to their own website or any other site not owned by eBay. They also have announced that email links in the listing will no longer be allowed starting in September. (See eBay’s Announcement). Also in September eBay will ”anonymize” all communication between buyer and seller except the notifications after the sale of the item. What this means is that the seller will only see the actual email address of the winning buyer. Any other comminication from potential buyers during the run of the item will be anonymized.

Amazon provides sellers with a list of sales including buyers emails, however they stress the seller may only contact the buyer regarding specific purchase issues. In other words sellers can not email market to these buyers.

The truth is that sellers using sites such as Amazon and eBay as a venue really can not build a database of their buying customers and then email market to them.

So the answer is the buyer is really the customer of the site and not the actual seller. The long thought marketing idea of selling on these sites to build your customer database is simply not effective because if you are caught sending emails to these buyers for anything other than specific purchase related purposes is against their policies and could cost you in the form of suspensions, restrictions or actually being kicked off of the site altogether.

Internet marketing strategies are changing rapidly! To make sure you have the very latest information, be sure to tune in every Saturday morning, 10 AM to Noon ET to ebay & Beyond: Basics to Business steaming live on the internet!

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments

One Response to “Your eCommerce Customers Are Your’s,,,Or Are They?”

  1. Chris Moran on June 30th, 2008 2:23 pm

    Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.

    Chris Moran

Leave a Reply