Merchants who sell their goods on an online marketplace have a distinct advantage these days due to rising awareness and traction of e-commerce websites in the country. Online marketplaces make it easy for you to list your products and introduce you to a huge number of willing buyers.
While this may be a good thing, there are challenges that Indian online sellers face when it comes to running their operations in this space. Besides ensuring logistics and product quality, merchants often have to deal with tough buyers who want to take advantage of the system. These are a small subset of your customer base but they are enough to give you sleepless nights and wreck your reputation as an online merchant. Sandeep Sahni of Autotrends.in mentioned to us that a buyer might willfully leave negative feedback about a product so that they can take advantage and ask to receive a gift for the supposed dissatisfaction. Needless to say, this is a tactic that doesn’t really work, but causes a lot of hassle.
Your objective is to expand your profits while minimizing potential losses. While following this objective, you have to make sure you protect your online reputation as a seller, which is a big deal when it comes to online marketplaces.
So how do you deal with a customer like this?
There are 2 ways which you can adopt to minimize your chances of falling into this difficult position with a buyer.
1. Preventative Measures:
These measures will help a merchant to avoid the situation in the first place;
- Keep all your records clean and deliver on your sales promises when it comes to shipment times, prices, product quality and availability. If you ensure this, you will win the faith of your customers who will keep coming back for more.
- Communicate with your customers throughout the buying process – if an item is out of stock, let them know. If a shipment is delayed, send them an email. You need to make your customer know that you care, and that this is more than a one off business transaction for you.
- Ensure that you have detailed records of your transactions, invoices and shipping process. Marketplaces these days make it easy for you to maintain these records.
- Have a strong and well defined returns policy on all the goods you sell. Having a crystal clear returns policy will definitely get more customers to buy your products and result in fewer business ambiguities. If you want to get information on how to draft a good returns policy, you can check out this link on eBay India.
2. Reactive Measures:
These measures given below will help you to deal with the issues that crop up when dealing with dissatisfied or difficult customers.
- The first thing you have to remember is to stay extremely professional, no matter what. When it comes to online marketplaces, the customer is always king, irrespective of the circumstances. So, understand this and deal with the problems that might occur in a calm and level-headed way. This does not mean that you give up, it just means that you should treat this as a business argument/debate rather than getting personal.
- Maintain detailed records of all communication with the customer when it comes to emails, letters and phone calls. You should do this using the Marketplace’s system itself so that both you and the marketplace can easily access these records and know of their origin.
- If a customer claims to be dissatisfied with the product you shipped, offer to exchange the product but remember to clearly state who pays for the shipping of the new product clearly in your returns policy.
- It makes good sense to offer store credits to your customer instead of cash. This will get them to come back to your online store to buy more products. This works better if you have your own storefront on a marketplace.
- If none of the points mentioned above are helping in resolving the situation with your customer, then you have to decide quickly if you want to refund the customer’s money and get your product back. You should be the one deciding this and you should do this before you are forced to refund by the marketplace, a situation which will definitely lead to you getting negative feedback and monetary loss in the long run due to the damage caused to your reputation.
- Ultimately, you should not worry too much about these cases as every other online seller is bound to come across such customers. Learn from every such case you experience and make the appropriate changes to improve your process.
If you are a veteran seller, we are very interested in hearing how you have been dealing with difficult buyers. Do share your stories and tips in the comments for our readers
