Growing your eBay, Etsy or Amazon store while managing listings, promotions, and dealing with customers can be really overwhelming. However, success often comes down to just getting the basics right.

Here are 14 key mistakes that many of you are probably making every single day, so that you can learn how to avoid each and everyone of them. Avoiding these mistakes will make all the difference to how your store ultimately performs in terms of both sales, and your longevity on these platforms.

The "Never Do’s" — Avoid these at all costs and everything else will improve as a result

1. Never miss your daily listing goal
   The number one way to drive more traffic on marketplaces is to increase the number of listings that you have available. It doesn't matter if you're on Etsy, eBay, or Amazon, listing every single day ensures your store stays active and gets its daily dose of free traffic from the algorithm.

2. Never go a day without running a promotion
   Deals and discounts will always drive traffic and increase conversion rates. Promotions, even small ones, will entice more people to make a purchase compared to you not having run that promotion. So always ensure that you're running some sort of promotion every single day to maximize your conversion rates.

3. Never run promotions for more than 48 hours
   All promotions lose their sense of urgency over time. If you allow a potential buyer to 'sleep on it' — 9 times out of 10, they will. In testing, we ran promotions of varying lengths and ultimately discovered that the shorter the promotion, the better it performed. Consequently, we also discovered that running a promotion for no more than 48 hours creates the right amount of scarcity and encourages potential buyers to make impulse purchase decisions more often.

4. Never cancel an order unless the buyer asks for it first
   If you sell something that you don't have, you really run the risk of messing up your account for a long time. But, here's a 'get out of jail' card that you can use in such a situation. Never cancel the order but instead, buy a shipping label and upload tracking if this is not done automatically. This way, you will end up dealing with the non-receipt claim instead, and from a customer perspective you look like you're going above and beyond to fix the problem for them, and they will be forever grateful that you just refunded them 99% of the time. It's way better to deal with this than to ever cancel an order because you have no stock. This is not only true because it's makes you look like a great seller, but also because your account metrics can withstand many more claims of non-receipt compared to the very few times that they can for seller actioned pre-shipment cancellations.

5. Never ship orders late
   If you’re running late on an order, just upgrade it to a faster service with tracking. Late shipments damage your seller rating which ultimately leads to less visibility for your whole store. Assuming this doesn't happen too often, the cost of providing the free upgrade will always pay off in the long run.

6. Never end listings without replacing them immediately
   Many people don't understand this one. But in a nutshell, to grow, you always want to be increasing the total number of active listings in your store. This is ultimately how you drive new traffic to your store every single day, and is the only guaranteed way to increase your sales completely organically without using paid advertising, and without lowering your prices to the point of no profit. So, if you have to remove items from your store, always have new listings lined up ready to replace them. If you don't, I can guarantee that you will lose traffic share across your entire store and your sales will decline as a result. So, when one listing ends, another one should always take its place.

7. Never make changes to all listings at once
   Making bulk changes to all of your listings at once will really mess up the visibility of your listings from an algorithm standpoint. It will drastically decrease the volume of traffic that you get to all of your listings, and your sales will fall because of this. It may take your store weeks (or sometimes even months) to fully recover to previous levels after making bulk changes to everything at once. Instead, if you need to make changes to all of your listings, just divide your total number of listings by 30, then gradually implement the required changes by that number of listings 'per-day' over the next 30 days and you will see almost no negative effect of these changes.

8. Never raise prices on unsold listings
   If something hasn’t sold, increasing the price will only decrease the chances of it selling in the future. If it's not selling, just lower the price instead. That will drive more traffic and increase the likelihood that you get sales. But, if you can't make a profit at the price you need to sell it at, then just don't sell it at all.

9. Never decrease Ad Spend by more than 1% per day
   Cutting your advertising spend suddenly is a recipe for disaster and you might just completely tank your traffic and sales altogether, and not be able to recover it by simply reverting. It's important to remember that all of these ad platforms work by machine learning and some sort of algorithm that is constantly processing the data. This means, cutting your ad spend too fast will almost certainly confuse the algorithm and cause it to go into a 'training' phase which is why sales drop so suddenly, whenever you do this. To avoid this, if you need to lower ad spend, just do it gradually. We recommend no more than 1% per day until you reach your target ad spend. But if you want to take even more precaution, just do it even slower than that.

10. Never handle complaints without resolving them in the first reply
    Customer complaints must be resolved quickly and efficiently, and usually within 24hrs on most marketplaces. You do not want to start a conversation with your customer. So, just aim to resolve issues with a single message to keep customers happy and your feedback always positive. If a customer has to reply you are causing them an inconvenience of some sort. You will get the highest rate of positive feedback when you resolve problems with the first repsonse. Where possible always use templated replies, or create and save them every time you have to deal with a common issue. You can bet that you will deal with the same issue over and over again. You can check out the templates that we use for handling customer complaints using this link.

11. Never immediately respond to angry customers
    If you get a message from a customer that isn't happy, do not respond immediately. Instead, just wait a few hours before replying. This gives them time to cool off and defuses the problem by a significant amount. You then have time to respond professionally, rather than just reactively and emotionally, which 90% of the time will result in a very bad outcome for you. And again, where possible always use templated replies. See the link above.

12. Never respond to negative feedback without offering a refund first
    If a customer leaves negative feedback, refund them first and never reply to their feedback publicly. After the refund, then ask for a revision using our negative feedback removal procedure. For example; this tried and tested approach has enabled us to maintain a 100% Positive Feedback score on eBay, after handling more than 100,000 orders. Basically, it works bloody damn well for us, and will for you too.

13. Never attempt to ‘bribe’ a customer
    When resolving a conflict, always give something first, then ask. In most cases this will be a refund, whether that be partial or full is for you to decide based on the severity of the customer complaint. Only then should you ask for something in return, like revising feedback. Remember that you will only get one shot at getting your customer to revise their negative feedback, so consider a full refund as a total compensation for the best results. See the link above for advice on how to go about doing that in the right way.

14. Obey the rules, play the game and never take anything personally
    Selling on marketplaces gets really personal, because everyone is out to get you. Not only do you have the marketplace policies, but buyers who use these platforms do know how to manipulate these policies in their favour. If you want to sell on these marketplaces you have to accept that some people are going to try and take the royal piss out of both you, and your business. But, it's critical to always move on and not dwell on any negative interactions that you have with unreasonable customers, or the platforms themselves. Always remember that customers can, over a long period of time, kill your business on marketplaces if you let them, but more importantly, the platform can kill your business overnight. So always obey the rules. Resolving and forgetting these issues quickly will be key to maintaining your own sanity and ability to be successful on these platforms, despite the constant bombardment of issues that you will face. Once again, where possible always use templated replies, so that you always remain consistent in the way that you handle every single problem that arises, no matter how angry or upset you feel about it in the moment. And don't forget, you can check out the templates that we use for handling customer complaints using this link, which will help you understand why you need them.

Success on marketplaces isn’t just about being the cheapest and it's not just a race to the bottom

Becoming successful on marketplaces is all about mastering the processes behind the scenes. The sales will come when you focus on the things I've mentioned above. You need to learn and avoid all of these "never do’s" and implement all of them (or as many as you can) into your daily routine. You must always stay consistent and treat customers like your livelihood depends on it. Because, if you plan to do this fulltime, I can tell you from personal experience, that your livelihood might just actually depend on it.

P.S. Never put all of your eggs into one basket (i.e. marketplace). Make sure you list all of your products on as many marketplaces as you can so that you're never reliant on the income from any single platform. I guarantee that you will sleep soundly at night if you do.