I am often asked about buying and selling online, mostly by people who are concerned about online fraud, I buy a fair amount online mostly books and printing related products and I would say that a much larger proportion of online purchases are unsatisfactory, compared to those purchases that I make in ordinary shops.As these are purchases that I have to make for the business I have no option but to put up with this situation.
As most of the readers of this blog will know one of the things I do is to publish books about this area, most of which I sell in my bookshop in Ramsgate.
I also sell my local books online predominately on ebay and on my own website and with the increase in internet fraud an increasing concern is how to show internet customer that they can trust a small business.
The greatest concern for customers is passing on their credit card details to a small business that they have never heard of. I overcome this by using PayPal on my own website. When you pay using PayPal the card details are not passed onto the retailer so there is no more risk of having your card details stolen than using your card with any other large well established company.
Another concern for customers is that they will receive a reasonably good product, in reasonable time, that is value for money, which is why I use ebay as well as my own website. The online seller has no control over customer feedback on ebay so if the seller has a reasonable amount of positive feedback the customer can be fairly certain that they will get what they expect.
From my point of view selling on ebay is more expensive than selling on my own website so I compensate for this by charging postage on the books I sell on ebay but sending those I sell from my own website post free.
Click here for the local books on my own website
Click here for the local books on ebay
Click here for ebay feedback
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.