The key to finding time to manage every aspect of your business is to automate as much as possible. ChannelAdvisor has a number of areas where you can automate a number of daily tasks, freeing up time to spend doing other important business functions.

Prerequisites

The following topics should be reviewed before completing this task.

• Optimizing Your eBay Account

Tasks to Complete

Complete the following tasks related to this topic:

• Automated E-mails
• Best Offer
• Feedback
• Second Chance Offers
• Unpaid Items

Automated E-mails

You have the ability to set up customized e-mail templates that you can use for a variety of reasons. In addition, you can automate the sending of these to customers for a number of status changes in the application. These automatic status notifications are triggered based where the customer is in the checkout process, when an item has been shipped, as a reminder for a customer to complete the checkout process and as a reminder to leave feedback for a transaction.

You may also utilize template tags to make your e-mails more dynamic and personalized as well.

For more information regarding automated emails for:

• Checkout - visit Sales Notifications
• Checkout Reminders - visit Automate Reminders for Incomplete Checkouts
• Feedback - visit Feedback Automation
• Email Templates - visit Email Templates

Best Offer Settings

eBay allows sellers to receive price-based offers from buyers which can be accepted at the discretion of the seller. Every Best Offer is binding and is good for 48 hours. Best offers are only available for Fixed Price listings and if the buyer's best offer is accepted, the listing ends.

As a seller, you have 3 options:

• Accept the best offer and close the listing
• Decline the Best Offer and tell the buyer why the offer was rejected
• Allow the offer to expire on its own in 48 hours (if the listing ends in less than 48 hours, the offer will expire when the listing ends)

If you accept an offer, the buyer who submitted that offer becomes the instant winner of that item. The buyer is notified by eBay that they have won the item. The transaction will proceed like any other completed eBay listing. If you accept an offer, the buyer who submitted that offer becomes the instant winner of that item. The buyer is notified by eBay that they have won the item. The transaction will proceed like any other completed eBay listing.

You have the ability in ChannelAdvisor to set a number of tiers to use to evaluate the automatic acceptance or rejection of Best Offers. If a submitted Best Offer price is within the tier that you have defined to accept, the listing will close immediately at the Best offer price.

For more information on configuring Best Offer settings, visit Best Offer Automation .

Feedback

The Feedback system is a core tenet of the eBay platform. Buyers leave feedback about their buying experience and sellers leave feedback about buyers who have purchased from them. Over time, a feedback profile is built on trading partners using eBay. Your feedback profile allows buyers to see the reputation that you have built with other buyers and sellers on the site. Buyers can leave a positive, negative or neutral rating about their buying experience as well as a short comment. Sellers can only leave a positive feedback rating and a short comment. Once feedback has been left, it becomes a part of the user's permanent profile.

The feedback score for any user can be seen directly to the right of the user name on eBay. This feedback is shown in parentheses and is followed by a star rating. The star is a graphical representation of the range that the score falls in. Once a user has achieved a feedback score of 10 or more, the star rating the correlates to the range of the feedback score will be displayed.

The Feedback score is calculated in the following manner:

• +1 point for each positive rating
• No points for each neutral rating
• -1 point for each negative rating

There are a number of automation techniques that you can take advantage of using ChannelAdvisor. You can automate leaving Feedback based on the status change of items in your ChannelAdvisor checkout, automate Feedback Rotation and automate the sending of e-mail templates to request feedback be left for you to your customers.

For more information regarding feedback settings, visit Feedback Automation .

Second Chance Offers

A Second Chance Offer is an opportunity for you to offer an item to someone other than the winning bidder after the listing ends. You can offer a second chance offer to the next highest bidder if your winning bidder backs out or if you have additional inventory that you want to sell at a price that is lower than the winning bidder's price, but above a threshold that you configure. This works by creating a fixed price listing on eBay that only the one bidder can buy.

The software allows you to set a threshold price entered per inventory item that controls which under bidders will be extended an offer. If the under bidder bids higher then this threshold price an offer will be extended to them; if they did not meet the threshold price then they will not be sent a second chance offer. The offer will be for the price the under bidder bid for the item.

For more information regarding these settings, visit Second Chance Offer .

Unpaid Items

The Unpaid Items (UPI) process will allow you to recover eBay's Final Value fees in a number of situations. ChannelAdvisor primarily gives you a structured way to communicate with both the buyer and eBay to resolve the dispute so that either the buyer pays or you receive a Final Value Fee credit.

Support for Unpaid Items has been added in three areas of the application:

• eBay Settings ( Marketplaces > eBay > Settings > eBay Settings (click edit next to Unpaid Sales)
• eBay Unpaid Items view ( Sales > Orders/Transactions > eBay Unpaid Items )
• View Details (on each invoice in the All Sales view), from the Dispute Details tab.

Form more information regarding Automatic Dispute Generation, visit Unpaid Items (UPI)