Many people who sell on Ebay completely neglect the follow-up process. They post an auction. Someone wins. They send an automated message to the winner. They ship the item. End of story. End of buyer-seller relationship.

. . .end of customers total worth to the business --and this is why so many people who sell on Ebay fail or make negligible profits: they have no idea that the real money is actually in back-end and follow-up sales.

In this article, I am going to go over one of the tools you can use to make follow-up sales on Ebay: autoresponders.

Autoresponders will allow you to automate the follow-up and upselling process. You can subscribe to an autoresponding service through a number of different companies. Most will give you a free trial that limits your abilities, but lasts indefinitely.

Getresponse (getresponse.com) is one of these companies. It has a user-friendly control panel, excellent customer service, and offers a free trial version that will give you access to everything you need for early upselling and follow-up.

You can use your autoresponder a number of different ways to make follow-up sales, but you must start by collecting names to load into your autoresponder.

You can do this by asking customers (after youve made a sale) if they would like to join your mailing list and receive special offers, discounts, and the chance to buy items before they go on auction. Load the names and email addresses of the people who respond positively into your autoresponder.

Getresponse will send them a confirmation message. The rest is up to you.

Come up with special offers, discounts, and contests and send them out via broadcast to your subscribers on a regular basis, but not too often.

Your customers have already a) purchased from you and b) agreed to receive special offers. From here, it shouldnt be too hard to get follow-up sales. They are already hooked--just give them a good offer.

For instance, you could send out special offers for complementary products at certain intervals. You could target people who purchased digital cameras and offer them sticks of memory at a discounted price, but only if they buy within a certain amount of days after the close of the auction. You could do the same thing with camera bags--and also set a specific date.

If you sell jewelry, you could offer customers a matching set of earrings for a necklace at a discount. Or cleaning tools. Or a jewelry box.

There are a number of different ways in which you can structure your Ebay post-sales follow-up with your autoresponder. There are only two real rules you should follow:

1) Do not, under any circumstances, add people to your list who did not specifically ask to be added to it. It is illegal and unethical, and it could land you in jail; and

2) Make sure you are targeting the right people with the right follow-up pitch. If youre trying to sell discount plastic dinosaurs to someone who just bought a case of motor oil, you probably wont get the response you want.

. . .other than that, it is completely up to you. Come up with some creative ideas; put them to work; and you can easily double or triple the lifetime worth of each customer who shops at your Ebay store.