Today I'm proud to announce that my business, "HoneVille.com" is becoming focused on it's eBay location for the first time since 2006. We will withdraw from all other marketplaces and have updated our website to primarily drive our customers to ebay to do their shopping.
For those of you who have followed us, you know it's been a rocky journey. We grew disillusioned with ebay in 2012 and announced our shift in focus away from ebay. That was short lived. 9 months later ebay introduced it's "hassle free returns" and that was a perfect solution for our business on eBay.
Buying clothing online is challenging. There are no dressing rooms and words and pictures are just no replacement for trying something on and actually touching and feeling the item. The problem was in eBay's world butting up against that "touch and feel" weakness was never a good thing. EBay's hassle free return program was a perfect solution to this problem. So by the fall of 2013 we were once again listing on ebay and had embraced the hassle free returns as our solution.
The big change for us came on Jan 1st of 2014. That's when we embraced our "FREE RETURN" policy. We called it "Risk Free Buying" and began to welcome returns with open arms! Thanks to eBay's platform our buyers didn't even have to ask us for a return. All they had to do is log into paypal, go to their purchase history, find the purchase, and click on "return this item". Ebay let them print up a shipping label, charged us for the shipping cost, then mediated the return making returning on ebay as easy as buying on ebay. For us that has been a perfect fit. Our website, and all the other marketplaces just can't compete with the simplicity of returns on ebay.
Ebay offers our customers the best buying experience! Fewer than 3% of our items need to be returned by our customers, but when they need to return an item they bought from us, ebay offers the best return solution for our customers. No other marketplace, not even my own website, can take care of my customers after the sell like eBay enables us to.
We've been offering free returns on ebay since 2014. One of the benefits of this that we didn't see coming was a sharp increase in customer loyalty. Buyers who need to return for a different size aren't going away mad... instead they're becoming our best customers! They're buying more. We've seen a sharp increase in repeat buyers on ebay and it's clear to us, our ebay customers want to shop on ebay! They love the simplified returns, they're spending more, and coming back more often. Surprisingly, we did not see a huge increase in returns when we moved to this model... all we saw was huge increase in customer satisfaction. Ebay satisfies our customer's better than we can satisfy them on our own website, and on other marketplaces. We love our "FREE RETURN" business model and so do our customers. Because of that HoneVille is shifting it's focus to growing our business solely on ebay.
Already we have 17,300 listings on ebay representing over 1.5 million variations, but we've only just begun to grow. Now that we're focused on one platform we can give ebay our full attention and promise our buyers that the best is yet to come. We hope you never have to return an item, but if you need to, you'll be glad you bought from us on eBay.
