Please note: Following these instructions may be against eBay’s or Paypal’s TOS and could get you in possible legal trouble. Consider this information for entertainment purposes only.
I was recently asked by a co-worker of mine if there is a way to use InfusionSoft (or any third-party email marketing software) to market to eBay customers. My co-worker has a client who primarily sells on eBay and wants to export his client data into InfusionSoft so he can run email marketing campaigns. Being a former eBay power seller, I was a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know the answer to this simple question. I do know that eBay offers an email campaign service for eBay stores. Unfortunately, it’s fairly expensive for large email batches.
I decided to search on the eBay forums and groups for an answer but quickly realized that most eBay sellers are completely clueless about email marketing. It’s almost comical. I decided that I would have to figure this out on my own.
I logged into my eBay account and started looking for reports that I could use to export customer information (name, email, address, etc…) I quickly remembered that eBay does not disclose any personal information of other users inside of their system. eBay uses an internal messaging service to handle all communication. When your item sells, eBay sends you a “Your eBay item sold” confirmation email that does contain the email address of the buyer; however, the “reply to:” is ebay@ebay.com not the buyer’s email address. At this point, the only way to gather the email address would be to go into each individual email and copy and paste those email addresses into excel…painful.
The next thing I tried was to log into my PayPal account and find a report that extracts email addresses from buyers. If you click on “History”, you can export all your data into a csv file. The file contains all customer information and transaction information.
There is one way I can think to actually automate this, but I warn you it’s totally untested and only theoretical. When someone sends you payment through PayPal, PayPal sends a “Notification of Instant Payment” email. In Gmail you can set up a filter that forwards only the Paypal notification emails to another email address. This “other” email address can be an email parsing server that strips the contents of the email and submits them to a web form. Your parsing software will accept the email, strip out the contents such as name, address, email address, item sold, and whatever else you want and automatically submit them to a web form. Now, everything is automatic. Pretty slick if I do say so myself! The major drawback to this is that email parsing software is notoriously unreliable. You would probably have to develop your own parsing software. If you go to the Business Resources section of my website, I have a link to a programmer job bidding website if you want to outsource something like this.
-Martin