The following article was originally written for the Ruby Lane forums. However many of the tips offered can be used when communicating with virtually any company's Customer Support desk. Employing some of these tools are likely to make your next experience with a customer support representative (from an airline to your local cable company) more successful:

Ruby Lane Customer Care & Share: Avoid Flaming! 

A ‘flame’ is any e-mail that’s inflammatory (hence the name). Flames are most often the result of unbridled anger.

Ruby Lane Customer Care & Share: Word Choice

Using weak words or including unnecessary words to fluff up your sentences can dilute the impact of your message. Try to choose descriptive words that really say what you mean.

QUESTION: My father traveled to and from Britain in the early 1960s. He was a passenger on the plane when the Beatles first traveled to America. I have two publications signed by all four Beatles. The first is Beatles in Paris / Boyfriend Photonews Extra!, a 16-page, black and white newsprint publication. The second is "Fabulous" Goes All Beatles: John, Paul, George, Ringo, Plus Cilla, 16 pages featuring 11 king-size color pin-ups. I saw an Antiques Roadshow episode suggesting these pieces with all four Beatles signatures have far more value than just a memory of my Dad?s traveling.

Ruby Lane Customer 'Care & Share' Column

Investing in customer loyalty takes place heavily at the beginning of a
new customer relationship and diminishes quite dramatically as the
relationship between you and your customer cements and matures into
'loyalty'.

Ruby Lane Customer 'Care & Share' Column

In business, the last thing you want to do is inadvertently alienate a customer or a colleague. Unfortunately, email is a medium where unintended alienation can easily happen, without your even realizing what's going on. Here are some suggestions to help you minimize misunderstandings when you send emails to your customers and colleagues:

Utilizing high quality, reciprocal links is one important way to increase the rating of an individual web page in Google and other search engines. Your sites rating influences the rank of your site in a search result for important keywords relevant to your sites contents– the type of items you sell. The higher your page rank, the greater the visibility of your website at the top of a search result.

Back in January we did an article entitled, “The Top 10 Fallacies of Selling Online”. The following is a list of 10 more fallacies that we see as important to understand if you’re selling online or considering selling online. At the end, we invite you to add your comments on what you’ve learned from selling online:

1. I’m so small that I simply can’t afford to accept returns:

The following is the latest scam example we received from a Ruby Lane shop owner. In this instance the scammer actually threatens legal action if the shop owner does not cash the check and complete the transaction. One can also see from the correspondence that the amount due for the item was much less than the amount of the check that was sent which is the common key to this type of scam.

I am a shop owner on Ruby Lane. My shop is called Jantiques. I am also a graphic designer, in business for over 30 years. I have been perusing other shops on the Lane, and am amazed at all of the unique and fascinating items being offered by shopkeepers here. What amazes me even more, though, is the lack of professionally designed store identities!