An eBay Shop is an essential part of a professional seller’s arsenal of tools. And before we look, over the next few days, at the ways an eBay Shop can contribute to your profitability, it’s worth revisiting what your Shop adds to your operations. It’s also a chance to evaluate whether you’re making the most of your Shop.
4 Good Reasons to have an eBay Shop
Search Engine Sexiness: A well-named Shop, optimised by its owner, making it as sexy as possible to Search Engines will most likely perform well on Google and the like. Your eBay Shop can be the way you drag in punters from the World Wide Web and get buyers from sources other than eBay.
Good Reports: As part of the basic package you get all the lovely Shop Traffic and Sales reports. This feature, should be the meat and drink of every eBay seller’s daily routine, is worth the £6 subscriptions on its own.
eBay Shop as a Destination: Your Shop is a place you can drive traffic to and promote independently. Although not as flexible as it could be (I would welcome changes that transform an eBay Shop into a truly customiseable, pretty much white-label, facility), sellers can enjoy success by tweaking their Shop.
SIF Format: Shop Inventory Format Listings offer sellers with some options not available to others. Of course, when choosing selling formats, a mix works. And for most sellers SIF can be part of that mix.
So, over the next few days I’ll be looking at eBay Shops. Is there anything that you’d specifically like to discuss?
17 Responses
Not really a discussion but I would like to know the reason why the cost of gallery images goes up with each pricing tier.
Are “designer” shop fronts – e.g. Frooition’s offerings – worth it? Personally I think not: eBay spend a lot of money driving buyers to eBay, and shop fronts that suddenly make buyers feel like they’re not on eBay any more are surely off-putting? (especially when they are commonly slow to load and clunky to use).
Is there a place in your philosophy for such things, and if so, when does a seller’s branding become more important than eBay’s?
My eBay Shop is very customised, its been like this for a long time now and customers like the easy layout. Best of all I pay nothing for gallery images.. 😀
Note:- I have a small program that creates the shop layout from file exchange active download; otherwise would be nightmare to maintain. So not for everyone.
Also have a suspicion images will beome compulsory in future.. 😥
When you say Sexy to search engines, what tips do you have to make this so?
when choosing selling formats, a mix works
What should sellers consider when choosing a mix of selling formats?
Also perhaps we can look at creating a brand?
A well-named Shop
Could you talk about how to achieve this? Is it better to pick an individual name which stands out, but might be mis-remembered, or to use generic words which might score better in a search but wouldn’t be quite as much your own?
I’ve seen eBay shops recently with names like “accessories-jewellery-and-designer-clothes”, and thought 😯 how does anyone remember *that* to find it again, but of course in a Google search for same, it’s probably going to do quite well.
Sue, after reading your post I googled for…
gold silver findings
and was gobsmacked to find my low traffic website which I do nothing to promote was the first item and my eBay shop was just a little further down.
The only place my site is advertised is at the bottom of the invoices I send out with ebay orders and on my ebay Me page. No adwords, no uploading of inventory to search engines.
shops dont work for me, simple fact!
What part of it doesn’t work for you, North? I can understand people saying SIF listings don’t work for them, but Shops are so much more than SIF, and I don’t see how extra branding, traffic reports, better searching, categories, email marketing etc. etc. etc. wouldn’t be worth more than £6 a month.
Anybody using his or her shop as a dumping ground really isn’t trying hard enough. We all have items, which didn’t sell, as well as we thought and sometimes they need to be sold at face value or below. CLD are an ideal time to sell off unwanted stock. We have found many buyers buy often buy a second item from our shop having made their initial purchase from our ‘Live listings.’ We have created links to shop categories from all our listings and find that it works well. The Shop Traffic reports clearly shows that we are getting hits from outside ebay. There appears to be room for improving capture by search engines. Our next project is to include some suitable text within our listings to increase hits.
PS don’t forget the added advantage of Selling manager within the shop package.
I have other things to do and other ways of making money,
the time and efforrt that needs to be put into an ebay shop is not time or cost effective for the return it gives me
though I am certain it works well for others
Norf: How do you mean it doesn’t ‘work’ for you?
I don’t see a Shop as a ‘time sink’.. certainly way less than a lot of other things I’ve suggested.
You can gain enormous benefits from eBay shops without having to put in any real time or effort at all. For example, just the extra ease of searching your listings: if that gains you an extra sale a month, it’s paid for itself. Seeing what search words have brought buyers to your shop takes minutes to look at, but can be incredibly helpful. An automatic email to people who have favourited you every week or fortnight, show-casing new listings reminds your buyers to come back. And so on and so on. None of it takes time. All of it can benefit your business.
I mean £24 quid a month can be better spent, and the time can be even better spent all my items are unique and start low there listed to sell ,
the type of item we list, and the price we list at, sells itself
I expect 100% sell thru,, I have no need to pay ebay for a storage shelf for the dead and unwanted,
or to be clear we do our homework , if an item we wish to list has not sold recently for a price we need to acheive we dont list it, its just the way we do things,
though we do have close associates, that only ever list using an ebay shop and are more than happy, we are happy to because we sell to them 😀
It’s £6 a month.