In the last eBay seller release it announced available with a billboard image at the top, larger photos and some social media features along with the new eBay collections.
I’ll be honest and say I’ve not seen a new eBay shop yet and most of the collections at the top of any page are from bloggers, magazine journalists, or eBay buyers rather than sellers.
There are probably two reasons why I’ve not seen a new look eBay shop. Firstly the truth is I hardly ever visit eBay shops as a buyer these days and with Best Match and ever increasing Free Postage there’s no incentive to make bulk purchases from a single seller.
Secondly, 90% of what I buy is purchased by mobile phone and not only do I not visit your shop, I probably don’t even read your item description or if I do look at it I’ll back out if it’s heavily templated and doesn’t display well on mobile. That’s not your fault as a seller, with the exception of a couple of pro-designers, eBay haven’t given sellers the tools to have a rich media description served to desktop users and a mobile friendly design for smaller screens.
The same is as true for eBay shops as it is for descriptions, only it’s even worse – on eBay’s mobile app I can’t even see your eBay shop, just “Items for Sale”!
In truth eBay shops (in my opinion), have a lot less value then they did 10 years ago, but it’s equally fair to say that they have a ton more value when you look at fees which makes having a shop imperative for most business sellers. Plus, even though large numbers of buyers are using mobile devices, there’s still a fair percentage using desktop browsers and, unless you have a customised shop, seeing as the new shop upgrade is free you might as well use it.
Have you upgraded your eBay shop?
If you’ve upgraded your eBay shop drop a link to it in comments below. We’d love to see some shops with the new billboard header and at the very least you’ll get some Tamebay readers clicking through to your shop and might get some extra sales.
16 Responses
Not yet but I am planning on ditching my dated Frooition shop for the new billboard image eBay shop and getting a simple clean responsive listing template suitable for desktop and mobile users. Professionally designed custom shops are increasingly hard to justify.
I have two of three shops with it, the other by a well known provider. Got to say the eBay ones look brilliant and they look fantastic on a mobile browser, hoping they do listing templates to match, would perform better than anything then on mobile.
Can’t read a fair few of the current designed shop ones on mobile, some don’t show at all and I hate having to zoom a mile to see anything, one reason why buyers don’t read descriptions so may also help with SNAD claims, with 45% of eBay sales touched by mobile I agree it’s harder to justify paying out for one these days especially the cost of upgrades and any changes you want to make.
Big thumbs up AND FOR FREE!
Never even seen an option to upgrade to the new shop.
This is my link to my ebay store. https://stores.ebay.com/Classical-Glass-Store
Please let me know if you see a problem with how it looks on a mobile phone. I’ve noticed a drop in sales lately. Any ideas? Thanks
New one on me, not heard a thing ?
First I’ve heard of it,
“From March – Look out for a message in Manage my Shop…”
Can’t see anything… is there any sort of shortcut to find this message/invite?
Haven’t had / seen the option in my eBay yet.
Ah, found a link, but I had to Google it which brought up ebay.com, then change the extension to .co.uk. Not exactly easy to find, but easy to upgrade to the new look.
https://pages.ebay.co.uk/storefronts/update/
Any decent eBay designer should be able to have a full design shown for desktop and a simpler design (or description only) for mobile. There’s no need for any support from eBay – just a few lines of code to tell smaller screens to apply different styling.
Google CSS media queries for more info.
Thanks for the link James.
I never had an invitation from ebay to upgrade, and if you have an old style shop there doesn’t appear to be a conversion option in Manage my Shop. However, link James provided works easily.
I completely agree with you Chris with regards to the descriptions of an ebay item. This made me explore how to get it responsive and here’s one example I have
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ritchie-Super-Multi-Bale-Handler-/181405338831?pt=UK_BOI_FarmingEquipment_RL&hash=item2a3c99cccf
I hope this post will lighten some retailers to re-think if they planning to get heavily designed ebay store.
Would love to help.
We’ve updated ours, but true to eBay form, it does not work correctly!
You are suppose to be able to add four large Featured listings to the top of the page, great in theory but when you go to add them, the search options are blank.
eBay customer services have confirmed this is a known bug and are trying to fix it. It’s been like it for around 3 weeks now so they aren’t rushing!
I have updated mine. I saw a banner entitled recurring monthly allowance (or words to that effect), not having seen it before I clicked and was prompted to create a new look shop – so I did.
I much prefer the new look, much crisper – better for mobile devices. Not actually noticed any difference in sales – still poor !!!
I’ve updated ours, this should give anyone a good idea of the format.
https://stores.ebay.co.uk/littlebosboutique
It must be a 1200 x 270px banner and you can choose the featured products but not customise much else, as far as I can see.
Also watch out for the bottom left – it gets covered by the logo box.
I’d like to see more customisation / layout options but I must admit its an improvement over the old shop layout.
https://stores.ebay.co.uk/Barjoys
The new layouts are much better than the old basic version, and are resoinsive.
I build ebay stores, and I make them responsive. Even the best of designs that may be quite complex in full screen can be changed for mobile. This doesnt take a lot more work to do, and any developer should be able to make responsive ebay templates.
For an example of a recent one I did look at the Office Shoes ebay store : https://stores.ebay.co.uk/officeshoes
All the items in there are fully responsive.
For those that can’t afford the premium of a full ebay store design though, the new upgraded layouts while being a little buggy are a great improvement.