eBay stores - how we did it

So somewhere along the line I learned about eBay stores. You can Open a storefront on eBay.com yourself by clicking the link. What we learned about stores that you may or may not know.

• Everything you list on eBay in any format will show up in your store.
  It's dirt cheap to list stuff in your store. I mean 30 days for .03 cents! Can't beat it
• eBay will pay you to send people to your store, when they make a purchase. Check it out HERE.
• The store opens up tons of new marketing opportunitites including building a mailing list (which I'll go over later), sending out newsletters and promotional fliers through email marketing, getting your listings picked up by search engines and getting you world wide web exposure and much more.
• You can customize them basically beyond a recognizable eBay store...almost like a regular website.
• You can get some pretty cool tools for monitoring store and page traffic for your store.
• You can set up your store to function while you're away with vacation settings and more!

So let's talk about these things a bit. I said everything you list in any format shows up in your store. But what about when you list something just in your store. Where does that show up? The answer is, they show up just like any other listing and are completely searchable. This is a fairly new change, but this update to eBay's policy should increase the exposure for store listings if it doesn't clutter and dilute the regular listing results. If you look at any given page from an eBay search, you'll have at the top "featured items". Sellers have paid extra to have their items appear at the beginning of the page. Then the next section has current auction and fixed price listings. Then after all of those there is a horizontal line and then all the store listings appear. Now if there are 12 pages of an item, the store listings may show up on pages 11 and 12 all the time, but it's more exposure than before - where store items would only show up if there were less than 20 items availalable in the other formats. There are also no gallery images shown for store listings in the regular search results. More on the increased store visiblity HERE

Next, let's talk price. It's next to nothing. I mean I listed 1500 items once, and it cost me $45. Compare this to listing 100 fixed price listings of items selling for $10. This would cost you .60 cents per listing or $60. For the 1500 items it would cost you $900 and the listing would be for 7 days, not the 30 day listing the store items are available. Pretty cool deal. Now the store isn't free, but they do start at a reasonable price, and they're free for the first 30 days!

Email marketing is a very effective tool. Let's say you're me and you sell magazine subscriptions. I promote my mailing list in my listings and in my store and on my about me page. And I get maybe 5 new subscribers a day. Now that's not a huge number but my list has grown to well over 2000 people. Now that's not a huge number, but when I send out a newsletter or flyer I see an immediate impact on my sales. But you have to grow the list and continue to provide something of value in the information you send. You can't just market, market, market to them. It gets old. Try to offer information that is valuable to that particular mailing list, so your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails and will open them.

Allright, moving on. Store customization. Our first store we've had for several years and have done very, very little to customize it. In fact just this past year did I finally figure out just how 'custom' you can make them. You can see our first store for All_that_and_more! HERE. Now check out our new store for LowPricedMags HERE. It's completely custom. Quite a difference isn't there? It has made a huge impact on our sales and we're going to take a second look at the first store soon. The magazine store we completely did away with the 'look' of eBay, at least on the homepage. We saw a huge increase in combined purchases. People get into the store and just shop. We love it! If you have questions about eBay stores or anything 'eBay' feel free to email me .