Advantages of an ebay shop?

Mrs_Money

I wonder if anyone can give me some advice? I already sell on ebay (household junk and old toys mainly, plus a few regular very small sales with a poor profit margin!) and wonder if anyone can sum up the advantages/disadvantages of having an Ebay shop?
I'm considering this because I'm possibly changing to a whole different range of niche market goods and doing Ebay a bit more seriously.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Mrs_Money

Anyone? or is it a daft question - I really don't know!

RFW

There are listing fee differences, fixed price shop listings are less, check out the price structure for shops.
There are a few other 'extras' with a shop, email marketing, a 'shopfront' which used to be better searchable in Google, I think that's changed a bit recently.
I think you still get the first 30 days free for a shop anyway so if you want to try it, it shouldn't cost you anything.

pursestring

Have a look here for some useful info:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/stores.html

soolin

Don't forget as well that once you start buying things to sell you must register yourself as a business. HMRC will want their share, but luckily ebay fees for business sellers are slightly lower than for private sellers.

Mrs_Money

Thanks for all your info everyone - yes Soolin - this venture would be a completely new and separate thing from selling household junk and would be all registered and legit etc., but thanks for your input.
I'm going to start all my research now and look at the Inland Revenue site re setting up as a self-employed/business person.
We probably could sell these items through a dedicated web site - trouble is it takes much longer to drive traffic to that than to ebay! Ah well, one day may be...

soolin

Do both, get a web site up and running and use ebay as a starting point to get sales. If someone buys from your ebay store just add a little note to your packing slip thanking them for their ebay order and letting them know that further stock can be bought direct from your website, and give them the details.