Ebay shops ... how do you drive traffic?

Flexible_Friend

For those of you (like myself) who have an Ebay shop, how do you manage to encourage customers to visit it and spend their money?

Do you list your items as short term auctions?

Do you list your items as short term Buy It Nows?

Do you use “lost leaders” to entice people to your shop?

Or do you just list everything as a normal shop item and rely on people stumbling across your shop and placing an order?

What is the most cost effective way of listing your items and how often to do list them before they sell or before you give up?

How do you word your items to generate the maximum interest?

I don’t necessarily want to find out people’s “secrets on selling”, just interested to hear how others approach things.

windswept

That's the $64000 dollar question , I am trying to figure out what the most cost effective way is right now, my fees this month have gone sky high compared with my sales. So I have gone from having absolutely everything in SIF, plus a few BIN's to radically reducing shop inventory, just putting expensive or slow sellers in there.
I made the mistake of having a popular BIN seller on SIF and found that listings were sometimes ending unsold, but then a shop sale would happen instead, so I had wasted a 50p listing and ended up with a higher fvf for the shop sale. now I am putting my good sellers on BIN only , every other day.
I have just put a brand new item on a featured listing because I think it will be a very good seller once it gets noticed, all my best sellers are not sold by anyone else on ebay, I have been very lucky in finding 3 such items, especially in the toy category, which is massive.
Perversely ,Mondays are usually my best day for sales but as yet I have sold nothing, I have 6 things ending tonight.
depending upon the cats. you sell in, play about with your item titles, I have managed to get to the top of shops in one particular cat. simply by having the singular and plural in the title. The problem is though that people search in many different ways, I am not having nearly as many shop sales as I did before xmas, shops seem to have been pushed off the radar by ebay. I think I have had 2 shop sales out of 20 in the last week or so.

Flexible_Friend

Listing items purely as shop inventory items appears to provide better value for money in so far as you can list for 30 or 90 days although the FVF are higher.

Listing items as non-shop BIN items, particularly in a popular category, gives higher exposure.

If your BIN item sells first time, then the overall listing and selling fees are normally less. If you have to keep re-listing as a BIN item, this eats into your profits.

I tend to list any new items as a non-shop BIN item and if it doesn’t sell within the allotted time (7 days usually), I re-list the item as a 30 or 90 days shop item knowing full well that the level of exposure will decrease.

Another question to ponder is, what is the right level of stock to keep in order to minimise your monthly Ebay listing fees particularly when items are not selling for whatever reason? It could be argued that if you don’t advertise something for sale, you can’t sell it!

soolin

I gave up my shop when the higher fees and less exposure kicked in last year. That combined with virtually no visibility for overseas buyers nearly killed my shop.

I used to run daily auctions for visiibility and then list the main bulk of my items in my shop.

computerwoman

I will only buy from shops off ebay
if that helps
I click on the link for shops
on the home page,
cw

cazmanian_minx

I put my best selling items up as 10-day BINs and also run 1p-start auctions. Make sure that your RSS feed is active (this is in the Marketing summary section) as that will farm out your listings to kelkoo etc.

Make use of your traffic reports as well. The Finding Methods -> Referring Domains is useful to see where your buyers are coming from and Custom Reports -> Store Search Terms tells you what they're looking for when they get there.

Talk to your customers. It's easy to set up opt-in mailing lists - at the moment I have two, one for special offers and one for new items, and I try to send a marketing email once a month. Ebay has 5 template emails you can send (Welcome, Ending Soon, Newly Listed, Previous Purchase, Items On Sale) and you can set those to send automatically at a certain interval without you having to do anything, or you can write a custom one of your own.

Caz

Flexible_Friend

Thanks for that Caz. I will have to take a look at my RSS feed settings.

Incidentally, what do you do if your 10-BINs don't sell? Do you re-list?

How do you encourage customers to opt-in to your marketing letters? So far I've only got 2 takers.

apprentice_tycoon

You can use cross promotion connections to have your items seen on other sellers bidder and winner communications and vice versa - you'd ask for connections from sellers that aren't competitors but are likely to appeal to your type of buyer.

cazmanian_minx

Flexible_Friend wrote: »

Thanks for that Caz. I will have to take a look at my RSS feed settings.

Incidentally, what do you do if your 10-BINs don't sell? Do you re-list?

How do you encourage customers to opt-in to your marketing letters? So far I've only got 2 takers.

I relist them at least once, as if they sell the 2nd time round I get the listing fee back anyway. After that, it depends - I'll often check whether one of my main competitors has made a change to their pricing and adjust my listing accordingly if so.

I've got a Store Newsletter box on the sidebar of my shop, with tick box options for the two mailing lists (Shop Design -> Promotion Boxes to access it) and since my shop header and sidebar are displayed on all my listings, people just sign up to it from there. I get about 10-15 new subscribers a month from it.

Caz

Stuart_P

computerwoman wrote: »

I will only buy from shops off ebay
if that helps
cw

interesting! why is that?