Any eBay sellers here with your own website too?

noitsnotme

Arfa__ said:

I totally understand how purchasing items on ebay rather than from a random website inspires more confidence. As such, I'm thinking of a solution where items are just listed on ebay, and setup a section on a website which displays the latest ebay items with links to ebay for users to buy the items there.

Could this give you the best of both worlds? Buyers use the checkout on ebay and thus gain the reassurance that comes with that, and the website can be promoted separately (blogging etc) to help drum up traffic to find the items up for sale.

What do you think? Anyone tried this approach? It would certainly save the hassle of setting up a separate ecommerce store on the website and managing stock between it and ebay.

It depends what you are selling.  It’s not easy to get traffic to your own website, particularly if you are selling common items with thousands of competitors or a mish mash of items with no theme.  EBay will get far more traffic than you can ever dream of getting to your own site.  And if you go down the route of spending thousands of pounds on SEO (or whatever it’s called these days) why would you then point them to eBay?

I’ve run my online business for 10 years but sell a very specialised product so gained a lot of traffic to my website without much effort as there was (and still isn’t) a massive amount of competition.  Selling on eBay and Amazon helped massively but I was always trying to direct repeat customers to my website, not the other way round.

There is lots of stock control software out there to manage it across multiple platforms.  Veeqo, now owned by Amazon, is now free to use if you don’t mind Amazon being able to see all your data.

roksat

I'm thinking about starting a business and selling products online. Unfortunately, I'm tech-savvy, so using Amazon or/and eBay seems to be a good idea. But I know that a lot of people create their own websites. How much does it cost? And how much time can it take to finally get a profit?

forgotmyname

How much?   From Free to  £100,000+++

How much time to get a profit?   From Never to the same day you go live.

The question is how much are you going to spend on advertising your website or do you already have a captive
customer base?  Unless your product is unique what will draw visitors to your website?

soolin

roksat said:

I'm thinking about starting a business and selling products online. Unfortunately, I'm tech-savvy, so using Amazon or/and eBay seems to be a good idea. But I know that a lot of people create their own websites. How much does it cost? And how much time can it take to finally get a profit?

I know this is a resurrected thread but the advice remains the same as given to the previous OP. What resources do you have to build on your website? As forgotmyname said do you have a large enough following from social media or other existing customer base you can build on or are you going to look into paid advertising?

tightauldgit

Yeah there's a reason why a lot of small traders use Ebay and/or Amazon marketplaces. 

You can start a website anytime you want but the challenge is driving traffic to it - chances are you aren't going to appear anywhere near the top of any Google searches unless you have something unique. And even if you do people are going to be more likely to buy from a known name like Amazon than randomwebsite.com. Not to mention that if you are just buying and selling then you might well struggle to compete on price anyway unless you have some special advantage or deep pockets to get bulk discounts.. 

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

roksat said:

I'm thinking about starting a business and selling products online. Unfortunately, I'm tech-savvy, so using Amazon or/and eBay seems to be a good idea. But I know that a lot of people create their own websites. How much does it cost? And how much time can it take to finally get a profit?

I think if you have a business plan that would justify the expense on a website and the required advertising you wouldn't need to ask the question  

RFW

roksat said:

I'm thinking about starting a business and selling products online. Unfortunately, I'm tech-savvy, so using Amazon or/and eBay seems to be a good idea. But I know that a lot of people create their own websites. How much does it cost? And how much time can it take to finally get a profit?

It took Amazon 9 years to show a profit. Bezos invested around a quarter of a million dollars initially.

You can use social media to build a brand and a following that can then translate to sales. That can be the cheapest way to do it. Getting a sale online is becoming increasingly difficult, no matter the platform. I spend from 5-10% of turnover on advertising, for new products that can be substantially higher.

forgotmyname

I remember when a free aol website could get you at the top of the google search but these days its a lot harder
and there are plenty of people out there who are willing to empty your pockets with their super secret ways
of getting to the top, which is usually plastered all over the internet anyway.

The problem is google like changing their systems and your added to the list of people that pay a lot
of money to get to the top.   It would take a lot of money to get to the top and stay at the top.

RFW

forgotmyname said:

I remember when a free aol website could get you at the top of the google search but these days its a lot harder
and there are plenty of people out there who are willing to empty your pockets with their super secret ways
of getting to the top, which is usually plastered all over the internet anyway.

There's also plenty willing to share their secrets of how they sell millions of products per week and live a life of luxury. I'm always surprised they're so altruistic to want to share their brilliant money making scheme but, oddly, always for a fee.
When I'm doing well selling stuff I don't really have time to make videos and let would be competitors in on my secrets.

Several of these sellers crop up on the Amazon seller forums with tales of how their accounts been suspended because they have broken some rule that the videos told them would be ok.

forgotmyname

Oh no, I was hoping one day you would divulge your secrets to being a millionaire and let us all have a bite
of your cherry pie. 

I don't watch or read the secret tips but it doesn't surprise me that some of those mentioned will get accounts
banned.