Ebay shop advice please

misterthrifty

Hi

I would appreciate some Ebay advice.

I have been selling on Ebay for a few years (stamps) and it has worked reasonably well, I have a feedback of 750+ at 99.9% (you can't please everybody) and I work pretty hard to get good feedback! I have built up a large stock of goods to sell and I feel it's time to move things on. I tend to sell the same things regularly and I use Turbo Lister.

I have looked at an Ebay shop, though the help pages on Ebay are fairly impenetrable. In basic terms what are the costs and the pitfalls. Also is seller manager/pro worth taking up as they may make my life a bit easier.

Any other advice from experienced Ebayers would be appreciated.

Mr T

FloFlo

I have 2400+ and 100% but am put off opening a shop because of low visibility in the searches. Most of my items sell on the first listing and the only advantage to opening a shop would longer listings, when I looked at it I wouldn't have saved much on listing fees and I felt my stock would take much longer to turn over.

TKPeters

Basically with a eBay Shop it is like having your own website, with all of your listings (Auction, Fixed Price & SIF) on display with your own branding.

Basic Shop £6 p/m includes Traffic Reports & Free Listing Designer
Pitfalls; Shop inventory items get lower visibility & higher FVF's

We have 3 main selling accounts & use Selling Manager Pro on all of them.

Selling manager is Free & should be used by everyone selling on eBay.

SM Pro is £4.99 pm includes Inventory, Free Scheduled & Listings, Sales Reports & automated features such as Relisting, Winning, Paid & Dispatch emails & automated positive feedback
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/selling_manager_pro/

StaffsSW

A Basic Shop on ebay.co.uk will cost £6 GBP per month, although the first 30 days are free. Looking at the pure economics of listing, a 10 day Buy It Now listing with Gallery will cost around 30p, depending on the starting price and quantity available, so 30 days will cost at least 90p. The same listing in a Shop Format would cost a mere 6p. From this principle, it would only take 24 listings to break even on insertion fees on the pessimistic assumption that nothing sells to incur Final Value Fees!

However the benefits go much further than just cheap insertion fees and long term availability to purchase. A shop subscription on eBay.co.uk also offers –

- An entry-level online e-commerce web presence, with a unique URL and brand identity for your shop
- Up to 300 customisable categories for your own range of product lines.
- Bulk editing options for converting auctions and Buy It Now listings into Shop Format, and back again.
- Traffic Reports to analyse where your visitors are coming from and what they are looking for, as well as growth trends and early warning signs.
- Basic Sales Reports to analyse your most effective category and selling format, your average selling prices, sell through rates and much more.
- Email Marketing facilities to create and send flyers and newsletters to your buyers.
- HTML link building tools to easily create cross-promotion tools for your listings.
- Use customisable pages to boost your brand, communicate store policies, and connect with customers
- Promotional boxes to highlight featured merchandise in your Shop to trigger sales.
- Options to run promotional sales with Markdown Manager.
- Custom listing frames to add your Shop header, search box, and category navigation to all of your listings.
- Listing Feeds to automatically publish and send product data to customers or comparison shopping sites via RSS Feeds.
- Customisable Search Engine Optimisation tags to guide traffic from outside of eBay to your store

It’s widely publicised that the exposure that Shop Format listings receive is significantly reduced, but when balanced with the insertion fee, you are getting what you pay for. The key is finding ways to let people know you have an eBay shop.

The fundamental method of gaining Shop exposure is to ensure you have enough signposts to your shops. These sign posts come in many forms such as the following –
Link store items through from existing Auctions or Buy It Now. Using the HTML link builder can provide simple text links such as “Buy It Now in my Shop for £9.99” to place in an auction, to impressive scrolling galleries of your shop listings that can showcase whole product ranges.
- Create cross promotions .When buyers view, bid on, or win an item, your other items (including Shop Inventory items) are promoted in a special display. As a Shop seller, you have complete control over which items are shown.
- Create an effective Shop listing header. Include your own banner, called a Shop listing header, on your Shop and all other listings to create your own unique and identifiable brand
- Optimise your Shop for Internet search engines. By carefully wording your text in the shop header, and specifying appropriate meta-tags, you can increase the chance of your shop listings being found by Search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Include these keywords in your Shop name and Shop category names where possible, and also in the content on your pages.
- Utilise Customisable pages, Reviews & Guides, Blogs and About Me Pages. All of these pages are content based with static URL’s, and therefore highly favoured by search engines. Reviews & Guides in particular can be used as sales tools for our own products, by demonstrating to your buyers that you know your products well.
- Promote your store “off-eBay”. There are many ways of getting your Shop URL out to the buying public, using modern techniques and more traditional methods
o If you post on eBay forums, or discussion groups focused on products that you sell, consider having a clickable link in your posting signature.
o MySpace & Facebook are proving to be effective marketing and networking venues where you can showcase your products and brand to a vast audience.
o There are also many sites that will advertise your eBay store in online directories.
o Google Base Store Connector is a free download that puts info about your store into their index, so that when people search Google for the products you have to sell, you’ll show up in their search results, along with a link directly to your site on eBay – it can be downloaded from http://base.google.com/base/storeconnector/index.html and is simple to operate – enter your store name, copy products from your shop, then publish them to Google Products.
o Include your Shop URL in an email signature block, on return address labels, any paperwork sent with your sales, and any invoice or payment acknowledgement templates sent after purchases.

In short, it's often cited as the best commercial decision that many eBay sellers that make.

Source - My Own Blog!

gingababe

A quick question , that has been asked on another thread, but no takers yet, so I was wondering if anyone here knew the answer? If you are working from home running a ebay shop, do you have to pay business rates?
Just wondering if it is all worth it?
Thanks for you help
Ginga