of our series on Ebay, we’re going to dive into the
subject of Ebay stores. This is something that, as a powerseller, you definitely want to get into.
In order to open up an Ebay store, you must have at least 10 feedback posts for the items you sell. This shouldn’t take you more than a week or so, depending on how much selling you do.
According to the reports I’ve gotten from people who have Ebay stores, they’ve seen an increase in sales of about 20% or so. Obviously I have no way of verifying this, but these are people I know pretty well and I trust them when they tell me something. Honestly, when I had my Ebay store, I didn’t really track sales increases and things like that. I wasn’t a big Ebay freak, which is probably why I got out of the business. But writing this series is making me want to start up again, when I get the time.
The biggest advantage of an Ebay store is that you can list items for a much longer period of time. You can list items for anywhere from 30 to 120 days, or even as “good until canceled.” This alone makes an Ebay store a must.
You can also include links to other auctions that you are running. Doing cross promotion like this, which was a topic in one of my other articles, is a great way to get extra exposure to your other listings.
Right up there with the extended listings, and maybe this is really the biggest advantage of an Ebay store, is that having one gives you a permanent home. This is a place where previous customers can always find you if they want. It’s like having your very own web presence. This is priceless.
So in other words, instead of going to ebay.com and trying to find you, they can simply type in the URL of your Ebay store and be done with it. You’d be surprised how many people bookmark places that they go to a lot. If you develop a good reputation for treating your customers fairly, you’ll be getting a lot of repeat customers.
Remember in the previous article I talked about how you wanted your listing to stand out and be different from everybody else’s? Well, you want your Ebay store to also stand out and be different. So have it professionally designed if you can’t design it yourself. Don’t get one of those templates unless it is your only option. They’re okay, but your own unique design is better.
Plus, you want to make sure that your listings and your Ebay store all have the same look. This way people can tell that it is YOUR listing and YOUR store. Many people just don’t get this. They think that they can just throw anything up on the Internet and people will come. If only it were that easy. You want to have a look, just like Google has a look, just like Yahoo has a look, just like Paypal has a look, and so on. Once you have established YOUR look, people will not be able to forget you.
Well, that’s it for this article and this volume. We’ll have more on Ebay in volume 55.
See you then.