Why Open an eBay Store?
By Stephen Bucaro
An eBay store is your own website on eBay where you can list all of your items, an online
catalog that gives your business a more professional image. An eBay store is not for everyone.
If you sell only a few items per month, you don't need an eBay store. But if you're a serious
seller, opening an eBay store provides several important advantages.
The most important advantage of an eBay store is that viewers of one of your listings
can click a link in your listing that will take them to your eBay store. Once in your eBay
store, they can view all of your other items and possibly make an impulse purchase. Your eBay
store allows you to offer quantity discounts and create back-end and up-selling opportunities.
Another reason to open an eBay store is because the listing fees are actually lower.
The insertion fees for store items priced under $24.99 is only $0.03, while insertion fees
for a similar priced auction listing is $0.50.
eBay store items also have a longer listing duration. Were as a auction listing has a
maximum duration of 10 days, eBay store listings have a duration of 30 days, and you can request
that your listings be renewed every 30 days. In fact you can use the GTC (Good 'Til Canceled)
option to automatically renew your listing every 30 days. This is very advantageous when selling
large quantities of single products.
There are three different subscription levels for eBay stores. The Basic Store for $15.95
per month includes unlimited product listings, 5 customizable web pages, and tools to create
promotional newsletters that can be sent to a maximum of 5,000 subscribers.
The Premium Store for $49.95 per month includes 10 customizable web pages, and promotional
newsletters can be sent to a maximum of 7,500 subscribers. Premium services also include access
to special eBay tools like Selling Manager, eBay Marketplace Research, and advanced traffic
analysis reports.
The Anchor Store for $299.95 per month includes 15 customizable web pages, and promotional
newsletters can be sent to a maximum of 10,000 subscribers. Anchor Store services includes
all the special eBay tools of the Premium services, and adds Picture Manager.
The best approach is to start out with the Basic Store for $15.95 per month and upgrade
to a higher service later if your sales volume justifies the higher cost.
For your eBay store design you can use one of the templates eBay provides, or you can
use the advanced design tools eBay provides to create a custom layout. Look at the design of
other eBay stores that sell similar products to what you sell.
How do they divide their products into categories. You can have up to 300 categories,
but much more than 25 categories may make your store appear crowded and confusing to customers.
If you need much more than 25 categories you may be better off with more than one store.
Your store design will look more professional with a custom logo. You can find logo design
software on the Internet, or for a few hundred dollars have a logo designed by a graphic artist.
The same as any successful e-commerce store, your eBay store needs to be designed with
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind. With SEO you will find many of your buyers originate
outside of eBay. They enter search words in Google and the results take them to a store on eBay.
One of the most important aspects of SEO is keywords selection. Don't write your product
descriptions like advertisements. Your product descriptions should include keywords that Internet
buyers might type into Google when searching for your product.
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