Just curious if anyone has - or had - an eBay store. Thoughts?

Hmm...no responses??

Heya,

I just signed up for an Ebay store and am working on getting some stuff in there. I am hoping that it will helpt to generate some extra sales not too mention extra website traffic. These are the only two reasons I am doing it.

I will fill you in as it comes along. I am hoping for the best.

I used to have an Ebay store but prefered the look of Andale.com. However, I don't do much in the way of Ebay any longer (except for custom pages, frames, etc) because retailers in the scrapbooking industry don't like to sell their wholesale products to stores who use Ebay. I guess they consider them to not be a "real" store.

The main reason I STOPPED using ebay was due to the EXTRAORDINARILY HIGH fees I was paying every month. I just felt that it wasn't worth it at all.

Just my two cents worth.

I use Ebay Stores only for the cheap pricing on stores listings. I am not impressed with the results though and would not invest much time or effort into it again. Ebay is great for fishing for customers, but they are the cheapest folks in the industry for us. Margins are lower and the maintenence is high. Regular customers visit a site and buy only because it fills a need or desire. Many people get caught up in the auction and many times have buyers remorse, hence killing any repeat business to your site.
I sell mostly on Ebay but am sick and tired of the $2K+ in fees each month and am looking forward to more regular web traffic.
My 2 cents worth....probably all it's worth. Ha ha!

I haven't used Ebay for a few years. I listed some cages and avian travel accessories on there to increase cash flow however, my experience was that it generated a lot of emails and calls asking if I would sell cages on my site or other expensive items at the opening bid price. It was irritating!

Mr. 4x4, can you share your strategies for finding customers through ebay?

My basic strategy is to search the categories that my products are selling in, then find the most popular items selling that I can market starting at $1.00 if It is real popular or marked down to a minimum markup of 25% on semi popular items. This brings in multiple bidders of which only one wins. The key is in the e-mails to the bidders. As soon as anybody bids on one of my auctions, my Auction Tamer software sends them an e-mail thanking them for bidding on the item....not trying to upsell or anything just an introduction with a signature. I sell more outside of Ebay through add-on sales than I do on Ebay. This and I don't even have a working website at this time. That is why we are working on our site.
Caution! Ebay customers need babysitting for the most part, so unless you have automated the processes, it can literally PARALIZE YOU! Hundreds of low margins sales weekly, which does not hurt the cash flow but can totally consume your time, eating away at the time necessary to plan, grow, and strategize.
I never market anything below 25% profit unless it is a closeout or return. We have added over 7300 new customers to our database through Ebay since July 1 2002. This is really too many for our current size. We plan on reducing our $2K+ Ebay fees to around $500-$600 as soon as we can get our site operational with more customer input effort to complete the sale and less babysitting.
Hope I didn't bore you to death.
Thanks, The 4x4dude!

Thanks for all the great feedback!

PCTailor,

I use eBay heavily as a marketing tool. I cannot tell you how many new customers i have added, who all came over from eBay. Most folks that i know who shop the net, search eBay first to compare prices. I will usually reduce prices by 10% or so as "eBay specials". This has worked great for two years. Now, my returning customers are responsible for over 35% of my monthly revenue.

As far as the eBay store, I would not recommend it. The items in the store are not searchable when a prospect types into the search bar. (I learned this the hard way, whan sales from eBay dropped like a bomb after i opened my store.)

Now, i usually run 100 auctions at a time. It does get to be a little time consuming to renew the auctions, but the number of new customers has been great.
(Don't forget about listing fees, sales fees, Paypal fees, etc.)

Good luck
Janet

E-Bay integration is slated for a version soon after 4.0!

Ryan, can you tell us what you folks have in mind, re: eBay integration? What will this look like? What will be able to do?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Oops. Sorry I missed this post. Let me speak with dev team to gather specifics. I will post more on this soon.

Captain, somewhere on the forum we were told that is working on an option where we check an "ebay" box and our product is automatically put up on ebay. Just wondering when that new feature might become a reality.

I assume that somewhere we would have a "See our eBay auctions" section that would let customers click and go to ebay to buy the items.

We are excited about this option because a lot of what we sell our vintage pieces that would do well on ebay!

Yeah Captain... Any more details on that eBay feature? Is it going to allow use to easily select an item and generate a ebay listing? Will ebay buyers have an order generated on our site and checkout there or on ebay?

I will have something for you guys on this soon. This ebay project is still in the early architecting stage. I would like to take ideas directly from you all on how to do this. Tell me what would be useful and how you envision it working. The bottom line is that we have had two planning meetings, but have not started coding and are still open to suggestions.

Thanks!
--Gup

Hi,

I was thinking along the lines of having a button that we can add to our ebay auction that says please click here for checkout after auction.

When they click on the button, it then takes them to a page where they can enter their auction number, auction title, user ID, and/or some other things. then when they click submit that information posts to the cart and they are then able to go through the checkout pages.

Some also want the ability to list auctions from , but I do not know if this is possible.

I would like to be able to click a box on the "product editor" page (perhaps we would need an ebay tab in the editor) that would put the product up on ebay. I would also like the product to appear in a category on my site called "eBay Auctions". Of course, having real-time payment would be great.

Its my understanding that there are fees that are associated with automatic submitting of auctions to Ebay! At least the last time I checked, which has been a few years ago.

Would be nice though to have that feature. Add a new product or use an existing product, a tab that would allow you to add all the necessary information for Ebay and then simply click a check box to have it submit the auction for you with a button that allows them to click automatically to check out. The only problem that I can see is how to know what the auction ended at. Unless you leave that part blank and let the winning bidder fill it in.

As I come up with some new ideas I will post them.

Great ideas... it is very helpful to have feedback from ebay auction users. You know better than anybody what features will be useful.

Captain, is eBay helpful on these issues? I would think that they would be delighted if cart software companies started adding eBay integration. They would surely get many more customers.

eBay has a developer section for such things I believe:

http://developer.ebay.com/DevProgram/

Muchos gracias.

No problemo!