Should you or shouldn't you? Open an eBay store, I mean. Many eBay experts or gurus would tell you no, or to wait until your inventory reaches a certain number. I used to be one of them. However, a special lady has really changed my mind and opened my eyes to the incredible VALUE of an eBay store. Janelle Elms, of OSI Rock Stars has taught me many, many things. To date, this shift in how I see an eBay store is probably one of the top three.
I've been 'shopping' for an ecommerce store for several years. I've had an Amazon webstore, an Auctiva eCommerce store, a BISI store through InkFrog, a MailCar store, an independent site through GoDaddy and probably several other efforts I don't remember, LOL. John Lawson, on his BS Walks show today encouraged us to get thoroughly comfortable marketing and selling on eBay before we 'took off the training wheels' and started an ecommerce site. I think John is 150% right and I'm not sure if it would ever be necessary to take them off! Building your own ecommerce site isn't easy at all and of the many places I've set up, NONE are as cheap as $15.95 for the features you get with an eBay store. If you click on the photo above and look at the list of features, you will be amazed. Another of the Big, Big problems with your own store is driving traffic. Granted, with eBay store items not appearing in search currently, you won't get the same volume as on an eBay core item listing, but you will still get some directly from eBay. For the rest of the traffic, it will be up to you to drive that. eBay provides some help for its store owners in that you have a well built SEO friendly website. You provide the keywords, and eBay inserts them correctly in the coding. You also have a free newsletter program included. And here is the BEST bonus - Five Free 'Custom' pages that you can fill with all the content and keywords that the search engine spiders love, love, love. So if you are thinking about an eCommerce website, don't count eBay out. Remember, you can always buy any domain you want and forward it so www.myownstorename.com would forward to your eBay store and no one would ever know :)
2 comments:
Kat!Doggone it, I just thunk about this, and thunk about this, and told myself NO!your NOT going to do this again. Now, do I HAVE to re- thunk it again?
Shell
Kat, I so agree with your post - for the money, there is NO better value than an eBay store - I've had one since the first month they opened them.
I hope they decide to put stores in the search since they now have multi-variant item listings because THAT would be the icing on the cake for me.!! Good job!
Beth
http://www.depressionglasswarehouse.com
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