Getting traffic to your eBay store and auctions
July 6, 2007
If you’re more than a casual eBay seller you should seriously consider starting an eBay store. I suggest starting a store even before you build a stand alone website. Here’s why:
The Internet has become the leading resource for shoppers to research products. Almost all shoppers start with a search engine query and begin scouring the Internet for product reviews, descriptions and the best deals around. Unlike eBay store listings, eBay auctions are not typically picked up by the search engines because of their short lifespan .
An eBay store inventory item can be listed for up to 30 days or good ’til cancelled (meaning it stays in your store until someone buys it). These items are indexed by the major search engines. If your store listing titles are optimized with the best keywords, you will see store traffic increase just from search engine traffic alone.
Some numbers show that eBay has over 215 million customers. Opening an eBay store gives you access to that audience without having to worry about driving traffic to your personal site. Don’t get me wrong, a personal site is important (as I’ll mention later), but every serious seller should take advantage of what eBay has to offer.
Unlike auctions, eBay stores give your customers instant gratification. Instead of them having to wait for the auction to end(unless you are using Buy It Now), they can purchase the item immediately from your store and guarantee they will get the item.
For as little as $15.95 a month you can get your own eBay store, a mini website to publish special information about your store, marketing tools and much more. Compare that to starting your own website.
Starting your own website requires a domain name, hosting fees, building the website, driving traffic to your website, managing your products, updating your website etc. All things important to have later on, but not immediately.
eBay stores allow you to list several items, for as little as a few pennies. Keep in mind that your Final Value Fees will be slightly more, but now your items gain more exposure.
If you haven’t heard of Googlebase and have a store you need to. Googlebase is Google’s engine for researching items for sale. They have even built a Store Connector application that will allow eBay users to upload all of their store items into Googlebase and get them indexed in the search engine. Another great way to drive traffic to your store. More traffic to your store means more traffic to your auctions which means more money for you!!!!
I’ll go into setting up your store the correct way in another article, but be sure to take your time and research all of the features and offerings the stores have to offer.
If you already have a website you can take advantage of the the traffic you do have and additionally get a 75% price break on Final Value Fees on your items. Any traffic you drive from sites outside of eBay to your store may qualify you to get 75% off those Final Value Fees!! That’s a great deal.
So, what are you waiting for, open an eBay store today!!
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