Marketing your ebay store

So - what do YOU do to market your eBay store?



Nothing? I think that's what most people do. They set it up because they can't be bothered running auctions, don't want to wait for the auctions to end to sell something. And then? THEN there is a deafening silence.

It's only in Kevin Costner's brain or the movie Field of Dreams that you "build it and they will come". It' s not true in the brick and mortar world and it' s not true on eBay.

So how do you go out into the streets of eBay and drag folks in to your store to look at your stuff?

1. On the Manage my store page there's the RSS feed. Enable that.

2. Use lots of key words and custom pages to bring people in to read. If you use your custom pages to discuss ONE category that you list in your story...(one per custom page I mean), you have, with a basic store 4 custom page...so 1 for a home page and 3 for custom pages.

3. Buy PPC advertising? I haven't done that so if you have, post your ideas and results in the comments. I'd be interested to hear them.

4. Have a Squidoo lens and feed your store to that. I do that. It's got limited effectiveness until you start to drive traffic to the lens too. So now you've doubled your work. But at least making the lens and editing them is kind of fun.

So what else do you do?? I'll list some more ideas I have next time. Meantime in the comments post your ideas. Or email me. depressionglass@comcast.net

Ebay changes - some ways to make some sales

Okay, lots of folks want to know..(inquiring minds...ya know?) HOW can I make money on eBay?

With all the hubbub about all eBay's changes, I think a lot of us forget the single most important point about eBay:

YOU CAN'T SELL IT IF IT AIN'T LISTED!

Now, I've personally found, that when I went over 100 store items (as far as quantity on my inventory I mean) I started seeing more sales. When I went over 200, sales again went up incrementally. That was true with every 100th block I passed. The best was when I managed to get over 1000 items in my Ebay store for more than 10 seconds. (cause you do know right, that if you're aiming for 200, as soon as you hit 195, things will start selling out of the store. As soon as it goes over 200 items, more things will sell...it's Murphy's Ebay Law). As soon as I passed 1000 items, I got about 8 sales in the next 2 days. ! HALLELUJAH!

So - my personal motto is: (come on Dar, you know the words...! ) LIST MORE, SELL MORE!

I try to list 100 items a week. Since February I've had a problem doing that - I must have developed eadd..otherwise known as "Ebay Attention Deficit Disorder". I just can't focus on eBay.

Still my current goal is 35 new listings on Sunday evening and 10 every other day of the week. Which in theory, would get me darned close to 100 new listings a week. I haven't managed it more than once or twice in the last 3 mos. But I haven't given up either.


The second thing to remember, with auctions especially, if the right eyeballs are not on eBay that week, your item will not sell. So what to do?

I personally wait 10 days, relist the item and try to publicize it, (making sure I use the eBay referral code for that item or for my store) and then if it doesn't sell then, I put it in the eBay store for a while. How long? depends? If it's Christmas maybe for a while. If it's June, probably definitely for a while. If it's tax refund spending time, for 3-4 weeks.

What about stuff you put into your store and forgot? (OH don't tell me you never forgot about them? Baloney. I do so I know everyone else does. LOL I mean we are all human. Life intervenes). So when I look at my eBay store and stuff is sorted by ending soonest for me, then I end the item and relist it...or I change the title, the picture, the wording or the price. (NO I almost NEVER EVER EVER lower the price. An old real estate adage is to raise the price...so I do that and guess what? An awful lot of stuff sells. I mean it's unreal. AT HIGHER than they could have bought it the week before. But again, it's that thing about the "right eyeballs" seeing your item.!

How else can you make money from your items? I think through an affiliate code but I'm no expert yet on that. I'm just designing my first campaign. Maybe (I think there's a rule on this) you can't get an affiliate referral payment on your items. But you can get them on mine. I can get them on those of bookcornercottage, or my52cents or bigdaddysmoney...or you blog, or you make a website, you put a feed on it. And we'll see how we both do.

Oh - and you make Squidoo lenses of your items, my items, every blue dress on eBay etc. and you update those lens regularly, (something else I"m not timely or reliable about yet) and WALA! soon you have a nice little account building up in Squiddoo money.

So. that's my idea for today...just basic commonsense. Want to see what I'm selling? That top feed in the box on the right side? That is me...come on in and visit!
Beth