Question
how many people make most sales through their stores and how many from auction BIN?
I'm inexperienced with stores completely and made perhaps 5 sales out of 5000
it's really irritating.
Share your wisdom please.
Answer
Have you activated the Custom Listing Header to appear in all your auctions?
On average, how many auction style and fixed price auctions do you have listed? These auctions provide visibility and will help drive buyers to your store.
Answer
here are some ideas for raising visibility of eBay Store items utilizing the auction and/or buy it now format:
http://pages.ebay.com/community/chat...ch/stores.html
Most of my traffic for eBay Store items come from the eBay domains. But the next big referral source is from search engine results. As a long-term strategy, I suggest learning the basics of web marketing and search engine optimization. It will help you to be less dependent on eBay which protects your business from eBay decisions that raise the cost to operate on eBay or reduces your sales.
Answer
I have had my eBay store for several years now, and have gotten sales up to about 8 out of 100 purchases. However, since the cost of selling via the store is so close to the fees for regular auctions, I am no longer so gung ho on making the store grow. Like, what's the point?
After all this time, eBay still does not have a shopping cart to let buyers make multiple purchses easily. A shopping cart would also offer buyers a bit more flexibility prior to clicking the "buy now" button. They might also be encouraged to buy more since once they click, they often move on to another item.
OTOH, I do carry the VHS versions of a lot of the DVDs I sell since they have pretty much taken over with buyers.
I also like the store cross merchandising but wish it was simpler and more flexible.
Overall I see 75% of I list in the regular auction/BIN format. I start most store items at 12 units any some items will sell out. I sell commodity, but niche, goods.
My 6-8 regular auctions support about 35-40 store listings.
An important thing to note is that the store carries many variations on the same basic item which is broken down into digestible categories. I think my buyers are more likely to look at all the "goods" provided it is not too overwhelming.
Keeping the buyer's convenience in mind is important to me.
Larry
Answer
Originally Posted by Irene
Have you activated the Custom Listing Header to appear in all your auctions?
On average, how many auction style and fixed price auctions do you have listed? These auctions provide visibility and will help drive buyers to your store.
I have around 160+ BIN and Fixed price running at all times.
But I still need to put items in the store.
THere is one problem, if I put the same items in the store, people won't have that pressure to buy the items right away. WHat do you think guys?
Answer
Yes, I have almost everything turned on in my Store Manager.
But I'm still no comfortable with eBay's layout. too confusing.
I also have custom pages running and even FAQs for idiots who can't read.
Answer
We restructured our Ebay listings about a year ago to reduce Ebay listing fees drastically.
We sell multiples of the same 50 or so items, including an average of maybe three size varients of the same item.
We list reserve or regular price auctions for one size of each item type starting at fairly low prices as 10 day listings to generate interest. Each such listing contains a plainly visible link to our Ebay store listings for all sizes of the item type with text that says something like "to Buy-It-Now, go to our Ebay Store", where they will find listings for all available sizes. Our Ebay store listings are set to rerun automatically, and each for an adequate number of items to last for its listing duration.
The result has been that more than 90% of our Ebay sales are now from our Ebay store listings, where it costs just pennies to list many, many items.
By far the bulk of our Ebay fees is for the reserve/regular listings, but for most of the year enough buyers bid up enough of the items there to recoup the extra listing expenses there. Think of these listings as "advertising" to drive sales to our Ebay store.
We do NOT run regular non-store listings as "buy now" as that would cancel their usefulness as running "ads" for the store early when they are bought.
This strategy has saved us LOTS of Ebay fees (and has frankly kept us selling at Ebay so far), but would apply only to those who sell multiples of the same items, not successive custom, individual items.
A caution: When linking a regular item to your Ebay store, do NOT include text that offers unrelated items with differing descriptions! You CAN say "This and other sizes of this item are available at our Ebay Store" or "See ALL of our offerings at our Ebay store". You CANNOT say something like "Buy this T-shirt and jewelry and toys too at our Ebay store", as that WILL get you busted for "keyword spamming" by the "Ebay cops".
Answer
Only 5 sales out of 5,000 store listings - there's a problem somewhere.
If you feel comfortable doing so, PM me a link to your store and I'll have a look tomorrow to see if anything hits me.
If you're not comfortable doing so, ask some of your off-line friends and relatives to visit your store and critique it as potential buyers. Then interview them or ask a series of questions in e-mail. What did they like? What didn't they like? Did anything confuse them? Do they have any suggestions to improve the browsing experience? Encourage criticism by not arguing with an opinion. Just listen. Remember it doesn't matter what you think of your store - what matters is what buyers think. If you hear the same criticisms from different people then consider those particular criticisms more seriously.
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I agree that having a shopping cart would be very nice - I sell lots of items in my store to people, someone this past week purchase over 100 items. The invoicing leaves a lot to be desired, seems that only 40 items fit on an invoice. That usually is ok, but sometimes it isn't. My store sales are going great, I get a lot of my traffic from ebay, but I do as much as I can to create repeat business, and it pays off. A lot of my sales are from regular customers, just have to turn the casual shopper into a regular customer!
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quick note on shopping carts. think about what your needs are and if other sellers would have the same needs as you. there are many scenarios an eBay shopping cart would need to accomodate that would it a very complex and difficult undertaking. personally, i think eBay would terribly botch a shopping cart feature.