The eBay Phenomenon

Should I Open an Ebay Store? Should I open up an Ebay store, or only use auctions to sell my merchandise? And, if so, what percentage of store items should I list, and what percentage of auctions should I list?

Hint: Knowing this will pretty much determine your survival on Ebay. Thousands of sellers didn't know this in 2006, and went belly up. Yes, you should open a store. Why?
Because you only have to pay a final value fee when the item sells, and the listing fees are cheap; around 11 cents if you add a gallery image. With auctions, you have to keep re-listing the same item every 7-10 days. And, the listing fees add up quick if the item doesn't sell.
Only list your best selling items in the auction format; the ones that will sell every week. Add as many keywords in the title as possible in those auction listings. For example, my company sells DVDs, so one of our auction listings might be named "Tony Hawk Trick Tips Skateboard Skateboards DVD Video Movie." Get the picture? If someone types in the exact name of the DVD, "Tony Hawk Trick Tips DVD", then there is a good chance my store listing will show up in the eBay search. But, if someone types in a general term like "Tony Hawk", it won't show up because there are too many Tony Hawk auction listings.

When that happens, the store listings are not displayed at all. So:


1) Auctions are there for stragglers that type in general search terms.


2) Stores are for buyers that type in exactly what they want.


The goal is to have 95%-98% of your listing as store items and 5% or less as auction listings. Also, remember to let eBayers know about your eBay store. Add BOLD comments to your store listings:

"Please check out our EBay Store for all of your favorite skateboard DVDs. We have over 200 titles ready to ship right now!!!" And, now for one of the best reasons to open a store; it gives you more web pages to submit to the search engines! This is huge! The web addresses that EBay generates for store items have the complete titles in them, and any other keywords that you may have listed in the title, like "DVD, video, movie, film", etc. Note: After you list an item on EBay, it takes a few minutes for the web addresses to change from a basic one to a specific one with the title and keywords in it.
After you create an EBay store item, you need to wait a few minutes before you submit it to the search engines. Here is an example of an EBay-generated web address for a DVD that I am currently selling in my EBay store, called "Future sellouts.";

Notice the title, and also all the keywords in the web address; skateboard, DVD, video. If someone types in a general term like "skateboard DVD", it can show up on Google. And, it gets better. Check this out. EBay and Google have a special relationship. EBay pays Google for higher placement on their search engine! So, let's say that you have 40 items listed in your EBay store. That gives you 40 different web pages to submit to the search engines each month that can greatly increase traffic to your EBay store. Let's try something. Go to Google.com right now. Type in "habitat regal road in mono DVD" (that's the name of a video we currently sell). Our EBay seller name is "skateboardvideos".
Look at the results. See any EBay listings in the top 5 positions? At the time I wrote this guide, our EBay store listing was number one. Also, look at the advertisements at the top of the page. See one that says "Habitat Regal Road in Mono Skateboard DVD Video - $3.00 - eBay"? Yep, that's mine too, and it didn't cost me a red cent. It's from sending my EBay listings to the search engines and using the Google Base Store Connector, something every EBay seller should be doing on a regular basis.