Profitable Tools in an eBay Store

One of the main reasons I say that 99 percent of eBay Stores are set up wrong is because eBay Store owners rarely know about all the benefits their Stores come with—much less how to put them to use. Yet, an eBay Store is the most comprehensive e-commerce solution available to online sellers—all for less than $16 a month.

I challenge you to find a Web site alternative that contains a feature list like the one below for this price (not to mention the built-in customer traffic that comes with owning an eBay Store, as opposed to a Web site).

Some of the benefits you have once you own an eBay Store include:

• A "brandable" Web site with custom pages: Most eBay sellers don't realize an eBay Store is truly a complete Web site. Just like a Web site, you can completely brand your eBay Store, and it has additional pages where you can provide additional information about your products, your business and yourself. You can see a brilliant example of this at Twirl Planet. The seller has made great use of the custom pages option.
• Promotion boxes: Just like a featured promotional banner on a Web site, eBay Store owners have four promotional box spots on each page of their eBay Store. With five custom pages and 300 categories, you have more than 1,000 different opportunities for additional marketing.
• Three types of listings: A regular eBay seller only gets to use two listing types: auction and fixed price. As an eBay Store owner, you get an additional type of listing to offer buyers: Store Inventory. This is similar to a 30-day fixed-priced listing, but with lower fees. All three types are featured in your eBay Store.
• Selling Manager: Normally $4.95 a month, this powerful tool allows you to automate many parts of your business, including feedback and monitoring listings. As an eBay Store owner, you get this tool for free.
• Markdown Manager: With an eBay Store, you can easily put one item, a category or your entire inventory on sale. This can be either a percentage or price discount. The sale amount is shown during a potential buyer's search as well as in your listing. You can also use Markdown Manager to showcase all your items that come with free shipping.
• Vacation Hold: As an entrepreneur, you should be able to take vacations—it's one of the reasons we choose to work this hard, right? If you own an eBay Store, you won't have to shut down all of your listing and then take the time to re-list them when you return. Using your Store's Vacation Hold option, you can simply put everything on hold and even notify potential buyers of your plans to return. This message is included in your eBay Store as well as every one of your current listings.
• Additional marketing on eBay: If fewer than 50 items are returned during a regular search on eBay.com, eBay will fill in the search results with items from eBay Stores. The ranking chosen for your items in this search will follow the guidelines of Best Match.
• Cross promotions: What better way to increase your profits than up-selling another product? Cross promotions allow you to determine what buyers will see as a "suggestion" to buy along with the items they are viewing or have just purchased. If you are selling a Blackberry Bold faceplate, then your suggestions set up in your cross promotions could be other Blackberry Bold accessories (instead of showing buyers the Barbie doll and Fiestaware you have for sale).
• Listing frame: With about 45 seconds of work and the click of a button, this benefit will provide you with additional marketing for your other products in every single one of your listings. Go to this listing and scroll to the middle (right after the Description starts). This bar on the left and the horizontal one across the top of the listing itself is called a "Listing Frame." As an eBay Store owner you can include this in each of your listings. The Listing Frame includes links to your other categories, your custom pages, your newsletter sign-up and more. You can't keyword spam your other listings in typical auctions, but as an eBay Store owner you get to do this legally.

Having contact once with a customer through a purchase is fine, but being able to put your new products in front of them over and over again is worth gold.

• Newsletter: This feature alone is worth the price of eBay Stores times 100. Having contact once with a customer through a purchase is fine, but being able to put your new products in front of them over and over again is worth gold. You have 5,000 newsletters you get to send out monthly to buyers and potential buyers who sign up for this type of communication. This allows you to show your readers what is on sale, teach them something about your products, offer them exclusives for being on your newsletter list and much more.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): Your Store is naturally coded so that search engine "spiders" will find it. As we stated in previous columns, once you set up your Store correctly, you can get your business not only ranked on Google's first page, but in the top few spots on the first page.
• Listing feeds: By activating your RSS feeds as well as your search engine and comparison site feeds, you are automatically sending your listings out to a whole new group of potential buyers without lifting a finger. These feeds go out to potential buyers who request when you list new items, to search engines and to shopping comparison sites for even more automatic marketing for your online business. These feeds also allow you to utilize them in outside marketing such as Google Base.
• Store referral credit: eBay pays you to have an eBay Store. This is one of my favorite benefits. If you do marketing for your Store outside of eBay, eBay will give you a 75 percent referral credit off the final value fees of the sales you send in. (More on this in my next column).
• Traffic reports: As my Success group has heard me say a million times, "Don't do the spaghetti test." In other words, don't throw your business out to the world of eBay and hope your products stick to a buyer. Use these in-depth reports to find out exactly what keywords your buyers are using, the search engines that are sending you traffic and even what country your potential buyers are coming in from.

You get all of this for $15.95 a month. If you upgrade to a Premium or Feature Store, you will get even more benefits, including additional marketing for your online business and more powerful tools to automate daily tasks.

Believe it or not, there are many more benefits to owning an eBay Store than those we have listed here. In our 1% eBay Stores training, we walk through optimizing all of these benefits for your business and profits.