Making a Living from Your eBay Business (2nd Edition)

Why would you want to open your own eBay Store? Well, it certainly isn't for casual sellers; you have to set up your own web page and keep the store filled with merchandise, both of which take time and energy. It's also a little expensive, especially after eBay's mid-2006 rate increase.

But if you're a high-volume seller who specializes in a single category (or even a handful of categories), there are benefits to opening your own store. They include being able to sell more merchandise (through your store) than you can otherwise list in auctions, being able to offer more merchandise for sale at a lower cost (due to dramatically lower listing fees), being able to display a special eBay Stores icon next to all of your auction lists, and being able to generate repeat business from future sales to current purchasers.

Opening an eBay Store is an especially good idea if you have a lot of fixed-price merchandise to sell. You can put items in your eBay Store before you offer them for auction, and thus have more merchandise for sale than you might otherwise. An eBay Store is also a good place to "park" merchandise that hasn't sold at auction, before you choose to relist.

In addition, if you do your job right, you can use your eBay Store to sell more merchandise to your existing customers. And, since eBay Store insertion fees are lower than auction listing fees, you'll be decreasing your costs by selling direct rather than through an auctionassuming you have an acceptable sales rate, of course.

All this is made feasibleand more profitabledue to the lower costs associated with eBay Store listings. As you'll learn in the "The Costs of Running an eBay Store" section, later in this chapter, listing fees for eBay Store items are substantially lower than eBay's normal auction listing fees. These lower fees makes it affordable to offer more merchandise for saleand more profitable when you sell it.

Another benefit of selling merchandise in an eBay Store is that eBay will automatically advertise items from your store on the Bid Confirmation and Checkout Confirmation pages it displays to bidders in your regular auctions. These "merchandising placements" help you cross-sell additional merchandise to your auction customers.

Note

Accounting Assistant is a software program that enables you to export eBay and PayPal data directly into the QuickBooks accounting program. The program is free to download and use, although to generate the necessary data you also need a subscription to either eBay Stores, Selling Manager (Basic or Pro), or Seller's Assistant (Basic or Pro). Find out more at pages.ebay.com/help/sell/accounting-assistant-ov.html.

In addition, eBay sends all eBay Store owners a monthly Sales Report Plus report. This report provides a variety of data to help you track your Store activity, including total sales; average sales price; buyer counts; and metrics by category, format, and ending day or time.

You'll also receive live Traffic Reports that show the number of page views for each of your listings and Store pages, as well as a list of keywords used by buyers to find your listings. Featured and Anchor Stores also receive an additional path analysis that shows how buyers navigate within your store, and bid/BIN tracking. And all eBay Store owners can export their Store data to QuickBooks, using eBay's Accounting Assistant program, for your personal financial management.

Finally, all eBay Store owners get a free subscription to eBay Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro. If you'd planned on using one of these tools anyway, getting them free helps to defray the costs of running your eBay Store.

Note

If you're serious about selling merchandise outside the eBay environment, you may want to create a more full-featured e-commerce presence than available with eBay Stores. See Chapter 28, "Launching a Full-Featured Merchant Website," for more information.

Of course, it isn't all milk and honey in the land of eBay Stores. According to eBay, items listed in eBay Stores take 14 times longer to sell than do items listed in normal eBay auctions, on averageand, in some media categories (books, CDs, DVDs, and so on) up to forty times longer. And, while eBay Stores merchandise accounts for 83% of all listings across the eBay empire, they only contribute 9% of eBay's total gross merchandise value. In other words, there's a lot of stuff parked in eBay Stores that just isn't selling.

This is one reason that eBay raised signficantly its eBay Stores fees in August, 2006more than doubling insertion fees, as well as adding a couple of points to the base final value fees. These fee increases make an eBay Store less attractive than it was before; you can't just stuff a store with merchandise that may or may not sell. At the new rates (which we'll discuss in a moment), you really only want to put items in your store that you know have viable sales potential.