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

Opening your own eBay Store is as easy as clicking through eBay's setup pages. There's nothing overly complex involved; you'll need to create your store, customize your pages (otherwise known as your virtual storefront), and list the items you want to sell. Just follow the onscreen instructions, and you'll have your own Store up and running in just a few minutes.

Creating Your Store

To open your Store, start at the eBay Stores main page (stores.ebay.com), and click the Open a Store button. When you accept the user agreement, the store creation process begins. You'll start by choosing a name for your Store then, on the subsequent Quick Store Setup page (shown in Figure 27.3), you'll get to choose a Store design, select a color and theme, enter your Store description, select your item layout, insert promotion boxes, and select various marketing options. Click the Apply Settings button to launch your newly created Store. It's that simple!

Listing Merchandise for Sale

Now that you've created your eBay Store, you need to add some merchandise. You do this by clicking the Sell link at the top of any eBay listing page; the normal Sell page now includes an option for Store Inventory, which is what you want to select. Go through the normal Sell Your Item listing creation process, and your new listing will be added to your eBay Store. That's one of the nice things about having an eBay Store; it's well integrated with your other eBay activities.

Customizing and Managing Your Store

eBay lets you customize, to some degree, the pages in your eBay Store. You do this by clicking the Seller Manage Store link at the bottom of your Store's home page. This takes you to the Manage My Store page, shown in Figure 27.4. From here, you can

• Customize individual pages in your Store

• Manage your Store subscription

• Put your Store on "hold" while you go on vacation

• Specify which Store items you want to cross-promote in your auction listings

• Add promotional boxes to pages in your Store

• Buy eBay Keywords (as described in Chapter 24, "Promoting Your eBay Auctions")

• Send promotional emails to your customers

• Register your domain name

• Cancel Good 'Til Cancelled listings

• Access your eBay Store reports

Just click the appropriate link for the action you want to perform.

For example, you may want to create a page in your Store to detail your store policies, or to list promotional items, or to showcase specific merchandise. Go to the Manage Your Store page, and select the Custom Pages link. When the next page appears, click the Create New Page link. This displays the Create Custom Page: Select Layout page, shown in Figure 27.5. As you can see, you can create many different kinds of pages. Select the layout you want, and click the Continue button. This displays the Create Custom Page: Provide Content page, where you essentially fill in the blanks with your new page's contenttext and pictures. Continue on to preview the new page and load it into your Store.