Ebay stores are one of the most overlooked ways to market your items & potentionally other items including FREE items.. Ebay's auction & fixed price sales insertion fees start @.20 and go up, yet your store listing is only .02 for 30 days as compared to 1-7 days or 10 days (which costs another dime) via other formats of selling.
Now there are truly 2 types of items to sell in your store. First you can always sell your merchandise and secondly you can sell penny type auctions. Looking at your merchandise first:
THe store format offers an "ebay express" format, but is listed with auction items. Many buyers simply do not want to bid & wait on the item due to several reasons. THink of it this way, if you were going to get your spouse a birthday gift you would want to ensure that it arrived on time. By bidding on auctions you could get out-bid and not even get the item, you could bid on several to try to ensure you win but you win multiple auctions of same item, or you bid on the item and are going to win but the auction doesn't end for 6-8 days... So, rather than taking the chances mentioned and others, as well as all the time involved, many buyers will pay a premium price to buy the item directly from your store.
Additional exposure:
Many sellers don't even know that their store items recieve exposure through google's froggle shopping system and other venues such as this & search engines. Google will not list "auction" style items in their system, but the store items make it in and with the new "GOOGLE CHECKOUT" system just beginning google may see an increase in "buyer" traffic very soon.
Also, if you sell the multiple items that are all basically the same or have an on-line store then your past closed auctions also show up in many search engines, which can lead new buyers to your current items.... The key here is to ensure in the description of items to include some way for the potential buyer to get to your current items. If your items are on ebay it is as easy as including something similar to: "please check out my other auctions/items".. And get a link to your store in your listing-where ebay doesn't allow you to place your actual "store" link in the description. You can among other things include your site name with payment info, place a link to a "guarantee" or "privacy policy" which in turn will show your site's name and a link from it to the home page of site...
Now the penny auctions... Many people including myself used to think that you made $$ by selling these and having a personal paypal account so paypal doesn't take the $$ as it's fee. Where you can make a little this way, the true value of these auctions are the content you sell. Within the e-book or whatever it is you sell be sure to include affiliate links to products the person can buy and links to your products and/or site. This can turn into a huge revenue if targeted correctly. For each item you sell for a penny you can guarantee that at a minimum of 33% of buyers will not even open it, but of the ones that do you are generating potential for affiliate sales and/or other revenue possibilities. Also, and this is where many miss it, the buyer will usually pass this info on to others and several will SELL the SAME ebook you sold them and then the cycle continues which puts the info into more hands and eventually enough people that are actually interested in the topic will read the information and generate revenue for you OUTSIDE OF EBAY!!! wow.. no fees involved. Actually, we sold one ebook approx. 3 years ago, and this was before the penny fad, so we made a small profit just from the selling of the book (which can still be done just not as easily), but continued to generate affiliate sales for over 2 years after we discontinued selling the ebook, and will prob. see additional revenue in the future from this 1 source!!
To sign up for an ebay store just click below:
