Any one have an Ebay store?

[RedCherry]

The fees just recently went up, and truthfully, I'm thinking of closing mine. I tend to sell the most from October through Christmas, so I might just have mine seasonally. They take 12% now final value fees when you sell something out of a store, and when most of my products are under 10$ that is a lot. Plus, using Paypal as a processor, takes another chunk.

The advantages of selling on eBay though are if you start a blog, and use keyword optimization in your title tags for your listings, plus submit your store to froogle, you can get your items in the search engines easier than you can starting a stand-alone store. Plus, there are literally millions of people shopping eBay, so if you have something unusual you can get some good sales. Just make sure you take in account the fees when setting your prices.

I also plaster my url to my non eBay store on every picture I post on a listing, so that can help you cross sell on your non-ebay store and make some money. You can't link off-site on listings, but you CAN on your about me page...so take advantage of that.

You will also need to drive traffic to your store by sumbitting auction style listings too. I might list a loss leader, or list something that for 25 cents more than can just buy it now in the store instead of waiting for the auction to end, that that will get traffic to the store. Plus, as I said, using the blogs helps too. There are quite a few bloggers on eBay and the blogs get read, and spidered well too.

So for me, I don't get a bunch of sales right now, but the soap market is very competitive on eBay. But DocHolly has unusual stuff, so she is doing better. If you have unusual, you can do fine.