eBay and the online retailer

I was recently asked by a colleague to assist him in setting up an eBay shop in addition to his existing online presence, at first (having not used eBay for a while) I was a little surprised and asked him why, eBay is notoriously expensive, its feedback system favours the customer and the sites structure is not favourable to the type of product he was selling i.e. clothes. He told me that a number of his colleagues have just launched an eBay division and were doing remarkably well.

Anyway, after much investigation I discovered that eBay have made some huge changes and although still expensive when you compare fee's to what you would spend with Google or Yahoo it is surprisingly close. They have now made eBay more accessible to large brands and have introduced a number of initiatives most notably Outlets and Daily Deal.

Outlets have attracted some big high street names and provide a platform for them to sell stock at a reduced price. Daily Deals is open I believe to al power sellers as long as you can meet their product criteria (this changes throughout the year) as an example they were looking for keep fit and home entertainment products throughout January, the idea of this service is that you sell the product at a breakeven price attracting more visitors to your shop. (At Xmas daily deals were getting around 14,000 hits per day)

So after much research into what our competitors were doing and what eBay could offer in terms of flexibility etc. We decided to use an external designer as my HTML is pretty rusty and why waste the time when you can pay someone who knows all the tips and tricks to do it for you. In the end I found a company who quoted me the bargain price of £150!! (inc a £50 discount) Considering all other quotes were £300+ and having said that at least 3 websites did not even get back to me at all!!

The service provided was spot on and if you are considering setting up an eBay shop I would highly recommend this website, if you want to spend more money on your designs etc you can plan for it further down the line. An example of the work can be found here at Buy Jeans Outlet, for that price you can hardly complain, some sites wanted around £800 and tried to sell you some (in my opinion) unneeded SEO service, which is what I pay eBay for - Traffic!!

So the shop is now online and doing very well and we even found time to come up with ten tips when setting up an eBay shop – good luck!

 

James