bubbajay.com

I know, I know – it’s been quite some time since I wrote about eBay – the original content of this Blog. But, like the poltergeist…I’m baaaaaaack.

If you’ve been around eBay for a year or more you may remember when eBay changed the search function so that any items listed in one’s eBay Store would not be displayed unless there were less than 30 of the searched term in the fixed price/auction categories.

This was devastating for many eBay Store owners forcing them to pay more for auctions style listings just to get the exposure they needed to sell their wares. It didn’t help that eBay raised the fees for Store owners at the same time – but that’s another story.

Now, when buyer conducts a search on eBay, at the top left of the page there is a tab named “Stores” (see image below). Previously if you clicked it, it just took you to the eBay Stores Hub where they would have to enter their search term again. But, with the new changes, when the tab is clicked it shows the results based on the search they performed.

The big question is whether or not shoppers would even realize that eBay has added this new functionality.

Regardless, there’s no down-side to it, so in my book that’s a plus!

Sunday night… it was a long day. I got up at 5am to go the the Swap Meet to try and sell some of the things filling my garage. Our house is on the market and I’m trying to get lean…as far as clutter that is. In general, I’m the anti-packrat. I throw stuff away almost too quickly and then wish I’d kept it. But, I still manage to collect enough stuff overtime to fill my Trooper from front to back floor to ceiling.

Anyway, after a 6-hour stint at the lovely Oceanside Swap Meet, I was $500 the wealthier and 24 boxes of stuff lighter! WhooHooo

I grabbed some Chipotle for lunch and headed over the the Boy Scout Space Derby event. This is a fun tradition held anually by my youngest son’s Scout Pack. They’re balsa wood rockets that fly down a fishing line race track propelled by ….rubber band powered propellers.

My son, being the knucklehead he is, decided he intentionally didn’t want to make it aerodynamic. He wanted it completely square, like block of wood it is when you get it out of the box. He also insisted we not paint it, or finish off nicely. He wanted to win the “Procrastinator” award (which is a real category), even though he planned well ahead to not finish the darn thing.

Amazingly he finished 4th overall out of some 60 rockets – beating many of the wafe like aero shaped rockets that obviously hours were spent on. It almost irritated people and only made our family chuckle. We spent literally 5 minutes on the entire project and he flew through 5 rounds with only 1 loss on the track before his final round for third place – which he lost. Anyway, it was fun.

I then hurried home for an online conference I was hosting for AuctionSelling101.com – our eBay education website. We coveed eBay stores today, where I instructed the attending students on how search is different for eBay stores than it is for fixed price and auction format listings.

Then we spent another hour where I literally opened up a store, and built it before them online in the conference room where I can share my desktop while talking to them in my headphones. Very cool stuff.

We had some dinner, and went over to Starbucks for an hour or so to play some Monopoly with the family. Then hit the grocery store and then home for the night.

Turns out we had a stellar day on eBay with the bicycle clothing! We sold 5 of our new cycling jackets and vests, several pairs of arm and leg warmers, toe covers and shoe covers and several pairs of shorts. Gross sales of over $350 for the day in just my bicycle clothing. Very good news!

We have an order already in that should be arriving in another week, and I have an order put together to submit next week. I sent out an email to my 400 plus past customers of cyling products directing them to my eBay store letting them know we had full inventory and lots of new items in stock. I guess it worked! )

My last post was about eBay stores and how we learned about them. You can read it HERE. In it I went over how to open your own store, but that link again is HERE. Now today I just read they’re having a ‘Best of Stores’ contest. I know they have it each year, but until this year we never really did anything special with our store so I never even considered entering.

There are several differnt categories, but basically the viewers vote, not eBay. So, if you’re not entering your own store, be sure to vote for ours! ) The store again is LowPricedMags .

If you’re interested, you can check out some of the last year winners below.

2005 Best Shopping Experience
2005 Best Custom Pages

For this year’s contest you can

So somewhere along the line I learned about eBay stores. You can Open a storefront on eBay.com yourself by clicking the link. What we learned about stores that you may or may not know.

• Everything you list on eBay in any format will show up in your store.
  It’s dirt cheap to list stuff in your store. I mean 30 days for .03 cents! Can’t beat it
• eBay will pay you to send people to your store, when they make a purchase. Check it out HERE.
• The store opens up tons of new marketing opportunitites including building a mailing list (which I’ll go over later), sending out newsletters and promotional fliers through email marketing, getting your listings picked up by search engines and getting you world wide web exposure and much more.
• You can customize them basically beyond a recognizable eBay store…almost like a regular website.
• You can get some pretty cool tools for monitoring store and page traffic for your store.
• You can set up your store to function while you’re away with vacation settings and more!

So let’s talk about these things a bit. I said everything you list in any format shows up in your store. But what about when you list something just in your store. Where does that show up? The answer is, they show up just like any other listing and are completely searchable. This is a fairly new change, but this update to eBay’s policy should increase the exposure for store listings if it doesn’t clutter and dilute the regular listing results. If you look at any given page from an eBay search, you’ll have at the top “featured items”. Sellers have paid extra to have their items appear at the beginning of the page. Then the next section has current auction and fixed price listings. Then after all of those there is a horizontal line and then all the store listings appear. Now if there are 12 pages of an item, the store listings may show up on pages 11 and 12 all the time, but it’s more exposure than before – where store items would only show up if there were less than 20 items availalable in the other formats. There are also no gallery images shown for store listings in the regular search results. More on the increased store visiblity HERE

Next, let’s talk price. It’s next to nothing. I mean I listed 1500 items once, and it cost me $45. Compare this to listing 100 fixed price listings of items selling for $10. This would cost you .60 cents per listing or $60. For the 1500 items it would cost you $900 and the listing would be for 7 days, not the 30 day listing the store items are available. Pretty cool deal. Now the store isn’t free, but they do start at a reasonable price, and they’re free for the first 30 days!

Email marketing is a very effective tool. Let’s say you’re me and you sell magazine subscriptions. I promote my mailing list in my listings and in my store and on my about me page. And I get maybe 5 new subscribers a day. Now that’s not a huge number but my list has grown to well over 2000 people. Now that’s not a huge number, but when I send out a newsletter or flyer I see an immediate impact on my sales. But you have to grow the list and continue to provide something of value in the information you send. You can’t just market, market, market to them. It gets old. Try to offer information that is valuable to that particular mailing list, so your subscribers look forward to receiving your emails and will open them.

Allright, moving on. Store customization. Our first store we’ve had for several years and have done very, very little to customize it. In fact just this past year did I finally figure out just how ‘custom’ you can make them. You can see our first store for All_that_and_more! HERE. Now check out our new store for LowPricedMags HERE. It’s completely custom. Quite a difference isn’t there? It has made a huge impact on our sales and we’re going to take a second look at the first store soon. The magazine store we completely did away with the ‘look’ of eBay, at least on the homepage. We saw a huge increase in combined purchases. People get into the store and just shop. We love it! If you have questions about eBay stores or anything ‘eBay’ feel free to email me .