Welcome to this edition of Adam Ginsberg's "Insiders" Newsletter. Each issue is designed to provide you with insights, tips, secrets and overall strategies on how you can build your online auctions business. I'm sure you love this issue! This week will show you how to drive traffice to your eBay Store - and how eBay Stores can save you eBay fees.
Lower Your eBay Fees by Driving Traffic to Your eBay Store 
In this newsletter issue the topic is: Why you want an eBay Store to make more money on eBay! This is part 1.
Did You Know...As of March 31, 2006 eBay has 247,000 US eBay Stores.
Are you making money on eBay? Have you set up your eBay Store yet? One of the main attractions of operating an eBay Store is that the listing fees cost just pennies. For example, you can create a listing in your eBay Store for just a few cents - and this auction can stay posted for 30+ days. As well, the listing can include literally hundreds of the same item. With profitability a key - selling from your eBay Store can make you a ton of money. However, there is a downside. The the Final Value Fees (or fees eBay charges when an item has sold) are higher than the ones you’d pay if the same item sold at the same price at auction.
Even though the fees are a bit higher when the item sells, in the last newsletter issue we determined that it’s definitely worth while to open an eBay Store.
While eBay Store listings do not come up in general eBay search results, there's another huge reason to have an eBay Store. It's common for items in eBay Stores (much more so than in regular auction listings) for the results to attract the attention of external search engines. If someone does a Google, Yahoo, Ask, or Alta Vista search, it is possible that your eBay Store listings could show up high in the results. If your listings come up high in the search results you'll increase your traffic to your eBay Store. Your goal is to do what you can to make this happen.
The first thing to consider is having your own Blog. Blogs are more popular than ever. They’re simple and easy to use – and fast to set up. http://www.blogger.com, which is owned by Google, would be a great first choice.
Tip: Blogs typically rank high in the search engines. Use your Blog to promote your eBay listings, including the title, eBay item # and link directly to your eBay listing.
Other Internet Marketing techniques work as well. You want to make sure you have good eBay descriptions as this will be considered high-quality content. Include content in your eBay Store as well, specifically in the header. As well, you’ll want to include as many relevant links to your Store as you can, and that you use your meta tags to define and label the content of each page.
Note: eBay limits how you can link away from your Store; make sure that you don’t link directly to sites that compete with eBay for revenue.
Tip: When writing the titles and descriptions for the items in your Store, be careful to use word spacing that search engine spiders can read. If you run your store name together, for example, like MyStoreSellsIposds, you’ve essentially made those potential keywords invisible because they are searched like one long word.
Obviously, the more exposure you can get for your store listings, the better off you'll be. One optimization strategy you can use to increase traffic to your eBay Store is to get your items appearing on other shopping sites such as Froogle, Shopping.com and Bizrate.com
While Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines will automatically index your eBay Store, you need to manually submit your Store information to shopping bot sites to get them to include your pages in their search results.
eBay provides you with an “export listings” link that third parties can use to download a current list of your inventory. Many shopping malls and directories will accept this file format to list the items for sale in your eBay Store.
Froogle is on eof the search engines tht uses this export link - and it's absolutely Free. You can find Froogle at http://www.froogle.com Froogle is owned by eBay, however the search results are limited to products on e-commerce sites. Someone who wants to find out where to buy something (not just find information about something) can search on Froogle to get a very focused list of relevant results.
You can set up your Froogle “feed” through eBay’s “Manage My Store” link. Select the “Export Listings” option and then check the box to make the file available. eBay will create the file and keep it current for you. You submit the URL to Froogle to use as a data feed. It will automatically update whenever your store inventory changes.
Note: You cannot use your Froogle feed for auction pages unless they are fixed-price listings.
Although Froogle is owned by Google, the listings are indexed separately. In other words, the two search engines do not “share” their data. Even if your eBay Store is optimized so that Google searches find it easily, it does not mean that your items will appear in Froogle. Manually submitting your feed to Froogle by using eBay’s export function will ensure that Froogle gets the data it needs.
What are the benefits of using search engines and blogs to promote your eBay Store? Well, there are a couple of compelling reasons. First, the more traffic you get through your eBay Store, the great the number of potential bids and sales – ultimately increasing your profitability.
Another main benefit comes from money you save on eBay fees as a result of bringing traffic to eBay from an outside site or link. There are several ways you can set this up. All of them give you a Store Referral Credit, which cuts 75% off your Final Value Fees.
You can learn more about Store Referral Credits at:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/specialtysites/referral-credit-faq.html
In order to qualify your sale for the Store Referral Credit, a buyer has to do one of the following:
- Click on a link containing your referral code on an off eBay site or in an email
- Type your eBay Store's URL into the address bar of their browser
- Click on a saved bookmark to your store
The buyer must then end up on one of your Store’s pages. They must then purchase one of your eBay Store’s items during that shopping session for eBay to register your fee credit.
The key is to place these links in front of as many potential buyers as possible and to make sure that each of those links contains your referral code.
To create your referral code, add ?refid=store to the end of your URL. For example, if the URL for your eBay Store is:
http://stores.ebay.com/Please_Buy_From_My_Store then the referral code that directs your buyer to your Stores main page would be:
http://stores.ebay.com/Please_Buy_From_My_Store?refid=store
Advanced Tip: For just a few dollars, I would highly recommend you register a domain name to promote your store. You can then have that domain name automatically forward to your eBay Store, including the referral credit ID.
As well, you can have multiple domain names, all forwarding to the same place, you’re not just limited to one domain.
You can get cheap domains here: http://www.highfivedomains.com
For example, you can register the domain: http://www.myonlinestore.com and have that link, which is simple to remember and easy to promote – with little chance of a someone mistyping the address in their browser.
Be sure to promote this link as often as possible. You can promote it from your email signature line, as an inbound link from another website, or on your blog.
Featured eBay Stores - Check Them Out!
Check it out: Brown's Linens eBay Store
Check it out: Sexy Stuff eBay Store
Check it out: Welding Supplies eBay Store
Check it out: Up Tempo Air eBay Store
Until the next issue...
Knowing No Boundaries
Adam Ginsberg
AdamGinsberg.com
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