Introducing EBay Stores

Imagine a storefront all your own, where buyers could go to browse through your merchandise. Your items could be displayed for a month, or even indefinitely. Low cost bulk items for which individual listing fees wouldn’t be economical could reside in the store until you removed them. You could have control over hundreds or even thousands of listings, plus image hosting and customizable pages. All of this can be had by opening an Ebay Store.

Ebay stores are a good solution for bulk sellers who don’t want to spend their money on recurring listing fees. Sellers of antiques, collectibles, and other slow-moving items will benefit from the Ebay stores’ “Good ‘Til Canceled” feature. This allows you to list items indefinitely, subject to listing fees every thirty days. If you anticipate that your goods will take some time to sell, it could be worth your while to use an Ebay store rather than traditional auction listings.

Ebay stores also come with a host of features that allow you to manage your listings, host your images, customize your pages, and market via e-mail. At the time of this writing, a basic Ebay store costs $15.95 per month. Basic Ebay stores come with five pages, 300 product categories, 1MB of image hosting space, and built-in ways to promote your store. The Premium and Anchor store subscriptions cost more, but offer more features and space.

The Markdown Manager is a popular feature. Ebay sellers who use the manager can offer their products at discounted prices. Of course, this is a great way to attract the attention of buyers, or to clear out items that haven’t performed as well as anticipated. Ebay stores also offer sellers the choice of putting their store “on vacation”. That is, when sellers won’t be able to manage their items for whatever reason, the store can be taken temporarily offline until the seller returns. This feature is convenient and helps prevent Ebay sellers from feeling like they are chained to their computers.

Ebay encourages store-based merchants to think outside the auction block when promoting their stores. Ebay recommends e-mail marketing to keep in touch with your buyers through messages and newsletters. Promotional flyers can be created and included with shipments. Blogs and other web sites can be used to showcase Ebay store, thanks to marketing widgets. Keyword managers make sure your store will get a good page rank in search engines.

And the list goes on. There are far too many Ebay store benefits to list here. For full details, visit http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/subscriptions.html.

Ebay is a marketplace for the 21stCentury, but some of the old rules still apply. Sellers must first grab the attention of buyers. The products must be superior to (or less expensive than) those offered by competitors. And customer service is still paramount. With Ebay stores, online sellers have a convenient way to achieve their goals.