Has anyone here set-up an eBay store? I'm currently in the process of doing such and would love to chat with you. If you'd like, respond here or PM me. We'll be selling art prints. Thanks! ABM
Yes you can set it to only allow payment via paypal. Make sure you state the person purchasing must have a confirmed Paypal account and you will only ship to their confirmed Paypal shipping address. This prevents you from losing any potential disputes. You can use Turbo Lister to get started. It's free and easy to use. It allows you to create simple templates, upload photos, set your pricing, create ads etc.
Also this an excellent tool to use to figure out the fees eBay & Paypal is going to charge you. http://ebcalc.com/
Thanks! Note, these won't be auctioned items. There will be a set price for each of them. I suppose why we were leaning towards eBay "stores". Is that the right way to go in your opinion?
I use auctions as a method of drawing potential customers into your store. Auctions are always listed on top of searches so I'd recommend having at least one per week just to draw more traffic to your eBay store.
Very cool. I'll be sure to run this aspect past my partners............one of whom will be setting up our said store. Thanks for your input, man. I learn so much from many of you guys in here!
I agree eBay isn't the best or only solution, but for the items he's selling it's a good starting point. A lot of eBay sellers and buyers have moved over to Amazon.com
Yeah, I actually do have an Amazon store for our software, and it's better because it's not such a price-sensitive environment. Basically, I think people shop ebay for a good deal. People shop Amazon for good variety. If you want to sell art prints, you probably want to find people in the latter mindset. But even the Amazon store sucks. They take about 20% of your sale! Yuck! And do you really want to spend any amount of time driving traffic to a place that can jerk you around with higher commissions at a moment's notice? No thanks. I hate the idea of giving up control of my business to monoliths like Amazon or ebay. Amazon does one thing really well: It gives seller legitimacy. A 5 star ranking on Amazon is gold. That's the only reason we still use it. So sure, start up an Amazon store too because some good reviews there give you legitimacy. But for goodness sakes, don't make that the cornerstone of your business. My advice to him boiled down to just starting your own basic site where you can feature the artwork as big as you want, and then stick a couple of Google or PayPal "Buy it Now" buttons on it. Fees are only 2.5%, and you'll make better profits in the long run. Take the money you would've given up through Ebay and invest that in advertising your own site.
Really good stuff! So, if I'm understanding all of this correctly, get the website up and running early. Go ahead and use Amazon, but more as a marketing vehicle as opposed to anything else? I'm also looking into how to get higher up the totem pole in regards to Google searches. You are awesome! tim
It will take about 6 months before you start seeing real traffic to your website on the google search engines. To get listed on all major search engines it's going to set you back about $2500 per month. If you're selling prints you might want to consider marketing them for free on sites like Flickr, Picasso etc. I'm pretty sure they offer watermarking to protect the images from being stolen.
I don't think a "6 months" rule is really true. It all depends on the keywords you target. My business wrote a blog post on "election night recipes" and we were the 4th search result within 48 hours. It took us 16 months to be the #2 google result for "cookbook software". It really depends on how competitive the keywords you choose are, and how effective you are at building Search Engine Optimization. Again, that depends. I spend more than that on Google search advertising in a couple weeks, but I'm incredibly aggressive. I've helped a local photographer here in Boise, and he spends about $40/month. You can spend as much or as little as you want (or need to). My bottom-line rule on all advertising is this: It's cheap if it pays for itself. It's expensive if it doesn't. A Superbowl ad costing $2 mil can be incredibly cheap if it sells $20 mil in product. A $30 stack of business cards is incredibly expensive if you don't get them in the hands of potential buyers. Cool idea. I hadn't thought of that.
Yeah, look at this page from my site: http://store.cookbookpeople.com/ I link to my Amazon page on my site so that customers can see (if they want) reviews there. And a lot of people go there to make sure I'm legit. But less than 10% of my customers come from my Amazon store. Obviously, you don't have to go to the full shopping cart system like I have. (Frankly, it's overkill even for my company right now.) Just stick some Buy It Now buttons on your pages.
I'm also in the process of looking into an Ebay store. I manufacture dry suits for water skiing, kayaking, rafting. I want to start selling directly to the public instead of to dealers. Gotta compete with the Chinese Manufacturers some how. Does Ebay charge a fee or collect a percentage of sale? Have any of you done Network Solutions for a E-commerce site? Prices seem reasonable. About 99.00 per month. Any input would be great.
Our company currently use MonsterCommerce from Network Solutions. It's amazing and the support is outstanding. eBay charges about 10% to 15% on average per sale.
