eBay Tips: Combining Your Online Store With eBay

It's one of the most popular combinations among online entrepreneurs: selling on both eBay and their own online store.

The popularity of this combination isn't surprising. Many sellers get their first taste of selling online at eBay, and set up their own site only after months of success - but they don't want to leave eBay.

Conversely, plenty of sellers first launch their own online store, and are only later drawn by the irresistible lure of the eBay marketplace.

Either way, combining these two makes perfect sense. The lure of eBay is its massive built-in audience, as tens of millions of buyers eagerly seek bargains. The lure of having your own store is (hopefully) a higher profit margin. Many merchants find they can charge a higher price outside of the auction environment — and avoid eBay fees.

“It's important for a multi-channel e-commerce company to drive traffic from eBay to their own site. However, it's important to not overdo it.”

Also, on their own sites merchants have complete control and flexibility in how they present products, without rules imposed by eBay.

For plenty of sellers the best strategy focuses on creating synergy between their eBay auction and their own online store. Savvy sellers work the advantages of both. They leverage the traffic of eBay with the higher profit margin of their own site to create a hefty revenue stream.

Directing Traffic
As anyone who runs both an online store and an eBay auction knows, it takes work to drive traffic from your eBay auction to your online store.

eBay won't let sellers link to their own store from their main eBay sales page— the auction giant doesn't want to drive traffic away from itself. It also doesn't want sellers to meet buyers in its auction marketplace then go complete the transaction elsewhere. eBay would lose fees.

However, eBay allows an important exception to its linking rule: it allows sellers to link to their own store from their eBay 'About Me' page.

"There's no cost to having an eBay 'About Me' page, so every single seller should have one," says David Yaskulka, who is an eBay Power Seller and also runs his own site, Blueberry Boutique.

eBay offers sellers a variety of tools for building their About Me page. Sellers can also use custom-programmed HTML to jazz up this page's look.

Some sellers build truly lavish About Me pages, creating an attractive display to drive users to their own online store.

Another effective way to drive traffic from your eBay auction to your own site is to promote your site in your e-mail. This is done two ways. First, when e-mailing customers, always include a signature file in your e-mail that touts your Web site. For example, a simple signature could look like this:

John Smith
PremiumShoes.com
"Shoes for every occasion"

Also, it's best to use an e-mail address that directs users to your site. Instead of using, say, an AOL or Yahoo e-mail address, send e-mail to customers from YourName@YourSite.com.

On a related note, sellers can create an eBay user name based on their site name — helping increase user awareness of their off-eBay store. For example, Yaskulka's eBay seller name is "BlueberryBoutique." Moreover, in his eBay listings he frequently repeats his company name along with his logo graphic.

Third-Party Checkout
Some eBay sellers use a third-party checkout system, which helps drive traffic to their own site. In this scenario, when a buyer on eBay checks out, they are directed to a checkout system that's branded with the e-tailer's identity.

One such third-party checkout provider is ChannelAdvisor. In addition to displaying the seller's brand, ChannelAdvisor's hosted checkout allows you to offer up-sell and cross-sell items to the buyer during checkout. And these extra sales happen off of eBay, reducing fees for the seller.

These third-party checkout systems allow two more advantages:

1. They enable eBay buyers to pay for multiple items at the same time, with combined shipping if desired

2. They offer customers a sign-up box for your e-mail newsletter.

'Branded' Charity
Most owners of online stores see no reason to link from their store to their eBay auction. Why send traffic to eBay? If a buyer has landed on their homepage, there's no reason to direct them anywhere else.

Yet there is at least one reason for a storeowner to link back to eBay. The auction giant enables sellers to partner with large charity concerns — nationally known non-profit groups that normally never partner with smaller retailers.

ebay, along with MissionFish, has an alliance with 8,000 non-profit and charity organizations. So an eBay seller can chose to support any one of these charities by donating a percentage of sale proceeds.

By partnering through eBay with groups like the Red Cross, Nature Conservancy, Make-A-Wish and others, a small e-tailer can lift its own brand recognition, ultimately helping drive traffic to their site.

Furthermore, eBay sellers who participate in the Giving Works program get additional visibility on eBay through a specialized search function that the auction giant uses.

Partnering with a well-known charity "is a tried and true brand-building technique," Yaskulka says.

A Word of Caution
"It's very important for a multi-channel e-commerce company to drive traffic from eBay to their own site," Yaskulka says. However, "it's very important to not overdo it."

Some customers will appreciate the opportunity to go to your own site, he says. "And if you lead them appropriately, the customer wins, and they'll enjoy both their eBay and off-eBay experience."

But forcing the issue is a bad idea, he says. First, this might violate eBay's terms of service. Additionally, many customers simply want to stay on eBay.

eBay ProStores

eBay realized that many sellers operate their own online store in conjunction with their eBay auction, so it introduced the eBay ProStores software platform.

eBay ProStores is a complete online store building program. The low-priced package (starting at $30 a month) includes everything from checkout to product merchandising tools. Sites like The Travelled Home and BeadForLife were built with the ProStores package.

At first glance these sites don't appear to have anything to do with eBay. They have their own domain name and their look and feel is comparable to many non-eBay merchants' sites.

But stores built with the ProStores software can integrate with eBay in numerous ways. Storeowners can easily display their eBay listings directly on their ProStores site. Sellers can manage their eBay auctions from within their ProStore's administrative tool, making eBay sales and off-eBay sales a seamless process.

Not surprisingly, ProStores' various tools all help drive traffic toward eBay — not from eBay toward ProStores sites. In the relationship between online stores and eBay, the auction giant is clear on which direction it wants to drive buyers.

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