Everyone should be linking from their regular listings to their eBay stores, of course. But what if you want to draw customers from outside eBay?

Well, it's a no-brainer to put your store URL in all your outgoing e-mails, and on your business cards and paper correspondence. You should also point to your eBay store through your regular Web site, if you have one. I've been doing that for quite a while and we get a few customers that way.

But we want a lot more eyeballs looking at our products on eBay, and one of the best ways to drive traffic, of course, is through search engines.

Like a lot of small eBay business people, I know a great deal about our products, but I don't pretend to be an Internet search engine marketing expert. We have a little Google ad campaign for our main Web site (Google makes it amazingly easy with AdWords), and we sometimes run a keyword campaign on eBay itself to direct people searching for orchids to our listings.

eBay knows that its sellers need assistance, and has been making serious efforts to make it easier for search engines to read the content of eBay stores and display those URLs in search results. The auction giant recently changed the default structure of URLs for eBay stores to make them easier to get picked up by outside search engines.

And it's working. I've noticed that when I do general searches on Google and Yahoo!, eBay store listings for our little orchid business are showing up more and more frequently.

Ironically, eBay's own search engine generally does not pick up Stores results, although in April, eBay rolled out a modification that allows Stores results to appear if there are fewer than 10 regular eBay listings returned from a keyword search. For those of us with lots of competition (which is the case for most eBay sellers, I'd guess) that really doesn't help much, though.

When I ran a Yahoo! search for "cattleya orchid," one of the paid listings was from eBay itself, and a click directed me to an eBay page that displayed the results for the same search terms on eBay. eBay has a similar arrangement with Froogle. I thought those were a nice touch, although the pointers are to auction and Buy It Now listings, not to eBay Stores listings.

As a result, it's still tough to ensure that your Store items are listed in the major engines.

Taking it to the next level
eBay also allows its store operators, most of whom are PowerSellers, to export their inventory in a file and send to those search engines that accept data feeds. That capability seems likely to reap the most rewards -- at some point. But when I decided to take eBay up on its offer to create a file of our eBay Store listings for distribution to the search engines, I ran into some stumbling blocks.

Initially, the process of creating a data feed is easy, and eBay provides simple directions:

1. On the Manage Your Store page, click on the "Export listings" link.
2. Click "Make a file of my Store Inventory listings available," then Save Settings.

Within 12 hours, eBay will create the file and post it to a URL based on your Store's URL, and will be available for anyone (or any search engine) to download.

But after that, it gets a little harder. That's because, as eBay tells you, it "is then up to you to make arrangements with third-party partners to download the file from the URL. eBay is NOT responsible for coordinating how the file will be used with a third party."

Continued on Page Two: Where to Now?