Saturday, December 30, 2006

Bringing in Traffic & Sales to your your eBay store

Some people have contacted me with concerns or requests for more info on how the traffic program is going. I wanted to update everyone. If you read the post right below this one you will get a basic overview. The answer so far is.. I am still testing this out! On December 12th I began a 30 day period of 25k in purchased hits. I am getting traffic, visitors (longer stays) and sales. eBay doesnt have the easiest system for drilling down for information on this but if you are really familiar with their advanced traffic reports for featured stores and familiar with your buying patterns and graphs you can narrow this down. The last time I checked I was only 13k through a 25k program of targeted hits. The total cost of my initial hit generating program here is 99 dollars. So Im about halfway through. Some people have had concerns about these type of companies with this traffic. So far my statistics and those provided by the hit company have seemed to match though there is a delay at times in my traffic reporting (it seems) through eBay. I am going to try to post a picture here to show you what happened to my traffic since December 12th when I started this. Also the graph you will see is what is called "VISITORS" these are longer stays, longer than just a click in and out apparently. My research has shown that there are a few good companies with this type of traffic but that there are many other "scams" . My personal opinion is that when eBay ended their keywords program the replacement program was something I couldnt even understand let alone try and has not worked for us. We are branching out to try a few new things and it might take a month or two of testing (so keep checking back) to really give an official opinion on this. I have a few different things I can try. First, I can try to run a lot less auctions and just bring this type of traffic in for January and run a few TA (Trading assistant) auctions where the customers pay the fees, and a few collectible auctions. The other thing I can try is the 7 day burst they offer where I bunch this all up in 7 instead of 30 days to see if I see a surge in sales. If you are curious and cautious dont try this until you get some more info from my trials :)

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Increasing your Sales on eBay with Off Ebay Traffic

Hey everyone! I have some interesting information for you. Recently eBay has had it share of issues. The growth of sites like Youtube,Myspace and others has led to a decline in traffic on some sites such as eBay. As a result we are always working on ways to build traffic. When I was researching eBays traffic decline on Alexa.com I came across a company that redirects traffic from dead domain names to your site. I thought the concept was interesting. From what I gather someone can search for something like TomsGiftshop dot com and if Toms is closed they get taken over to you if you are a gift seller etc. So far I am 20-25% into my hit campaign and seeing very good results. It is not expensive to try and seems to work when adding off ebay hits to the existing eBay traffic. I will be posting additional info and graphs as I study this. Here is a banner below so you can check it out.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Huge Star Wars PEZ - The Value of Multiple Keywords in Selling


Hey everyone! It has been so long since I have posted to the blog here, my apologies! I have been busy selling and handling matters for my aunt's estate. Today I am going to review an important concept . That is the value of having items which contain multiple keywords of value when buyers are searching. For example.... You will see pictured here a set of Star Wars PEZ containers. This is a HUGE 12 inch high one! These items have "Star Wars" and "Pez" as two very valuable keywords. "Star Wars" has recently been listed as THE top keyword in collectibles! "Pez" is very high up there as well. These items thus can appeal to both star wars and pez collectors! We have other large PEZ items as well like Kermit Sesame Street Muppets PEZ and Big Bird Sesame Street PEZ , see how this works? All these by the way are MUSICAL PEZ containers and when you open them they play music! They dole out huge packs of PEZ not just individual candies! You can find these items in our store at http://Onceuponabid.com . We sometimes like to look for items with a "functional use" as well as popular keywords. For example, we sold out of another PEZ item recently. It was a "glow in the dark" "PEZ" " Freezer MUG" . It had a good use, was collectible for PEZ people, and then others like glow in the dark items. So look for multiple reasons people would want an item and that should help your ability to sell them! So far Miss Piggy PEZ has sold out.. lets us see who is next! Until later.....