Increasing Your sales for your eBay Store UPDATE

Hey! This is one of the first times I have been excited in a while. We are having an excellent sales month and in sharing a lot of details with other sellers I have learned even more things to pass along. So if you are strolling in for the first time or just checking please keep checking back over the next few days at least so I can feed you some useful info.

If you have been reading you will know by now I have been using a traffic program that I started trying out in December. This month so far I have had 106 store sales and 29 CORE sales on eBay off a base of less than 600 items. That is probably the best eBay store item sales number I have had and our fees are running very low this month (ebay fee bill). Now I am doing a bunch of things, so Ill go over them all here...

1- I am opting in / out of Ebay Express every 7 days
2- I am bringing in 25k in hits a month using a traffic program. Allocated cost to this month $61.00
3- I have been using search engine submission sites and manually submitting this blog, my ebay store, my ebay store domain and my myspace to all of them I can find.
4- I cut back core auctions to 10 or less items a week and have had a decent sell through on those as well

That is the basic plan I am following. During the course of my research, I had the idea to try out some foreign traffic programs for the next month . I have not done so yet and will not mention any providers until I can get some info as I have not decided on which one to use yet and they are different than the first one I am using for US traffic. I asked a few questions and found out we , as eBay store owners have stores on other eBay sites if we sell to those countries! I never knew this! Let me give you links to our UK store and our Australia store...


http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Once-Upon-A-Bid


http://stores.ebay.com.au/Once-Upon-A-Bid

This is something that I did not know, and which could be of value. I stumbled across this after asking some questions and figured we could list items on these other sites and point people to our stores in their country! As you know eBay policy makes it so you have to be clear on the location of your item as being in the US (if you are a US seller) and you should note any special concerns for those countries in terms of what you can ship there. Generally the UK and Australia are pretty easy , its other countries which are more difficult in this regard.

So I am actually going to look to not only promote my US url but the foreign ones as well and build up some knowledge of my store on these sites.

I started using the traffic program mentioned a few posts below on December 18th. I ran one program from Dec 12-Jan 12 and then another started Jan 18 and will run til Feb 18th. Some other people have started trying it out as well and I will report how things worked out for them . So far out of 3 other people I am familiar with 2 others (besides me) were fairly happy with it so far. One person directed the traffic to an off eBay website and had a poor result. As a result of her analysis of this I would not recommend the program for this purpose. My reasoning on this is that it is redirected traffic. This means people come to you after they looked for something else similar to what you sell. The eBay name gives these strangers to you a slight amount of thought that they are somewhere familiar or that they can rely on. So while 95% of your traffic will just click away I believe it helps turn a little more of whats left into buyers.
Another issue is that the seller who had a poor result sellers primarily a single product line. As such I would not recommend this for a single product. Remember the odds. 25,000 visitors maybe only 1000 will take a peek maybe only 30-50 will become buyers maybe less. If you sell a variety of items I feel you are more likely to do well with it. Also if you have a small store and not much in it yet, I would hold off on much traffic and search engine stuff until you stock up some. A larger store provides some if its own traffic as it gets indexed. You need this traffic to work with other sources to make things work. I am only offering these cautions as the best info I can offer , it could be be that your experience would be different.

I will be giving a full report when the month ends which is later tonight, so probably by some time tomorrow.

I will be reporting more on promoting the foreign URLs for our stores and I am going to start recommending some other resources that I have used like books I have read etc, in case people like those things. Right now I have a few in my store, the cheapest and most ebay related is the Grilled Cheese Madonna book whic talks about all the crazy eBay auctions and might give you some marketing ideas. I have a few other market specific books listed on the Tween market and Creating Ever- Cool how companies create brands that live on. Those are more general.

The comment section is open for others recomendations as well.

Another project I will be working on is creating a Squidoo lens for all our content and some new ideas . A good friend of mine (Sallie) who is featured way way down the blog (She sells some nice jewelry) has been working with Squidoo and doing and excellent job. Its time for me to get moving on it!

More sooon...

Marty