Marketing Your Ebay Store - How To Help Buyers Find Your Items - By Susan Deppner

You're a seller on eBay and you've decided to open an eBay store. That's simple enough to accomplish. Then, suddenly, you realize that your store items don't show up in eBay searches. At this point the $64,000 question seems to be, "What do I do so that people will find my eBay store items?"

The first piece of advice it seems everyone gives when that question comes up is to be sure to run eBay auctions regularly and mention in your auction listings that you have an eBay store so people will go there to see what else you have. That's good advice, but the problem is that too many times people just stop there. Next thing you know they've closed their store because so few people seem to be finding it. That's too bad because there are numerous methods they could have used to market their store more effectively. Here are a few.

1. EBay Express, assuming you and your listings qualify. EBay provides this check list to help you grow your business on eBay Express. Read it to learn about seller and listing criteria for this eBay venue. If you qualify as an eBay Express seller and want your listings to show there, make sure you follow the specific guidelines.

2. Make sure your items show on Google search and other search engines. Always enable your store listing feed and export your store items regularly to Google Base (go to the google website to find out more). Your items will show up when people search and look at the results on Google Products (formerly called Froogle). You don't have to understand the technical aspect of how this works, but know that it does work and it is an important marketing method that should not be overlooked. Make sure that you are optimizing your items for search engines by using excellent keywords in your store description and in your listing titles.

3. Blogs or other web posts. If you have a blog, or if you ever leave a comment on a blog or if you post on an online forum, put your store link in your signature line if that's allowed. People really do click through on those. The nice thing about having a store is that you have a specific web address. I also recommend that you consider purchasing a domain name that you can use to forward to your store link, something easy for people to remember. In my case, my52cents.com is much easier to remember than http://stores.ebay.com/my52cents. Make yours an appropriate and memorable name. Include it with every blog comment or forum post. Post often, but don't spam post; that's just tacky.

Those are just a few examples. Marketing your eBay store is an important part of having an eBay store. You can depend on the store being found via your auctions, of course, but why not take a few minutes and notch it up a level? All of the methods I mentioned, aside from purchasing the domain name ($10 or less at godaddy.com) are free and easy to accomplish.

By the way, you can track how people find your store by looking at your traffic reports on your "manage my store" page. If you haven't looked at that, you may be very surprised to see where your store traffic is coming from.

These are just a few suggestions and you can find more on eBay, who actually wants your store to succeed, so don't overlook the eBay help section when you're seeking good eBay store marketing advice.

About the Author:

Susan Deppner is a writer and editor, as well as a businessperson with perhaps too many exciting ventures online and off, most notably those involving eBay and Squidoo. You can find her My52cents on eBay - Auction Tips blog at target="_new" href="http://my52cents.blogspot.com">http://my52cents.blogspot.com and her Squidoo lenses at http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/Susan52

Copyright 2007 - Susan B. Deppner - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.