eBay is continuously trying to optimize their platform not only for the buyers but also for the sellers. The sellers, indeed, in order to grow and reach their goals, must use a platform appropriate to cope with their needs, as to increase: the notoriety of the shop, traffic on their listings and, most of all, the incomes from their shop.
In order to take advantage of the marketplace, each seller should use - or at least know - the tools offered by eBay to differentiate an occasional seller to a professional one.
At this proposal, I gathered some pieces of advice to optimize your permanence in the marketplace, from SEO to email marketing.
eBay shop settings to optimize your business
- The graphic look of your eBay shop represents your business and your brand: decide which layout is better to show your business style not forgetting the perspective of your final user. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes, think at their age, gender and interests. Having a professional business could be fundamental to increase sales and gain trust among your clients.
- In addition to the default categories on eBay, you can customize your own categories if you have an eBay shop. That could be useful to those who are surfing in your shop.
- The spaces for promotions can be used in your shop’s pages to promote items or to add personalized links to redirect to a specific category, to a personalized page of your shop or to subscribe the newsletter.
- the eBay RSS feed allows to the search engines, to the users and to the ones who subscribed to receive automatic update about the listings. You can enable this option in your Seller Center, among the marketing tools. Then, you will see a footnote tag RSS in your shop. Send price update or other offers.
- The Marketing emails can be used successfully to keep in touch with your clients. Predefined email are shown under the button “create email” in email marketing section. Create lists of the recipients and send them communications. Pay attention: they don’t have to be sent close one to another. Your clients could be annoyed.
- Use leaflets or coupons inside your package as retention tool. In this way, you will stand out among the other sellers. You can use Promotional leaflets from your shop’s marketing tool.
- Use the Promotional shipping tool to set discount, promotions and related article packs.
- The Seller Hub (My eBay > Sales > Marketing) is a useful tool to check your business trend. With datas in your hands you can make more conscious choices about the purpose of the Promotions Manager tool. Here you can also find the Promoted listing tool.
Beyond your policies inside the eBay shop, there are some other activities you can do:
- Once you have a homepage, you can buy a corresponding domain with your ID or eBay shop’s name. A web link can be useful to be reached easily in the search engines and gain positions. Once that your articles will gain a good position on Google, you should see an increase in sales.
- The more you know about the products you sell, the better you can do as a seller. How to show competence? Create a second level domain with a blog (es blog.yourshop.com) as a container for your articles. Add a link to your eBay shop where possible: if your visits will increase thanks to valuable contents, the search engines will repay your shop with a little push.