Getting Traffic to Your Store

Search engine optimizing your E-bay store

This is a step skipped by many due to lack of knowledge, but it is very important. Let's think about how we can rank well in search engines with our new E-bay Store:

• If you sell on E-bay, open your store, but choose the store's name carefully - it goes in your title tag so be sure to use a keyword.
  • The title tag is something that search engines use to show your store in search results.
  • A keyword is what people will type into a search box if they are looking for products you will be selling. For example: If you sell car stereo products, a good search engine friendly name for your store would be "Johns Car Stereo"
• Having a few hundred items in your e Bay store gives you a huge number of inbound links.
  • Links that point to your store greatly improve your Google search ranking.
• Your store department names should be keywords.
  • For example: If your car stereo store sells sub-woofers, you should name that category "car stereo sub-woofers" etc.
• Build an "about me" page that has links to each major department of your store. Links from your "about me" page are allowed but you are not allowed to link out from your listings.
  • Contact us if you need help with this one.
• DO NOT put outbound links in your E bay store.
  • Links that take people away from your store and to a different site hurt your rankings.

Search engines like Google use a computer called a "Robot" that "Spiders" the web looking at web pages and then indexes them to appear in their searches. It can take up to 2-3 months for the robot to find your E-bay Store, so remember, business is only going to get better.

Driving E-bay traffic to your store

You need to list auctions in order to drive traffic to your E-bay store. Listing auctions costs a little more money than the store listings and they are only run for 3-10 days. They are needed however, because this is the best and fastest way for customers to find you and your great new store. We suggest you start by listing 10-20 of the items that you feel are most likely to sell. It's no fun to spend your profit on listing fees but it is easily avoidable. However just because an item doesn't sell the first time you list it, don't decide to never list it again. If you sell an item once every 2-3 times you list it, you are doing great. Try changing the category or the title on an item that isn't selling as well as you think it should, sometimes this makes a world of difference. Once you find the items that are selling, continue adding more items to auction. The items that are not selling too well, just leave them in your store. After all, it is only costing you $.02 a month. Even if you only sell one every three months, you're still making a profit on it and the work has already been done anyway. Listing items in an auction is done the same way as listing in your store except you choose "Sell item at online Auction" or "Sell at a Fixed Price" instead of "Sell in Store Inventory". You may also create auctions directly from your store inventory - In the Items I'm Selling view of My E-bay, click on "Send to Online Auction" or "Send to Fixed Price" from the Action drop-down for the Store Inventory item you want to send.

When you get your store running smoothly and your auctions are all set up and doing well, you can open a new account and a new store targeting a different line of products. Because of how easy it is to run a drop-shipping E-bay Store, you can easily handle 2-3 stores. So when your ready, just start back over at Step One.

Let's take a look at shipping.