Let’s take a close look at what eBay auctions and Stores do for you. They each do something different, and they complement each other. And they are both inexpensive compared to other online retailing opportunities.

eBay Auctions

eBay auctions enable you to sell items one at a time. Assuming you have different items, they will be spread all over eBay auctions into their requisite categories. As Gertrude Stein once said about an American city she considered boring, “There’s no there there.” Indeed, there is no sense that the eBay auction seller is a retail organization that exists someplace.

Because eBay auctions enables you to sell only one item per auction (or multiples of one item at one time), such auctions are not necessarily conducive to selling additional items to new buyers and existing customers. Consequently, it’s up to you to do something to make your retail presence felt in eBay auctions.

Perhaps the best thing you can do is to run so many repeat auctions in the categories in which you sell products that it seems like you’re always there. This gives the illusion of having a presence in eBay auctions. Certainly this works for many kinds of businesses that make repeat sales of the same products day in and day out. Even those businesses, however, can get lost in pages and pages of items listed for sale on eBay auctions. If your strategy is to create a presence, you will do well to time your auctions so that they are spread over all of the listing pages of identical products being sold on eBay auctions. For instance, if you group them all together, they may appear on page 6 but on none of the other 14 pages of products eBay auctions generates for that type of product.

With this strategy you have to have your products spread out over the eBay auction pages day in and day out, 365 days a year, to maintain your presence in cyber world.

For those that don’t have products that they sell each day repeatedly but rather sell only occasionally, this strategy doesn’t work very well. Another way you can enhance your marketing and establish something of a presence on eBay is to cross-sell. You can do this with a cross-selling device (panel) provided by eBay or another auction management services such as Andale. You can also do it by referring people to your other eBay auctions. eBay automatically lists all of your other auctions that you’re currently running and will show such auctions if a buyer clicks on a link. This has some effect in establishing the illusion of your presence in eBay.

What is the great advantage of eBay auctions? The buyers are there. If you have the product, they have the money. A transaction is imminent.

eBay Stores

An eBay Store is different. It is a presence not only on eBay but also on the Web. It provides you with a permanent catalog of the products you sell. Unlike an eBay auction where you have to schedule your products and be careful how they are timed, with an eBay store you just put them in a catalog and they are available 24 hours a day for as long as you’re willing to pay to have them there. Perhaps the prime difference between eBay auctions and eBay Stores is that everyone uses eBay auctions. Not so many people use eBay Stores. They are two different systems. When you look for products in eBay auctions you do not find products in eBay Stores (with some exceptions).

The reverse is not true. All of your current auctions are listed in your eBay Store. eBay Stores comprise a huge Web mall. Web malls have never been very popular. Nonetheless, eBay Stores are becoming a popular Web mall for two reasons. First, they have the eBay brand which is very powerful. Second, you can use eBay auctions to market your eBay Store.

I would never advise anyone to operate an eBay Store without also putting products up for auction on eBay, too. Because eBay auctions are more popular than eBay Stores, you need to have a presence in eBay auctions in order to lure people to your eBay Store.

The question is, How do you do this? Well, eBay does something for you. It gives you a red tag icon in all of your auctions on which your buyers can click to go to your eBay Store. That’s nice, but it’s not enough. You need to continually direct people to your eBay Store from your eBay auctions. That means specifically putting links in your eBay auction ads which take people to your eBay Store. The link might read something like this, “Visit my eBay Store for a larger selection.” So, it is quite clear to me that the way eBay auctions complement eBay Stores is through directing potential buyers to the latter. The other question is, How do eBay Stores complement eBay auctions? The answer is simply that an eBay Store gives you a presence on the Web, a more concrete illusion of being an ongoing and responsible online retailer. It also provides you with opportunities to sell products to prospective buyers who are specifically looking for those types of products.

Unfortunately, eBay Stores don’t work so well by themselves yet. Undoubtedly, someday eBay Stores will be as popular, or perhaps more popular, than eBay auctions. When that happens, it will be another reason for you to have an eBay Store.

The Datafeed Duo

eBay auction ads and eBay Store ads can come from the same database. Indeed, eBay’s Turbo Lister or Andale’s Lister Pro, typical listing databases, will send a datafeed to either eBay auctions or eBay Stores, or both. Consequently, in the world of datafeed marketplaces for eBay retail businesses, eBay auctions and eBay Stores are the first two datafeed marketplaces to which you will send your products.

An eBay Store as Your Website

An eBay Store gives you a unique URL (Web address) which, in effect, belongs to you as long as you maintain and pay for your Store on eBay. This is much easier and less expensive than establishing your own independent website. In addition, you have built-in eBay traffic which would take a huge amount of marketing (e.g., getting found by the search engines) on the Web to duplicate. In my opinion, most eBay retail businesses will not find establishing an independent website to be a cost-effective way of doing business on the Web. At least, not as long as they can have an eBay Store instead. An eBay Store gives you most of the good characteristics of a viable ecommerce storefront. It gives you a place, and more importantly, a place where there’s traffic. It gives you a storefront look. It gives you a catalog of products. And it gives you a checkout mechanism. The checkout mechanism, of course, includes payment choices. You’ve got it all on with an eBay Store. Or do you?

The primary shortcoming of an eBay Store, as I see it, is the lack of capability to add content to your retail website. An eBay Store is pretty straightforward and does not provide you with the opportunity to add the kind of content you might add if you had an independent website. Content is a huge attractor which helps sell merchandise. Content also provides, or helps provide, great customer service. I see content as being an essential part of every retail business. In many cases, a business that cannot provide content on the Web is less than the best it can be.

Content

Content can consist of tutorials, reports, articles, checklists, and useful links. In short, content is useful information relevant to what you sell.

Even simple straightforward content such as how to use, clean, repair, and protect your products is better than nothing. Now to provide those four things on your website you may simply put links to a manufacturer ’s website. This does not mean that you have not provided content. Indeed, you have provided the content necessary to customer satisfaction just a click away. Customers certainly can’t complain about that. What they can complain about is the lack of that information being readily available to them.

Some products are more complicated than others. For instance, if you sell chess sets, you may want to inform people how to care for them, clean them, and repair them when they get broken. This instruction will be straightforward and undoubtedly short. In other words, it’s not a great deal of content. Nonetheless, it’s content that helps customers use your products and shows them that you care.

On the other hand, if you sell radio-controlled self-powered model airplanes, there is a huge amount of basic information that you can give your customers on how to maintain and repair such a product. After all, it includes a high-tech radio controller and a motor as well as a fuselage with operational wings and stabilizers. Consequently, until eBay offers you substantial capability towards customizing your eBay Store into what will compare favorably with an independent website, you may have to resort to offering your content in a different place.

Note that in both of the examples above, there is a second level of information that can be valuable to your customers and provide you with an opportunity to offer more content or even sell content. For example, chess players will want to learn how to play chess better. Give them a tutorial on playing chess or sell them a book on the same topic. Hobbists will want to learn how to control their model airplanes skillfully and put the planes through flying maneuvers. Give them a tutorial on flying or sell them a book on the same topic.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Is it cost-effective to run eBay auctions? You bet! This is the heart and soul of your marketing effort. eBay auctions are ultimately costeffective. But a word to the wise here. eBay auctions are only costeffective if you use an auction management service. You cannot keep yourself well-enough organized to provide good customer service without the use of proper software.

Are eBay Stores cost-effective? A second, You bet! An eBay Store is inexpensive, similar to eBay auctions, handled by the same auction management service you use for eBay auctions, and provides a presence not only on eBay but on the Web too. As I hope I made clear in this article, however, you must use eBay auctions to drive traffic to your eBay Store to make it as successful as it can be.

The combination of eBay auctions and an eBay Stores is made even more cost-effective by the idea of the datafeed. Your products are in your database (e.g., Turbo Lister, Lister Pro). You can feed the data to eBay auctions and you can feed the data to an eBay Stores. Voila! Your products will magically appear in each place. Thus, the datafeed is the key to cost-effectiveness in jointly operating both eBay auctions and an eBay Store.