Why Would You Want to Sell from an eBay Store Instead of from Auctions?

An eBay Store offers a few advantages over eBay Auctions. First of all, it’s cheaper to list your items (2 cents for a 30 day listing) and many of the “listing upgrades” like gallery and subtitle are also cheaper. An eBay storefront also lets you list your items for 30, 60, 90 or 120 days or even Good ‘Til Cancelled. When you’re listing in auctions, 10 days is the longest you can list an item for.

If you sell the same items on an ongoing basis, or have a lot of one item to sell, a Store will be much easier to manage. It will track your inventory for you, so you can list as many as you like for a longer time and you don’t have to keep relisting every time you sell something. It can be a lot less time consuming than relisting your item on e Bay auctions.

Another big advantage of a store on e-Bay is its cross-merchandising features. You can set up multiple items that are related to each other and when someone buys one, it will suggest the other items as add-ons. For example, if you’re selling a digital camera in your store, you could cross-merchandise memory cards, cases or batteries. The auction listings on eBay don’t have any way of doing this.

Another helpful thing about a Store is it has a fixed URL. When you set up a store, you will have an internet address (stores.ebay.com/yourstore) that you can print on your business cards, add to your email signature or promote however you want. Each auction listing has a unique address that changes from one listing to another.

A Store on eBay Does Have Some Disadvantages Compared to Auctions or Other Online Stores

The items you list in an e-Bay Shop do not normally show up in the standard searches. When someone searches for an item on the eBay site, the only way your store items will show up in the search is if there are less than 10 auctions that match the search. This means you need to list auctions as well if you’re selling through a store on eBay so people can find your items with a regular search.

When you open a Store, you can set up your own categories within the store and your own design (logo, layout, etc.) but it still basically looks like the eBay websites and is fairly limited compared to some other online stores. With Yahoo Stores, for example, you can design the look of the store from the ground up, so you can make it match your existing website design, or any other layout you wish.

Lots of people are very successful on eBay selling from a store, but it depends on what you’re selling and how you list your auctions. If any of the following apply to you, it would be worth looking into an e-Bay Store in more detail:

• You list the same items over and over
• You have a large quantity of an item
• You don’t want to have to relist your auctions every 5-10 days
• You want to have a fixed URL for your eBay listings
• You sell related items that you want to cross-merchandise to your buyers

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