Why should open an eBay shopOne of the questions that I’m asked incredibly frequently when it comes to eBay selling businesses is what the benefit is of opening an eBay shop. Although it’s true that there are additional fees when it comes to setting up a shop, and that some sellers spend an age working out a cost-benefit analysis to calculate the point when it becomes worthwhile to move to setting up a shop, I personally think it’s worthwhile no matter how much you are selling. If you are serious about making extra money from selling online, then you should consider setting up a shop whether you have one, or ten, or ten hundred items for sale.

ebay shop

There’s a great benefit that comes with eBay shops and that’s to do with the direct links to the products that you have for sale. If you have to keep relisting items each time a listing ends or you run out of stock for a couple of days then you need to update links to those items on any other website with which you might be advertising your wares. With an eBay shop however, those links are permanent, so whether they’re on Facebook, Twitter, in an article you’ve written or on your own website, they all permanently point to the products that you have for sale.

More than that, you’re also directing visitors to everything that you have for sale, not just one item which would be the case if you were sending a person to one specific listing. You’ll be able to engage your audience with a link to an item that they are interested in, and then keep them entice them to look at the rest of the goods you have for sale. If all of the products in your shop are in the same niche market you could make some great additional sales here of similar items.

Hopefully I’m making you see that eBay shops are definitely a good idea, so here’s something to consider once you’ve set up your shop, or something to implement right now if you’ve already done so!

This little advanced eBay shops strategy will help your listings to be noticed more successfully by search engines, by incorporating keywords relevant to the products that you have for sale within the item listings. It’s all to do with the way that your shop’s categories are ordered and displayed, and with just a few small changes you could soon start to see dramatically more traffic taking a look at the products that you have for sale.

Why don’t you take a moment to have a look at some successful PowerSeller eBay shops and look at the way the categories are organised within their shops? Unlike some novice sellers, you will soon start to see that there are a multitude of different categories and subcategories used to sort items into very specific areas.

ebay shop 2

The reason for this great multitude of subcategories is all to do with a term called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. This is a process of driving visitors toward your eBay listings by helping your pages to be more friendly and accessible to search engines. More traffic will equal more sales, and so you should look to set your own eBay shop up in a similar way.

How?

By following these three very simple steps:

1.       Click on Seller and then Manage Shop, which you will find located at the bottom of your main shop page.

2.       Click on Listing Frame, located on the left hand side of the page within the Shop Marketing section.

3.       Select the radio button option that says ‘Shop header and left-navigation category list (first 30 categories that contain items)’ and then click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.

In those three simple steps you have now activated the category display within your eBay shop. It’ll help visitors to navigate around the items that you have for sale, but more than that it will help to increase traffic to your sales pages. How? Because of the very details subcategories that you should now put into place.

The subcategories within your shop should be packed full of the keywords that your customers will use to search for the very items that you have for sale. Product brand names, keyword descriptions and more will certainly come into this, and many of the subcategories may be similar to keywords that you’re already using within your listing titles. By incorporating these keywords within your subcategories and including them on all of your listing pages, search engines such as Google will be able to tell really easily exactly what you’re offering, and will therefore prioritise your listing pages within its search engine results.

Let’s take a look at an example. If the niche of your eBay shop is sporting goods and you sell items such as T-Shirts, Baseball Caps and Running Shoes, then some of your main categories may be ‘T-Shirts’, ‘Baseball Caps’ and ‘Running Shoes’, but then your subcategories will be more specific, featuring titles such as ‘Adidas T-Shirt’, or ‘Nike Running Shoes’. A visitor looking at your T-Shirts may see a category list that looks something like:

T-Shirts

  • Adidas T-Shirts
  • Nike T-Shirts
  • Puma T-Shirts

Your job is to create keyword rich subcategories for every category with your eBay shop, and then to sort the items that you have for sale into those categories. With your categories displayed on every page, you’ll also find your important keywords displayed on every page; something vitally important for raising your profile with the search engines.

ebay shop 3

If this is something that you haven’t yet put into place then I strongly recommend you take some time to do so. eBay lets you choose up to 300 different product categories, so there is plenty of scope to play around with different keywords to see which of your listings start to receive more views and make more sales.