Marketing Strategies

[Guest]

Ebay takes a rather large share of your profit through their fees, both seller fees and store fees (if you have an Ebay store). Therefore, you can make more money having customers buy from your osCommerce shop, rather than through Ebay. Here are some things you can do to get your Ebay customers to switch to your osCommerce shop, thereby saving you from having to pay Ebay fees.

 

1. When you ship an item to your Ebay customer, put your shop name & URL on the packing slip, in a prominent place so the customer can see it. Put some wording on the packing slip telling the customer that you have opened up a website shop for their convenience.

2. Attach a business card, with your shop name and URL on it, to the packing slip.

3. Send your Ebay customers an email, telling them you have opened an osCommerce shop. Give them the URL.

4. In the above email, offer them a discount on a first time purchase through your shop. You can use the Credit Class & Gift Voucher contribution to make a coupon in their name for their use. That way you can easily see when they have used the coupon and possibly send them another.

5. Put your shop name and URL on your Ebay "About Me" page.

6. Have a "bookmark me" link on your website in a prominent place so buyers can easily find you.

 

Ebay is a good start for a lot of sellers and some people are afraid to stray from it. But, Ebay's fees are very high and they cut into your profit. If you can get those customers to buy through your osCommerce shop, the better your profits will be.

 

Good luck making yourself rich, instead of making Ebay richer.

[Joe7]

This is brilliant advice..

 

4. In the above email, offer them a discount on a first time purchase through your shop. You can use the Credit Class & Gift Voucher contribution to make a coupon in their name for their use. That way you can easily see when they have used the coupon and possibly send them another.

[Bntbrl]

I was under the impression that ebay doesnt want you to send sales to your website.

[Guest]

Of course Ebay doesn't want you to take business away from them. However they do have guidelines regarding what you can and cannot do when you sell on Ebay. This thread is about marketing tools and how to market your osCommerce shop on your Ebay About Me page.

 

Here is a quote taken from Ebay which directly relates to the topic at hand:

What links may I have on my About Me page? You may link to your own Web store from your About Me page. However, you may not directly offer any non-eBay merchandise on the About Me page itself.

So, do not put the name of your website on your About Me page; Do Link To It , and, to be on the safe side, call the link "My Web Store" instead of calling it the actual name of your site. And never put your website name on your auctions or anywhere, except as a link on your About Me page.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Good luck and remember, when you sell through your osCommerce shop, you don't pay Ebay fees.

 

Regards,

[Joe7]

I remember changing my eBay username to (for examples sake): 'nameofmystore-com'

 

And I was suspended within 24 hours. So be careful, add the link on the 'About Me' page, and on a business card sent with your products.

[hubcat]

So, do not put the name of your website on your About Me page; Do Link To It , and, to be on the safe side, call the link "My Web Store" instead of calling it the actual name of your site. And never put your website name on your auctions or anywhere, except as a link on your About Me page.

 

I don't see why you would not put your web store name on the About Me page. Nothing in the quote you posted says you can't do that - only that you can't directly offer your merchandise on your About Me page. It seems to me there is a big advantage to putting your web name on the About Me page.

 

Adrienne

[Guest]

This is getting kinda crazy. I would suggest if you question what has been told to you in this thread, you go to Ebay and read their rules for yourself. This thread is not a discussion on Ebay rules. It was merely an attempt to help you find ways to market your osCommerce site to your Ebay customers, thereby bringing customers away from Ebay and to your website, free of Ebay fees.

 

I'd give you a link to Ebay where they state their rules, but this forum has rules as well, which includes no links to outside sources.

 

This is the last time I am going to quote what Ebay says...it is up to you to do your research.

 

The About Me page may not promote outside-of-eBay sales or prohibited items, nor may it contain links to commercial Web sites where goods from multiple sellers are aggregated by a common search engine. See Additional Information to learn more about links from your About Me page.

If you put the name of your website on your About Me page, you are promiting outside-of-Ebay sales. However, you are allowed to put a link to your site, as referenced in an earlier post.

 

Good luck and happy reading.

[Bntbrl]

I'll find out shortly. I put something liek "mysebstore.com offers excellent choices for this or that to make your life easier" et cetera. And I put alittle personal info and feedback feeds I had. It has to be "approved" i suppose, as it is not instantly available.

[nalin]

If you put the name of your website on your About Me page, you are promiting outside-of-Ebay sales. However, you are allowed to put a link to your site, as referenced in an earlier post.

I think "promoting" would be a pretty liberal interpretation, but I guess it would depend on the name of your site.

 

A few more eBay tips:

You can have discreet links on your image page. I use a image page which loads an image from an overloaded url and provides a handful of links relevant to our products, rather than using an image file only.

 

eBay stores allow for cheap cheap listings (in my case ~$.05 for 30 days compared with ~$5.00 for 7 with a normal auction). If your products are not offered on eBay, or are only minimally offered list them in the store as store searches turn up when regular ones provide few or no results. By a large margin our store outsells our auctions.

 

The eBay API (developers.ebay.com) allows for anything that their website does (and then some) except bidding. I am not at liberty to provide code because it has been developed for work, but by using a library such as (pear) Services_Ebay (php5 only, there is a similar library for php4 but its function calls were more akward and it is a commercial product) one can relativly easily replicate the items in their oscommerce shop to an eBay store (or auctions). If your serious about listing on eBay and have some understanding of programming and the oscommerce databases using the API can automate the task (there are interfaces available for many languages besides php).

In our case we have ~150 bestsellers in our eBay store. The code took a few days to hammer out, but relisting once a month with pricing, description, availability, a changed template...whatever...direct from oscommerce takes literally seconds. The api also allows you to do other cool stuff which would be difficult or impossible if manually listing (in my example the multi-auction pictures probably would not work by hand because of the timing necessary).

[Harleypete40]

The easiest way I found to get your ebay visitors to your shop is simply put a link on the description page saying

 

For more products click here

 

Most people interested in what you have got for sale will click on the link anyway.

 

Regards,

Peter

[avail1now]

The easiest way I found to get your ebay visitors to your shop is simply put a link on the description page saying

 

For more products click here

 

Most people interested in what you have got for sale will click on the link anyway.

 

Regards,

Peter

 

Not sure this is the right place to ask this, but how can you use products in osCommerce database to dynamically feed an ebay auction template and upload those auctions using ebay TurboLister

 

any working examples would be a great help..

 

thx,deano

[a12c4magic]

1. When you ship an item to your Ebay customer, put your shop name & URL on the packing slip, in a prominent place so the customer can see it. Put some wording on the packing slip telling the customer that you have opened up a website shop for their convenience.

2. Attach a business card, with your shop name and URL on it, to the packing slip.

 

Another idea would be to invest in some of the Royal Mails smilers and have your shop name and url printed on an actual stamp and then whenever you post anything you'll also be advertising your business.

 

With Smilers, you can get your own face, or that of your best mate, mum, grandma, family pooch or anyone else for that matter, on your own set of customised stamps.

 

http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/shop?ca...duct=prod350007

[♥auctionblox]

The easiest way I found to get your ebay visitors to your shop is simply put a link on the description page saying

 

For more products click here

 

Most people interested in what you have got for sale will click on the link anyway.

 

Don't do the above. Your listing will be cancelled by eBay and repeat offenders will have their account cancelled.

[doni]

What would be wrong in saying in your ebay listings : if you have any queries, please feel free to email me at [email protected]?

[Harleypete40]

Don't do the above. Your listing will be cancelled by eBay and repeat offenders will have their account cancelled.

 

 

Funny, I have been listing with a link like that for about 2 years continuously, and have not had 1 listing cancelled. They will cancel as soon as you put the URL to your site, but as long as the URL is not there, i.e. myshop.com they leave you alone.

 

At least that is my experience

[Guest]

Does any one know a quick way of transfering items from an Ebay store to an OsCommerce site? Ive got just over 500 to transfer.

 

Many Thanks

[dslayer2]

Funny, I have been listing with a link like that for about 2 years continuously, and have not had 1 listing cancelled. They will cancel as soon as you put the URL to your site, but as long as the URL is not there, i.e. myshop.com they leave you alone.

 

At least that is my experience

 

According to eBay, auctionblox is correct. I put "For additional products, click here." and made it a link to my site. Two days after posting the product, I got an email from eBay stating the listing was in violation of the inappropriate links policy. They immediately removed the item. So take your chances if you like, but you will be risking the removal of your item and losing your listing fees.