Simplx Blog

eBay stores are eBay’s version of an independent online webstore. An eBay store is a series of customizable pages, hosted on eBay, where you can post a special type of extended-duration, fixed price auction. In essence, you populate your store with a variety of Buy it Now products.

In some ways, an eBay store is sort of like a really elaborate MyWorld page. You have a certain level of control over its appearance and content, and you can add modules and features to it to give visitors access to your products. Listings on an eBay store have lower insertion fees and longer durations, but the Final Value Fees are quite a bit higher than the ones for a typical auction.

The Types of eBay Store
There are three different levels of eBay store, each with progressively higher monthly fees but also additional features and greater customizability. Even the basic store is not intended for amateur eBay users however; we don’t suggest signing up for an eBay store until you are making a strong number of regular sales per month. But, for users who are making a consistently high number of sales, eBay stores can significantly increase revenue.

Basic
Basic stores are the simplest to set up and use, but offer limited reporting and marketing tools. They are also relatively inexpensive, making them a good choice for hobbyists and part-timers.

Premium
A Premium store adds features for tracking your sales and gives you more advanced tools for marketing. Owners of Premium stores also have access to 24-hour-a-day technical support. These are a good choice for someone who is an established presence on eBay and is selling on eBay as a career.

Anchor
Anchor stores are meant for the most advanced, high-volume sellers. The subscription fees for having this store (before Insertion and Final Value fees) are over $3,600 a year, and many of the features are too advanced to be helpful for casual users.

More information about the three types of eBay store subscription is available here.

Store Inventory Format
Probably the single biggest reason to open an eBay store is access to the Store Inventory Format for your listings. Store Inventory Format behaves very much like Fixed Price Format; the buyer does not bid against other buyers for the item being listed, but simply agrees to purchase a certain quantity at a “Buy it Now” price. Store Inventory Format listings can also have significantly longer duration than normal listings. In fact, they can have a duration of as much as 30 days.

The Insertion Fee for Store Inventory Format doesn’t change with the quantity of items listed. That means the fee will be the same for listing a thousand of a particular item as it would be for listing one. Incidentally, Store Inventory Format cannot be used for items that have a price of less than $1.00.

Additionally, Store Inventory Format has a unique option available called GTC. GTC stands for “Good ‘Till Canceled,” meaning that GTC listings will automatically renew until the seller either cancels them. This allows you to have a particular item continuously available for sale, while paying the lowest possible Insertion Fee every month for doing so. GTC listings won’t stop auto-renewing until the quantity of items in the listing drops to zero or you cancel the listing.

Store Inventory Format does have its disadvantages, however. First and foremost, items listed for sale in an eBay store do not have the same visibility that standard auctions do. Listings that use Store Inventory Format don’t come up in an eBay search unless one of two things happen:

The potential customer specifically searches for results in eBay Stores (most don’t)
The search returns fewer than 30 results (very uncommon)
That means the vast majority of potential customers won’t even see listings in your store when they do a normal search, even if they are searching for exactly the product you carry. How does anyone ever sell things from their eBay store?

Getting Customers into your eBay Store
The thing to remember about Store Inventory Format is that, for the most part, it relies on getting potential customers into your store so that they can browse your products. Most of the time, successful eBay store owners do this by running a few standard auctions of their hottest items while keeping other items up for sale in their store. When potential customers are already considering bidding on those listings, they often tend to visit the seller’s eBay store to see if they can find other interesting deals.

This is where Niche Marketing fits into the equation. Successful eBay stores sell items that are related in some way, so that customers who visit the store through another listing find themselves in a place full of other things they might want to buy. This is where your potential customers will find related products that they never would have searched for on their own, because they didn’t even know about them!

Conclusion
eBay stores aren’t a benefit for every eBay seller, but they can be a powerful tool for those who are in a position to take advantage of them. Furthermore, managing an eBay store is excellent practice for managing an online business outside of eBay—many of the same procedures and techniques apply.

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