Make Money from eBay
Since college entrepreneurs like us are confined to classrooms and dorm rooms, we don’t have the time or funds to set up brick and mortar stores. If you’re already in the business of selling stuff from your dorm room, an eBay store can help you get more customers and sell more of your products. Here’s why:
An eBay store has a greater chance of exposure and promotion. This is because eBay has a vast number of members all over the globe. Promotional tools such as eBay’s cross-promotion features can help you publicize the sale of your products. There are even keyword tools and email marketing tools to help you spread the word about the products featured in your eBay store. You can even apply search engine optimization techniques to your eBay store.
Oh, and I almost missed an important fact - eBay conducts more searches in a day than Google. And these searches are more targeted, because they’re product searches. This means that the people doing the searching are ready to buy.
It’s also relatively inexpensive to create your own eBay store.The basic fee is less than $16.00 and that comes along with a unique URL. You can use this URL to show your store to other people, even if they aren’t eBay members. While it’s preferable that you have your own website outside of eBay, you can easily run the business-side of things with an eBay store.
The administrative tools that you get with your eBay store such as sales reports and accounting tools can definitely help you run your eBay store more efficiently. If you don’t have the time to manage your eBay store (especially during midterms or finals), you don’t have to worry – it’s that easy to maintain.
Transacting business through an eBay store tends to be more secure. If you’re running an online store outside of eBay, some “shady” customers who don’t want to make legitimate purchases can get in touch with you. Member ratings and user comments allow you to look at member testimonials so you can find out how trustworthy a buyer is. Be careful of conducting business with eBay members with low ratings and who have comments such as “does not pay” (If I have to explain why, you shouldn’t be in college)
eBay now has a social networking feature. That’s right, eBay caught the Web 2.0 bug. This is a great way to build up loyal clientele and get referrals. I’ve yet to test it myself, but using this as a marketing tool will probably be similar to how it works via MySpace or Facebook.
All in all, if an eBay store is created and designed to look professional, it can have a lot of success. Whether you’re using it as a major source of income for product sales, or you’re using it to drive traffic to your site, a little work on eBay can go a long way.
Related Articles:
- Selling on eBay
- Sell Stuff On eBay
- Starting A Business with Zero Money
- Defining Your Big Payoff and How to Get There (Part 2)
- How to select your niche
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Setting up a store on ebay is in some cases cheaper and easier than building your own ecommerce store elsewhere if you don’t know what you are doing, also like you said, you really get a chance to feed off of ebays massive traffic with an ebay store and list your items in the store format for cheaper. It has its benefits, the only thing I would say to anyone thinking about opening an ebay store is that you really need to brand it and take it seriously if you want it to do well.