After almost a year of having an eBay store I have found the benefits to be more than I could have imagined. Along the way I have discovered a few strategies that have worked well not only in selling outside of my store but on how to drive people to it. I have been asked by others who are thinking about a store or are struggling with theirs to give them any tips I might have. After sharing my ideas I thought I would write this guide about it. The information will be based on my store and experiences, but I know that there are those who can apply the same ideas regardless of the types of items you are selling.

My favorite benifit is the ability to have store inventory.  Having a store allows you to keep a large inventory of items available at all times. It is very reasonable to list them there if you list with none of the extras. I usually use a gallery photo. For .03 cents for 30 days  (.01 for the insertion fee + .02 for the gallery fee) you can always keep items in stock and ready for your buyers.(with the fee hike prices are higher but still a good deal if you carry a small inventory) 

TIP: I never send any store inventory items to online auction or to a fixed price. This way they will always remain in your store where you can add to the number of available items when they start selling off.  Lets say I start with 10 prints in my store of "Lavender Floral". After a few months if I only have 2 left in my store I just revise the listing and change the available number back to 10 and keep it going. An important thing about this is you get to see, over a long period of time, how many hits each item is getting, helping you further your marking strategies.

Along with Store Inventory you get easier management of your listings. 

Having a store allows you to create store categories. When you do this all of your listings are much easier to manage in My eBay. (See above graphics) Your My eBay page will now have a drop down window where you can choose any store category and you will have all of those items at your finger tips. This comes in handy if you want to make revisions to one particular set of items. No more scrolling until you find what you are looking for. Add to that the format dropdown window and you can further narrow your search. Not sure how many items you have listed in a category? Right above the store category name is the number of items in that category. Another way of helping keep track of your inventory.

Now for exposure to my store. As I stated in my TIP about store inventory, I will make a new listing and leave the store listings alone.  These listings will be used outside of my store at a fixed price. I list them at different days and times to keep them showing up. To drive people to my store I will build a link to another item in my store within the item description. (see graphic below) 

In my case, if I have the original painting of a print I am selling, I will create a link to that item. You can build your link to any item and hopefully it will bring buyers into your store.

Another way of increasing exposure to your store is to list your item in more than one category.  TIP:  Don't use the add a second category option when making your listing. Create a completely separate listing in the other category you want to list in, this costs the same and has several benifits.

• If you have entered the number of available items as 5, using the second category option will put you in another category but still leave you with only 5 items available. Making a seperate listing for the new category will now give you 10 available items. Since adding a second category doubles your listing fee, you might as well just create a new listing  for the second category & have twice the amount of items available for sale.
• Another good reason to do this is you can stagger the listing times. Put your item in a second category an hour or a day later. The more items you have listed in different places and at different times the better the chances of getting noticed.
• Probably my favorite reason to do it this way is you can see which category is getting more hits.  When you use the add a second category feature the hits from both categories are combined. Creating a seperate listing lets you see if one category is more productive than the other for getting your item seen.

Custom pages: Another benifit of having a store and a tool for greater exposure.

Having a store allows you to create custom pages in your store. Not only can you build links to other store items but you can build them to store pages also! The above graphic shows a link I built in the description of an item I am selling. There is a bit of a story about this item and I created a custom page about it. Clicking on the link not only takes people to the page (see graphic below) it brings them into your store where they can see the other wonderful items you have to offer them!

Having an eBay store  gave me the affordable tools I needed to build a brand image, keep items in stock & gave my customers greater access to me and my products.