Friday 12 October 2012

eBay becoming a waste of time for some online sellers

While eBay has been the most popular online marketplace for buyers and sellers to exchange goods, with increasing prices and restrictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any eBay store to make a steady profit. 

One of the major problems for online stores within eBay is becoming the increasing amount of advertisements to other stores that are appearing not only on the search areas of the site, but also the listing pages of specific item products. 

eBay sellers spend a substantial amount of time tailoring their items, making sure the titles are correct, the image is of a good quality and they item contains an informative description that gives a customer all the information they may require before making a purchase. Not to mention the amount a seller pays in listing fees for each of their products and if they have thousands of products in their online store, it is going to cost them a lot to list the products. It all adds up to substantial amount of time and effort on the part of the seller in order to try and make sales each month. Now it would seem that the job is becoming even harder to turn that initial customer interest into a sale with the 'See what other people are watching' section at the bottom of the listing page. Basically, this gives the customer a look at other products that are also available to purchase from different stores that are similar to the item you are viewing. 

Basically this is eBay saying 'Okay, so you like this type of product? why not purchase this instead?' If you are the person whose items appear in this bottom section, you may like this concept because basically customers are viewing your products without you having to do any real work. However, if you are the store owner who's listing page this has appeared on, your essentially paying your listing fee and spending time tailoring the content, only for eBay's ad to pop up and attempt to direct the customer to go elsewhere. 

I tested this out using a random search for a canvas wardrobe, selecting the first result I came across. When scrolling to the bottom of the listing page I found what I was looking for: 


Now I can kind of understand that from eBay's perspective you want all customers to have the best possible shopping experience they can, so providing them with more options in terms of what to purchase is going to give them a more enjoyable experience. However, as online stores pay a listing fee to have their items placed within eBay, it is only right that they expect that a customer should be entirely focussed on their product when they do actually view the listing page. Not to mention the fact that some listing fees are different meaning one seller may have paid more for the listing than another, but still have their listing devalued by advertisements appearing within it. 

These little additions are only serving to annoy a number of eBay store owners, resulting in them considering closing their store altogether as it is no longer a profitable enterprise.

So what are the alternatives?


If you are an online seller growing fed up with the increasing fees and restrictions placed on eBay, you can look to break away from eBay, but still sell online through your own ecommerce store. We at eSellution are currently offering all of our customers a free ecommerce store, which allows you to sell not only on your own  store website, but also have Facebook store and mobile store. You can list as many products as you like without having to worry about paying any fees whatsoever. If you are looking to break away from the restrictions of eBay, this is the answer. Get your free ecommerce store now. 

The software is easy to use and literally allows you to set everything up and begin selling in seconds. If all of your products are only on eBay, you can integrate your eBay store to your ecommerce store and transfer all of your products from eBay to the store in minutes.

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