5 Strategies for Marketing Your eBay Store

There are a lot of options for marketing your eBay Store. Not all are worth the effort. In fact, many will suck up days of work and hundreds of dollars in costs without bringing in one sale.

Pictured below: an eBay Store in the wild.

These five strategies for eBay Store promotion won’t waste your time and money. Some are dead certain to work, some are cheap and easy, and some are excellent in specific situations. You don’t need to use all of them—just the ones that work for you.

1. Dominate Search Results & Grouped Listings

This seller has won “our pick” from eBay. That means they’ve conquered grouped listings for this item and maximized the number of shoppers who will visit their Store.

Start by focusing on the health of your listings and your seller account. Every eBay seller must master the basics of eBay SEO and grouped listings to stand a chance.

• Match each new listing to the eBay catalog whenever possible.
• Master the arts of taking photos and writing product descriptions for eBay.
• Price competitively, and make good use of pricing psychology and other eBay pricing techniques.
• Become an eBay Top Rated Seller and take advantage of Top Rated Plus.
• Offer Guaranteed Delivery anytime you can.
• Blow customers’ minds with the quality of your customer service.

These are the foundations of making money on eBay. Some may not seem important today, but the shift to product-based shopping will make them increasingly critical throughout 2019 and beyond.

If you use these techniques, you’ll expose your Store to more of the people who matter most: the eBay shoppers who already like your products. Only a small percentage will click through from your listings to your Store. But, with a ton of people visiting your listings, that small percentage will add up.

2. Use the Promotions Manager

eBay gives you some awesome tools for marketing your Store, and one of the best is the Promotions Manager. This lets you offer deals visible to anyone browsing the search results. And even better, customers can choose to only view listings with deals.

These deals are also visible to anyone browsing your Store.

Promotions can be great for pulling in some quick views. And if customers like one deal, they may check out your Store to see what else you’re offering. Then they may see your other promos and make several purchases at once.

Won’t Deals Hurt My Margins?

Not necessarily! You can also use volume discounts, like those shown above, to encourage larger purchases. Scale the discount with the size of the order. That way, you can keep profits respectable while providing a meaningful bargain.

You can also use tricks like raising your price for a short time before cutting it back to your original price as a “deal.” However, the higher sales from offering a real bargain can pay for themselves.

This sales boost won’t disappear once you end the deal. A recent history of high sales will improve your eBay search rankings. That way, you’ll keep selling more (and getting more Store visitors) even if you return your price to normal later.

3. Include Package Inserts

An easy way to encourage eBay buyers to return to your Store is to include a package insert of some kind, such as a flyer or business card. You can easily use this to promote your Store. eBay explicitly allows you to include a link to your Store in buyer communications, and you may be able to coax back some return customers this way.

However, it is worth noting that many sellers use this opportunity to promote their own website instead. Whether this violates eBay policy is not entirely clear. We’ll let you make your own decision.

Whichever route you take, there’s one thing almost every seller agrees on: include a handwritten note! Even if it’s just “Thanks” and your signature, this reminder that you’re a real person goes a long way toward establishing a relationship. You need a relationship if you want people to come back to your Store.

4. Create a Newsletter

Not every buyer will follow your Store. Those who do, though, have given you permission to send them marketing emails. You’d be crazy not to make use of that!

Use eBay’s email marketing tools to reach out to buyers who have subscribed. You can send out up to one newsletter every week, but it doesn’t have to be that frequent.

If you’re going to produce a newsletter, make sure it provides value. That doesn’t just mean tell them all your deals. Do your best to be entertaining and informative. For example, you can offer tips on using the items you sell, or tell the story of how your product was created.

In other words, nurture the relationship with your customer.

You can and should feature your products and special offers. Just be careful not to drive your followers into unsubscribing with a constant hail of promotions.

5. Go Off-Site

You should do everything you can to win over eBay shoppers. But what about pulling in people from other parts of the web? Many an eBay seller uses the following strategies to promote their Store:

• Share it on social media.
• Buy a domain name and redirect it to their Store.
• Build links to their Store or domain name from other websites.
• Write blog posts that link to their Store.
• Advertise through third parties like Google Ads.
• Try to rank on the search engines.

These can work. Yet, you might not want to use them to market your eBay Store.

Why? First, because the same techniques could drive the same amount of traffic to an ecommerce website of your own. You could then avoid eBay’s fees and marketing constraints. That’s usually a better use of your off-eBay marketing efforts.

These are also difficult and time-consuming strategies. Unless done well, the results they produce will be tiny for the effort they take.

When Should You Try Marketing Your eBay Store on the Web?

These techniques can be worth the time and effort in the right situation. Use them when you need to:

• Build up your eBay feedback score so customers will trust you.
• Boost your eBay rankings or get featured in grouped listings.
• Send bidders to a high-value auction.

Finally, if you have no interest in creating your own website, you can spend all your marketing time on your Store. You might as well give these a try!

Just note that these techniques only work if you are sending customers to buy from your eBay Store. Sending over random people who just end up clicking the back button may actually hurt you. So, don’t use clickbait, tricks or bots—market to real people who are actually interested in what you sell.

Final Note: Design

Make sure your Store is worth visiting! Use the categories, promotion boxes and other design options to create an attractive storefront that maximizes sales. Otherwise, all the time you spend marketing your eBay Store will be for nothing.

Having trouble getting into your buyers’ brains? Read up on ecommerce psychology and crack the code to making more sales.