posted on September 5, 2003 10:21:30 AM new
I have noticed an odd trend in the past week. While eBay has been relatively quite for us, our web sites have been selling like crazy, and I do mean like crazy. One of our specialty sites is selling like it was Xmas time – in all my years, I have never seen such an odd phenomena – normally when our sites are busy, eBay is also, but not in the past few weeks, and yes we sell approximately the same items on eBay that we do on our web sites.
Are any of you with Web sites experiencing the same phenomena?
posted on September 5, 2003 11:13:39 AM new
I'm not currently running a site but hen I did I picked up a lot of my web customers from my ebay sales. I always included a postcard for my website in all of my ebay orders. A lot of my customers started going to the site directly to buy since there was no wait or possibility of losing out on an item that they wanted. If ebay sales really slumped I would llist a couple special items then hype the listings on the front page of the site, which helped direct site only customers over to my ebay sales. If you play it right, you can help both venues feed each other.
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 5, 2003 12:05:23 PM new
Ebay is getting to be harder to use and so slooow that buyers, me included, look for other sites that have the same things.
A techie part I needed was $200.00 new on ebay, $175.00 refurbished, $100 to $175 used. The manufactures website had it $99 refurbished with a full warranty. Guess where I bought it plus $300 more. This is not a large company.
Small specialty sites can give you better service and deals and ebay is becoming a tacky site with all the banners for singles at the top of search pages.
If you want to see why ebay is becoming so slow do a view source on a search page and look at all the spy-ware, scum-ware, and crap that loads. They think they own you.
posted on September 5, 2003 12:08:10 PM new
One of the biggest points that many sellers make about selling on ebay is the potential to gain new customers for their non-ebay sites. Some of these sellers may even lose money on ebay to harvest the buyers.
Could all of this customer harvesting have significately effected sales on ebay? That's an interesting question isn't it.
-------------- sig file ----------- President John F. Kennedy said, "There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third."
posted on September 5, 2003 07:51:53 PM new
You mention your sales, but what about your website traffic? I ask this because your traffic may have increased substantially, and as a result, your sales have gone up as well. Now that google/yahoo can index the Miva software my website catalog uses, my traffic has exploded. This month, looks like we're on track for 3M hits. Since traffic has gone up, sales have also.
posted on September 6, 2003 09:31:08 AM new
I have thought about putting up a site to sell things that are not selling on ebay. HUMMMM Now you really have me thinking
posted on September 6, 2003 04:19:25 PM new
I like Fatcow - $99.00 for a year and it includes a shopping cart. Just don't build your website first and then think you can add the shopping cart later - see my post under website help. They will pretty much build your website for you. Otherwise I've heard that go-daddy is very easy to use, but I'm not familiar with them.
posted on September 8, 2003 02:38:13 PM new
For those not highly experienced with web sites I agree FATCOW is a very good and inexpensive site - we have 2 sites with FATCOW and 2 with ntt/verio -
But if you aren't really web site experienced, I'd recommend FATCOW - you get a free shopping cart, and it is an easy site to use.
IF you are highly experienced then I'd recommend ntt/verio.
BUT, as I have often said, "build it and they will come," does NOT apply to web sites - they take a LOT of work, and fine tuning if you are going to be on the 1st page of Google, which many of our specialties areas are, and without paying anyone to get us there - just the expertise of my husband's web site construction.
In the past you could increase and build web site traffic via eBay, back when they would allow such links, but not any more. We do get followers from our eBay auctions, but we certainly don't depend on such.
We keep mailing list of ALL of our customers separated into the specific items they purchase, and about every 3 months run a special, and do a mass mailing, which really increases traffic. We use GROUP MAIL for this, as the program will go into other of our programs and harvest the e-mail address, and eliminate duplications - we are extremely pleased with GROUP MAIL for occasional E-MAIL SPECIALS - but we keep these specific - that is for instance, folks who purchase unique table accents like knife rests, chargers, etc., are sent one e-mail flier - those who buy Art Deco lamps, are send another - and so on. We don't mass e-mail with info the customer wouldn't be interested in.
The e-mailings are NOT spam, as we have transacted business with all that we e-mail. AND we get almost no complaints from the thousands we send.
posted on September 8, 2003 03:11:32 PM new
If the customer did not request to be emailed, those are SPAM. It does not matter how much business you have done with them, If they did not request more info it is SPAM and one day you may find your account canceled for being a SPAMMER.
posted on September 8, 2003 04:42:32 PM new
Shoporium may be an excellent solution for folks who want to sell both on ebay and in a webstore. What is nice about Shoporium www.shoporium.com is that you can use the same software, the freeware program "auctionsubmit" (www.auctionsubmit.com) to write and launch items to ebay and your webstore, it is very easy to take an item that hasn't sold on ebay, click a couple of buttons and load it into your webstore or other auction sites. The other things I like about Shoporium are that is is under $20 a month and totally fixed fee, no per item fees, no final value fees, no ups, no extras and that the webmaster Meryl has provided very prompt and useful tech support on the rare occasion when it was needed. With any web store a large part of your success is dependent upon how well you promote your site, you will need to spend some time making sure you have the correct keywords, titles, META Tags, etc and register your site with the major search engines. It may also take some time before your sales start to take off, (some of the search engines take months before they include you and spyder your site) so you probably should be prepared to think in terms of investing a full year to determine whether the store is working or not. YMMV!
posted on September 8, 2003 08:06:36 PM new
Yahoo costs- both to build your shop, and to advertise it. It costs to put your URL into the yahoo search directory. Make sure your site is in good shape before you invest in yahoo!
I am with lightningservers.net, which offer three choices for shopping carts. They also offer two chices for forums, and many other toys. I really like them, they are personable and helpful and have a control panel that is efficient and easy to get used to. They are hosting 5 domains for me, for $120 per year.
Tell Drew- Dragonmom sent you
"And All Shall be Well, and All Shall be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall be Well"
posted on September 9, 2003 03:16:40 PM new
I will check them out. I did look at your site and I thought you did a wonderful job with it.You have a unique product I bet it sells well.
posted on September 9, 2003 05:23:17 PM new
Dragon - is that a package deal or is it $120 yearly each? How much space do you get? BTW - I agree that both your site and your produt is great. Both show lots of loving attention..
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Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 10, 2003 10:14:00 AM new
$120 a year, for everything.
His prices are still low, but not as low as that!
What I did was I started visiting <http://www.web-hosting-forum.com/> and reading what webhosters had to say about different ISP's. Among my concerns were that I could put adult content on my server- watch out for that one. There were several hosts that I would have gone with except they stated they didn't allow adult. They would tell me privately that they didn't really care, but had it as a disclaimer. I don't think much of that, so I looked elsewhere! This guy was just starting out, and we set the deal up via email, AIM and a phone call or so. You will probably meet similar people that way.
A friend of mine is with
<http://ixwebhosting.com/>
for around $20 per month he gets pretty much unlimited everything- dbs, bandwidth, The control panel isn't to my liking and the server interface seems very slow to me.
I just installed a gallery software for him
<http://www.idealizingeye.com/> and his front page is created with some kind of serverside builder they have. Not pretty yet, but his paintings are wonderful, I think!
"And All Shall be Well, and All Shall be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall be Well"
posted on September 10, 2003 11:12:35 AM new
One thing to keep in mind about a hosting account, is that cheapest is not always the best way to go. When I started out, I used Valueweb. They provided Miva Merchant shopping cart, a large storage space, and a great deal of bandwidth for the price. However, I noticed that my site was very slow at times. I always had attributed it to the large catalog of items that I sold. Not so, I changed my host a few months ago, and am now ranked among the fastest websites according to alexa.com Personally, I think site speed is one of the most important things to look at when finding a host. Be sure to look at comparisons of this when finding a new host.
posted on September 10, 2003 11:48:06 AM new
Thank you both. I used to work with an amazing server who I have much love for but their prices have not droped from the old days. They do design and hosting and are working with a some of the bigger entertainment copanies and local governments so they have no need to (I still remember my first meeting when they ran out of their home). I love them to death, but for some of the smaller clients I design for they cannot afford their prices and it's time for me to find some viable alternatives. Celeb - thanks for the heads up - sometimes I think the horror stories are more important than the glowing ones.
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
Men Are Like Grapes. If You Stomp on Them and Keep Them in the Dark Long Enough, They Might Turn Into Something That You Would Take to Dinner
posted on September 11, 2003 03:32:22 PM new
I have a Yahoo store.
All said and done It costs roughly $120 a month in my case.
$49.95 flat per month plus $.10 cents each month for each item in your store and 0.5% of revenue (3.5% of revenue generated from the Yahoo network but it does not apply to me as I cannot be listed with Yahoo shopping)
It is incredibly easy to do. It is simply plug & play. If you have mainstream merchandise anyone searching the Yahoo shopping network will find your products in the search results.
Like the old saying goes you gotta spend money to make money. If you build your site all by yourself then you have to constantly maintain the code of your pages. You have to do all of the marketing yourself. You gotta do everything. I used to do that and use CCNOW for payment processing in my early days.
I find the $120 is well worth the fact that it only takes me minutes to add or remove products and overall maintenance of the entire site.
posted on September 11, 2003 05:48:59 PM new
Last fall/winter when we were selling I would list 1000 items a week on ebay, and 1000 slower items on yahoo every 10 days. I did VERY well by sending all my ebay customers to my yahoo booth, and everytime a buyer asked a question I gave them the booth address. I used yahoo auctions as my "website", and it cost me $50.00 to list 1000 items. If the buyer was not a yahoo member I ended the auction and sold it to them. All sellers should consider having another venue to sell your goods.
