Mighty Bargain Hunter

Making money with an eBay Store, Part 5: Setting up your store

November 10th, 2007 | by mbhunter |

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(This post is part of a series on Making Money with an eBay Store. The Introduction and table of contents to the series is here.)

Part 4 of this series on making money with an eBay store gave some thoughts about how to obtain your product at the right price, because, after all, it’s hard to make up on volume what you’re losing on each unit. If you don’t have something to sell, then an eBay Store probably isn’t a good way to make money.

But let’s assume that you know that you need a store, you’re all set up with your business’s registration, and you know where to get your product. You’re all set to sell, except for one thing. You don’t have a store!

I could do a step-by-step “click here, now click here” instruction sheet for signing up for an eBay store with diagrams and lots of severe hand-holding, but I won’t because I don’t think you’ll need, or even want, help with this part. EBay leads you through the process of signing up for a store very clearly, and any additional instructions from me would just slow you down, frankly. I’ll share a couple of decisions I made during the sign-up process below if you want, but otherwise I’ll hand the explaining over to eBay and you can open an eBay Store!

I chose the Basic Store option, which was $15.95 per month (and still is at the moment). The more expensive packages give you more space for your images and pages, snazzier analytics packages, more marketing e-mails, more branding opportunity, and more promotion on eBay itself. Of these benefits, the biggest one in my opinion is the higher traffic — your store gets promoted on eBay more and your items show up in the search results more frequently. I found that my items still got sold even with the Basic Store, and unless you really have a need for the extra features, it’s perfectly fine to start with the Basic Store and upgrade later if you find it lacking.

When I chose the name for my store, Back Mags Plus, I wanted something that would indicate what I planned to sell as a staple, and also allow for other products. (Hence the “Plus.”) This is a one-time decision that’s more or less permanent, so I suggest that you think carefully about what you want to name your store. You’ll definitely want it to indicate what you sell. It doesn’t have to be your business name, but if your business name describes what you sell well, then that’s certainly a good choice.

Are you all signed up? Congratulations!

(If not, you can open an eBay Store here!)

After your store is set up, you can access the store’s control panel by logging into eBay, going to your My eBay area, and clicking on the “Manage My Store” link in the left sidebar under My Subscriptions.

Again, it’s probably easier for you to poke around and play with things than for me to give you step-by-step instructions. As a start, though, here are a few pointers:

• The default design of the store is fine. Really. My store is basically the default design, and stuff sells out of it regularly if the price is right. You don’t have to accept the default design, but it will serve you just fine as a start.
• Download Turbo Lister. You may already have some experience with it if you’ve listed a lot of auctions. It’s way easier to use Turbo Lister with a store than to use the web forms. And the price is hard to beat. (It’s free!) I’ll talk about the tricks and tips I’ve developed for using Turbo Lister in a later post in the series.
• Just because you have 300 categories available doesn’t mean that you have to use them all. Some stores do a whole lot of business with fewer than a dozen categories. It all depends on what you’re selling. I have less than a dozen because that’s all I need.
• Review the terms and conditions before throwing up a lot of external links on the pages. Actually, think carefully about what you want to put on those pages. (I haven’t used any of them on mine, yet.) EBay’s pretty strict about how you can advertise stuff outside of eBay, so be sure you’re compliant.
• If you don’t have a lot of “store policies” to put up on a page, don’t worry about it for now. I have almost no posted policies at the moment. I’ve just started to explain why I ship magazine only by Priority Mail, but that’s about it. If I were selling a thousand items per month, I’d probably add some expectations or terms and conditions. If you encourage open communication with your customers, describe your items accurately, and fulfill them quickly, this covers a lot of ground by itself and most people will be delighted. Some people won’t be, but that’s part of the business, and sometimes there’s very little that can be done with some customers.
• If you haven’t added a PayPal account for your business, do it. You can have one personal and one business PayPal account per person. It’s much cleaner to have a business-only PayPal account that is connected to your business checking account that you set up — especially if the IRS wants to look at your business more closely.
• If everything’s in place, list! That’s why you got the store!

Next I’ll post on how to streamline your listing process.

If you have questions about setting up a store, feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly. Hope you’re enjoying the series!

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