Promoting Your eBay Store

One of the reasons that sales rates are lower for eBay Stores than they are for regular eBay listings is that many Store owners don't promote their storesthey use their Stores almost like a parking lot for excess merchandise. It doesn't have to be that way, however; smart eBay Stores sellers know to promote their Store listings separate from their regular eBay listings.

Use the URL

Naturally, you should post the URL for your eBay Store as many places as possible, to drive more business to your Store. That means driving sales from any other website you have back to your eBay Store, as well as promoting the Store URL on business cards, local advertisements, and such. Your eBay Store address should be on every promotional item you deliver.

Create a Listing Feed

Another way to drive traffic to your eBay Store is to create an RSS listing feed. This feed lists all the new items you list in your store. You can then syndicate or distribute this feed, so that anyone subscribing to the feed will automatically be notified of new items in your eBay Store.

To create an RSS feed for your Store listings, go to your My eBay page and click the Marketing Tools link. From the Marketing Tools page, click the Listing Feeds link. From there, check the option to Distribute Your Listings via RSS, and then click Apply. That creates the feed.

Once you've created the feed, you now have to distribute it. One of the best ways to do this is via the FeedBurner service. Here's how to do this.

Start by going to your eBay Store page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the orange RSS box. This displays the RSS feed for your site. Write down or copy the URL for this feed, which appears in your browser's Address box.

Now go to the FeedBurner site (www.feedburner.com). You'll need to create an account (no charge), and then follow the onscreen instructions to "burn" a feed. You'll enter the URL that you copied for your eBay Store RSS feed, and continue following instructions to save and distribute the feed. Feedburner will then make sure your feed is syndicated across the Web.

Tip

Since updates to your feed go out only when you add new items to your store, you want to list something new in your store every few days. There's no need to add a lot of items at a time, the key is a constant addition of merchandise, so that subscribers are receiving almost-daily updates.

Whenever you add a new item to your eBay Store, your RSS feed will be updated, and any subscribers to the feed will be notified. It's a great way to attract repeat business to your Store.

Export Your Listings to Search Engines and Shopping Sites

There's another promotional opportunity available on the Listing Feeds page. eBay lets you export your Store listings to third-party search engines and price comparison sites.

When you check the Make a File of Your Store Inventory Listings Available option, eBay creates a special file of your store listings, and posts that file to a web page. This is an XML-format file that contains the following information for each item listed in your store:

• Item title

• Item description

• URL of the item page

• Whether the item is orderable

• Current price

• Availability

• Item number

• Shipping cost (if specified ahead of time)

• Gallery picture (if available)

• Quantity

• Currency

You can then submit the URL for this file to your favorite search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and so on), as well as to various price comparison sites (Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, and the like). While eBay creates the file for you (and keeps it updated with your latest listings), it's your responsibility to submit the file's URL to whatever sites you choose. Naturally, you should follow the submission instructions for each particular site.

When you submit your eBay Store listings to a web search engine, your listings will appear in the search engine's search results. When you submit your Store listings to a price comparison site, your Store will appear as an option whenever someone is price-shopping for a particular item. It takes a little work on your part, but the result is much wider exposureand wider exposure means more sales.