When Should You Open an eBay Store?

 

Transcribe of “When Should You Open an eBay Store?”

Hey guy, Neil Waterhouse. Got a lot of questions over the years from people asking, “When should you Open an eBay Store?” Now, the reason most people open an eBay store is because you pay lower final value fees. But there’s other reasons as well, as I’ll show you in this video. I’ll also put links in the video and below the video where you can get more information if you need it.

The first reason to open an eBay store

Now let’s start off with the first reason to open an eBay store, and that is to save money. Firstly, there’s two basic main fees for selling on eBay. Listing fee, for listing items on eBay. And the eBay final value fee, which is a percentage based on the price each item sells for. Let’s look at these two fees one at a time.

The listing fee is a fee for listing an item on eBay

Firstly, the listing fee is a fee for listing an item on eBay. If you have no store, eBay allows you to list for free 40 items per month. Sometimes they give promotions as well, but let’s just leave the promotions out ’cause they’re not you know it’s, they’re irregular. Now, those 40 items have got no listing fees. But if you list more than 40 items, and you have no eBay store, eBay charges you a listing fee.

But if you list more than 40 items, eBay charges you a listing fee

If you got no store eBay charges you a listing fee of $1.65 for any item that’s got a starting price of up to $100. And for items with a starting price greater than $100, eBay charges you $3.85 to list the item. Now, in comparison, if you have a basic store which costs $25 here in Australia, or for a U.S. $20 per month. You can list up to 600 items for free each month. So, that was the listing fees.

The lower eBay final value fees

Now, let’s look at the lower eBay final value fees. Which you get if you have a store. This is normally the reason most people decide to subscribe to the eBay store. So to keep the math simple, let’s say you have an import or a drop ship eBay business. Selling in the home and garden niche, and your average sale price is $100. And you sell on average, 10 items per day.

If you don’t have an eBay store, eBay will charge you a final value fee of 10.9%

If you don’t have an eBay store, eBay will charge you a final value fee of 10.9%. So just under 11%, but 10.9% on every item that you sell. So in this example, if you sell an item, for say $100, eBay will charge you a final value fee of 10.9%. Which of course is $10.90. If you’re selling 10 items per day. That is a thousand dollars of revenue per day, or 30,000 or 30K per month. With a final value fee of 10.9%, that’s $3,270 of final value fees. Or you know, 3,300 for round numbers.

Get a basic eBay store which costs $25 per month

Get a basic eBay store which costs $25 per month. Your final value fees in this niche come down to 10.9%, oh sorry, from 10.9% to 8%. Which will give you a savings of $870. If you’ve got a featured store, which costs $55 a month, your final value fees drop down to 7.2% for that niche. That’s 3.7% or just under 4% less than if you had no store when selling in this niche. Now 3.7% on 30K means you’ll save $1100 per month compared to if you had no store.

EBay offers three levels of stores

Now, bottom line is eBay offers three levels of stores. Basic, featured, and anchor. You need to crunch the numbers based on your monthly sales, the number of items that you’ve got listed, and also your average sale price. And you need to crunch those numbers to figure out when is the best time for you to get a store. Or, if you already have a store, should you upgrade to the next level?

Other reasons to justify opening an eBay store

Now, there’s also other reasons to justify opening an eBay store. And it’s starting to rain, so I better wrap this up quickly. But as you can see we need the rain, so I’m not gonna complain about the rain. See it’s all brown, and there’s just little specks of green appearing, which is wonderful. But anyway, so, there is other reasons to justify opening a store, and the first one of these is vacation settings. If you subscribe to a store, you can put you’re store on holiday so that people can’t purchase your items while you’re away.

If you subscribe to a store, you can put you’re store on holiday so that people can’t purchase your items while you’re away

And the big advantage of this is, if you shut down all your listings around the holidays, like a lot of people do, you lose all your sales history. Five sold, 10 sold, 20 sold et cetera. The holiday mode is useful when your starting off, however, like I mention many times in these videos, you should be spending 10% of your profits on low cost overseas, virtual assistants. Which cost you from one to two dollars per hour.

Hire virtual assistants, these people can run and grow your business while you’re away or while you’re on holidays.

And these people can run and grow your business while you’re away or while you’re on holidays. Now if you’re new to this channel, I’ll put a link on the screen and below to a free video showing you how and where to get these virtual assistants. Now, the next benefit of getting an eBay store is you get access to the promotion section of eBay where there’s a feature called markdown manger, among other features, but markdown manager allows you to put items on sale.

Markdown manager allows you to put items on sale.

It shows buyers your old price with a line through it, and your new sale price. Now this is a pretty powerful tool, and if you want to know more about it, I’m not gonna go into it now because I’m getting wet but I’ll put a link on the screen to a free video showing you how to set it up and how to use it.

“Do buyers actually ever go to a seller’s eBay store?”

Now, a question that comes up a lot is, “Do buyers actually ever go to a seller’s eBay store?” And this question comes up a lot when I run seminars. And whenever this question comes up, I ask everybody in the audience to put up their hand if they ever go to another eBay seller’s store. I have a room with say, 100 people in it, normally two or three people with their hands up.

Why buyer went to another eBay seller’s store, it’s normally because they’re researching that seller

But I question them and drill down to why they went to another eBay seller’s store, it’s normally because they’re researching that seller. Not because they want to purchase from that seller. Now of course, there are exceptions. As you know, when eBay buyers go to a seller’s store, you know, and this is normally because the seller is selling something very specialized, like vinyl records, stamps, coins, a brand name, NIKE shoes, or tops, or shirts, or whatever.

Most people on eBay the buying cycle is they decide what they want,

But for most people on eBay the buying cycle is they decide what they want, they log onto eBay, they search eBay using the normal search box to find the item, they purchase it, pay for it, that’s it job done. They don’t normally go to a seller’s store. The place they search is eBay. That’s their store. Not a seller’s store. If you do go to a seller’s store, please let me know in the comments section below, why, and why you do it, and what’s going through your mind when you do it. Love to know, love to hear.

There are few other advantages of getting an eBay store

Now, there are few other advantages of getting an eBay store, like you can customize your store and get a unique URL to it. But again, not many buyers ever go to an eBay seller’s store. So this is not something you do in my opinion as a priority. There’s plenty of other stuff like listing more items et cetera. Now, when you do have an eBay store, you can list all your items in your store and put them in unique categories. Like pet products, baby products, et cetera.

EBay allows you to set up to 300 categories,

EBay allows you to set up to 300 categories, and by putting each listing in the correct categories, this helps Google index your eBay listings. So when people search for your items using Google, these items can appear in the Google search results. Now the last feature I’ll mention in this video is if you have several thousand products listed, you can probably justify getting an anchor store.

The big advantages of getting an anchor store

And one of the big advantages of getting an anchor store, besides being able to list 250,000 items per month for free, and also getting the lowest final value fees, is you get your own eBay rep. You no longer have to call the eBay customer support line with everybody else. An eBay rep will keep you up to date with all the latest changes on the platform and also they’ll work with you to grow your business. They’ll also help you get your products onto the big eBay promotions.

EBay promotions are very powerful.

And these eBay promotions are very powerful. Items that might be selling, only a few a day, can go to selling hundreds of times in one 24 hour period, during an eBay promotion. Now, that’s all for this week. I’ll put links below to everything I’ve mentioned in this video. And don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and until next week, list more, sell more. This is Neil Waterhouse.

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