EBAY for marketing purposes.

[Neil]

Does anyone here sell on ebay as well.

I was thinking of having ago at listing a few products, primarily with the aim of driving traffic to my blue park site.

Does anyone do this and do they get many sales.

Neil

[petad]

It depends partly on your product range. We tried a few lines on eBay, but were a bit worried about devaluing the brand image, and also found sales very slow, with hardly any referrals. We sell a completely different product range on eBay which does very well, but does not apply to our website, so we don't refer to it.

We have had much more success via Amazon, but as I said, it depends on the products you are selling.

[Soundbite]

I ran an ebay business for a couple of years. In my opinion an ebay busness is only worth running if you are going to sell damaged goods or unwanted stock for a bargain price. The competition is fierce and will drive your prices down so if you do sell branded products you will risk tarnishing your name and the brands.

The other problem I had was with actually listing the products. There are so many factors/rules eg feedback, ebay disputes, paypal disputes, DSR, listing rules, vero, listing schedules, the list goes on. (Try training staff on those rules and you will see what I mean) We had to use another company called channel advisor to make the ebay system simpler to use. The ebay system is not good with managing lots of listings, you need to pay another company astronomical fees to make it easier.

Ebay fees are reasonable, better than amazon but ebay has so much competition, which will drive your prices down. In my opinion the Amazon system is much better to use than Ebay, there are not so many rules and it seems as if the Amazon customer service is very good. I don't use Amazon due to their high fees and also tuff competition which could again drive your prices down. I also found that I sold lots more products on ebay than amazon.

Ebay has customers who are looking for a bargain so they are usually in the low income bracket. I find Amazon customers have a slighly higher income bracket and are looking for a better service. It therefore depends which market your products are aimed at.

There are so many other ways to generate sales apart from Ebay and Amazon and I wish you all the luck.

[Neil]

Thanks for your replies.

I have to admit that i wasn't really very keen on actually selling anything through ebay. I just wondered whether i could use it to direct traffic to my website. Ebay has a huge number of users and i was trying to find away of tapping into that.

Generating sales once people are on the website is the least of my worries, on days when in the plants are in season we convert up to 10%.

Regards

Neil

[roobyroo]

Hi Neil,

We currently sell on Ebay too. We sell nowhere near as much as we do on our bluepark site, and the selling fees can be quite expensive. Also it can be very time consuming if you're having to list all your items, balancing stock ect yourself.

Every so often I'll think about shutting up shop on Ebay (mainly because of the high fees) but then I talk myself out of it telling myself that any extra sales are better than no extra sales, every little helps I suppose.

We've never sold on Amazon, although we did enquire about it recently and it tuns out that everything you sell via Amazon has to be bar-coded. This was a problem for us as not all of our stock comes supplied with bar-codes and it was going to cost mega bucks to have all the stock bar-coded so we decided not to bother.

I also agree with the other posts on here, a lot of people who are shopping on ebay are looking for a bargain, the competition is feirce and if you are selling cheaper, it does seem to devalue a brand. Some of our vendors won't even allow us to sell thier goods via Ebay.

Also you can't promote your site via Ebay, I've had so many listings removed by Ebay because there was a small image or piece of text that linked to our Bluepark store.
So many rules with those guys it's unbelievable.

Having said that, it may be worth a shot if you find the right products to sell at the right price, and are looking at boosting your sales slightly.

[lewey]

Echo the other comments on it depends a bit on what you're selling.

We use ebay on a small scale to try introduce a wider audience to some new products we have. We list any of our main products, but have some special sample size pots of a relatively new product, which we put on ebay to try and get more people to try (and hence like). It's a marketing exercise really, we don't really make anything from it, just recover some costs.

Have been caught out a few times though with people bidding and then never paying.

Did make an attempt to use Amazon a few years back, but quickly stopped that due to their very high fees (relative to our margins).