Posts from — January 2009

eBay Stores announced today that the custom designs may break under the “New” eBay look and feel for eBay Stores. Fear not! Our of hundreds of stores out there, we only have one store in the market that will likely fail under the new deal which won’t be enforced until March. Plenty of time for fixes.

Now we have some of those who have said that other companies are non-compliant, and that “thousands of stores” will break under the new system. Ouch. The reality is that even the top competitor in eBay store design  does not have more than a few hundred eBay stores out there.  So let’s all take a breath and relax. The sky is not falling. eBay is not punishing my competitors for their non-compliance, rather, they are taking the easy road to out-of-the-box thinking and watering down theirs store algorithms so that good creative design and extreme automation won’t mix. Too bad. The truth is that those non-compliant cookie-cutter designs were a brilliant idea of someone in the industry, albeit they may have technically broken the rules of eBay. Specifically the site interference rule of style sheets. * But in their defense, if only out of sheer envy, even throwing a gazillion dollars at it; won’t work. As eBay has now demonstrated those with a gazillion dollars can only seem to go so far. Ebay, who has a gazillion dollars can’t even seem to come up with a suitable backend that could handle both those who can’t figure out how to do great design, and those who do it well.

What is an eBay store anyway? Is it a cookie cutter store made for cookie cutter design or is it the property of the seller? After all, those sellers make money there and they PAY eBay for the privilege of having their stores, don’t they? Well, yes, and then it stands to reason that they should get the improved experience that THEY want out of their stores. But the truth is hard to swallow, eBay couldn’t figure out how to do it programmatically and that’s a shame. Good eBay store design will suffer.

Meanwhile, while we ARE experts at eBay and all of our stores (but one) are in compliance, and we DO play by the rules, still so much in eBay store design has outdone itself. We generally tout modified custom design for eBay stores because the truth is that the selling power is in the eBay template and not in the frilly store design. The truth is that our top clients, top 10 powersellers on eBay, don’t use full store design because it prohibits buyers from buying.

Conversion happens at the template level and not at the store level. Once they hit store they are already on the conversion trail. When companies tout their conversion rates, they have to know that this is based off of template conversion into the store and not the other way around. So what’s the reason for great eBay store design you ask? Well, for design companies it’s a no-brainer, profits.

Good eBay Store design means that it looks good, it feels good and buyers will buy unfettered by the extra barrage of ridiculous over-designing. If you are over designing your eBay store, you’re wasting your money. Go take a look at the work we’ve done for the number one seller on eBay, ACCStation, and you’ll see that it’s simple unfettered design. They clocked out their conversion rates and realized that sometimes good design is simple design. Now, I’m not saying that there is not room for improvement there after 3 years, but still, they are definitely converting or they would not be the #1 seller on eBay now would they!

Design is meant to compliment the offerings not to shout out all around it in complete design overload.

If you have aspirations to be a huge powerseller, you don’t want your eBay store to be the main source of your income anyways,  as the fees are pretty hefty. Most of the largest sellers out there opt for a standalone website.

I’ll do another post soon about eBay template design and the misnomers out there about conversions. Trust me, we know how to eBay!

* eBay rules on site interference:
http://pages.ebay.com/stores/newstore.html#o9 You might have used CSS extensively, which is against our Site Interference Policy.

So eBay makes this big announcement and calls in the troops to deal with the fallout of it all. I’m just not feeling it.We all know there is a recession out there and everyone else needs a trillion dollar bailout, but here we have a company with a gazillion dollars at their disposal and all they can come up with is a cleaner web 2.0 look, that we could have done for a cool million (just kidding) and a few cross sells. I guess they’re broker than I thought.I don’t know if I missed something, but truly, I’m just not feeling all the hoopla on this one. If you’re trying to sell me a few cross-sells and a couple of marketing trinkets and tout this as a brave new world, we’ve got a problem.

There is little that is significant in this announcement other than a few stores needing a new design, or a few hundred stores needing new picture hosting and new designs and a new designer.

The reality in this announcement is simple, it’s in the compliance factor that eBay wants to uphold to prevent hackers and spoofers, phishers and spammers  from messing up the site. The big deal is that eBay has to contend with millions of wackos to prevent being overrun by innovative programmers and cyberpunks.

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