Category — eBay Store Design and selling on eBay

Heard from one of our customers that President of eBay Marketplace, Laurie Norrington, commented on the  fine eBay Template work we did for eBay’s Daily Deals configuration. Not entirely sure what she said, but heard that it was a nice review.

The eBay template in question (below) is our latest creation for Allure-Jewelers who has over 29,000 listings on eBay right now and is also featured as a seller in the Daily Deal section of eBay.

This template is part of a set of eBay templates that are in our Premium Design package which has been modified to fit the criteria for eBay Daily Deals Guidelines. In other words: It’s the simple version.

See more of our eBay Templates here

ProStores has sent a note around a couple of days ago advising ProStore owners that the checkout redirect that they can now have with eBay will not be there after 2010… and the nice news is that ProStores has “chosen” not to support the requirements of checkout redirect until then so it will go away much sooner. “As of June 15, 2009, they will only allow Third-Party Checkout through vendors who have updated their checkout pages to meet specific design and functionality requirements. Among the required changes, eBay has eliminated the ability to cross-sell and up-sell items from your own Web store in the checkout flow. ”

Therefore folks, until June 15 when checkout redirect will no longer be used , unless you’re on another system (other than ProStores) who will abide by the difficult to maintain API piece that eBay is now requiring. ProStores will sign off of checkout redirect on July 15.
This tells me either eBay’s requirements are too difficult for anyone to consider, even eBay’s own ProStores platform, or that eBay doesn’t consider it an important item, (which of course they don’t since they are going to put it to bed).

This frankly means that eBay merchants who use any platform for an off-eBay store, I mean a website, will need to realize that eBay if a fantastic traffic generator and a couple of things will need to be in place to help you cross-sell from eBay.

1. a userid on eBay that matches a domain name

2. an “About me” page with links to your website

The first being of the utmost importance because we don’t know how long eBay will allow off-site linking to assist eBay sellers in saving money on fees.

If you’re an eBay seller, you might know that eBay has settled upon restricting payment methods.

Take a look at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html for the current information.

Choice words here include “Sellers aren’t allowed to:

• Ask buyers to contact them for additional payment methods
• Offer a payment method to some buyers and not to others
• Discourage buyers from using any payment method the seller specified in the listing
• Ask buyers to pay using a method not mentioned in the listing.”

The bottom line is that eBay is now restricting payment methods *in most categories* to exclude checks and money orders. Feeling a pinch of fees coming on? Yes we agree.

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.

The latest in eBay Store design, something we do everyday, along with website design, is….

1. About 150 designers became “certified” by eBay on store design, many years late, but okay. It’s all good.

2. of course we were one of them. Check out our eBay Store Design Page
3. Not too long ago ebay implemented a “makeover” for eBay Stores making it easier to find things, (or not).

4. Featured stores were renamed Premium – and more features are added, for example from what I’m hearing soon they will provide 24 hour support.

Now let’s talk. The new featured store functionality is great. eBay is now realizing that they are competing with some other big guys, like Amazon Webstores who, like Pepsi took Coke early on, could be an issue without some improvements to the functionality of eBay Stores. Basically the playing field is getting very competitive for merchant sites and all the players are offering many things to attempt to attract and retain sellers.

See you next time.