Category — eBay Store Design and selling on eBay

Despite the economic downturn online sales for sellers on eBay and Amazon continue to rise as do the sales of other retailers as reported by various sources in the e-Commerce industry. Meanwhile as sellers prepare for Black Friday the rush to compete is on!  Free Shipping is permeating the web’s shopping sites as we speak, and life continues to roar as retailers compete for the supposedly last dollar available in the US as thousands man the OccupyWallStreet movement and things seem so depressing elsewhere. While stocks are plummeting at the mention of more financial problems for Greece, savvy sellers in the United States still appear to be somewhat unaffected by the slide.

You have a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet, right?

Now that everybody and their brother has a smartphone, a tablet, or at least a laptop shopping for the 2011 season online is blooming all over.

Online sellers can prepare for the greatest month since last December by sprucing up their stores, checking their offerings and matching those other guys out in the forefront. Shopping feeds may be picking back up as  the use of bar code shopping on mobile devices is sure to make the competition fierce this year for sellers who have UPC coded products and free shipping offers.

The most important things to watch with your online store now is

1.  Get yourself into Google’s shopping feed

2. Offer Free Shipping wherever possible

3. Spruce up your store with at least one holiday message.

4. Make your site a mobile friendly website.

Its not too late to work for greater sales this holiday season.

Everyone wants a great looking eBay Store, but what some people don’t know is the limitations on stores and eBay Listings. (May 25, 2010) [updated Nov 2010

1. Live Chat on an eBay Listing or store: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/reviewsandguides/links-reviews-guides.html Prohibited links include: Links or other connections to live chat systems. You can include a live chat link in your About Me page or custom Stores pages, but not in your Store home page.  You may include your chat user names in an item description, but not a link to chat. http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html See the eBay Policy
2. Audio or Video on eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html You can include a video in your listings as long as it can be played back within the listing. But you’re not allowed to link from your description to a video on another website. There are some exceptions, ie: YouTube video is okay. See the eBay Policy
3. Mailing Lists on eBay: Links or solicitations to subscribe to non-eBay newsletters or mailing lists are not allowed. See eBay Policy
4. Scripts on eBay: If you try to use scripts that we disable, you’ll get an error message that says “Disallowed JavaScript/HTML Syntax”. This means you won’t be able to list the item, or the script will be disabled at run-time.
5. Logos with .com on ebay: Anchor Store logos that are used on the Stores home page have to include the official Store name, and the name can’t include any of the variations of “.com” or other extensions like .net or .org
6. Phone numbers on eBay: Store logos and Anchor Store logos can’t include phone numbers, email addresses, or other contact information
7. Flash on eBay: Store logos and Anchor Store logos can’t flash, move, or be animated

There are virtually hundreds of rules for eBay Stores and eBay Auction Listings, but the above sampling are a few of the more common requests that we get. While we can design using any of these infractions we do not recommend it. It’s only a matter of time for any eBay seller until a competitive seller will bring your store or listing to the attention of the eBay policy enforcers and you are pulled down for this. I’ve seen sellers with thousands of auctions be pulled down in a heartbeat even though they have sold for years 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.

We think we’ve done some impressive ebay store designs and thought we’d write a little about the web design process for ebay store design. We usually make a template, then create the store design. First of all the ebay header in the store will go across all of the entire ebay store. For any template that is 800 wide, that means that in the ebay store it will have to spread 100% or it hangs there not looking so grand. We can adjust design for a 100% store header, and leave a centered 800 pixel wide about me page, but it isn’t always that pretty. In addition in ebay stores you’ll always have a white space between the header and the bottom part of the page. That can be difficult to design around as well. Unless you have an integrated ebay store homepage, it’s not always perfect. But then again, it will look fine to most people.

When you build your ebay store, rememeber that eBay puts some restriction on the amount of code you can use there. You’ll likely have to strip out some styles, and at the very least some spaces in the html code.

As far as the left navigation goes, we’ve done some nice stores with upgraded navigation on the left, but again if you have lots of code you’ll notice the white line separating the middle section of the nav.

Overall eBay store building is fun and a fantastic way to show your wares on ebay. Design your ebay store with these things in mind and all is well.

Take a look at some of our ebay store design here

One of the most common problems in web design is the ability to make things fall as they should instead of as they may. This is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to design work. Most software, dreamweaver, front page, and others insert some nasty code in places where it might make sense if it were a perfect world but web designers know we don’t want that. Structuring a table to go 100% width can be accomplished easily enough, but sometimes things get out of kilter. First of all your code will adjust itself quite often for the size of your monitor and if you are liking a huge monitor with 1200 resolution you’re in trouble. You’ll want to design for the lowest denominator, and currently that is about 800 wide. But you wont’ want to make a table 800 wide and then have it look like a little dwarf in the middle of a forest. You’ll want the perception to keep rolling outward no matter how big your visitor has his resoltuion set.

The best way to accomplish this is through the use of a table set to 100% width. You’ll want each of the columns inside this table to be set at percentages and not at acutal width. If you see some code that says width=”638″ you’ll know you might be in for trouble. Usually its a single cell that is doing the messing up, this is where you’ll want to go in and reset it for width=”40%” or something like that. You might have to do the dreaded and actually read the code you are putting in but basically what you are looking for is something like this:

table width=”100%” border=”0″
tr
td width=”645″> /td
td width=”600″> /td
/tr
/table

The td width is set to pixels while the table is set to 100% so no matter how you cut it, if you’re using something like dreamweaver, it will keep shifting around making the table all distorted. The correct code for this table would be something more like this:

table width=”100%” border=”0″
tr
td width=”50%” /td

td width=”50%” /td

/tr
/table

Remember to start your tables out as percentage tables and you’ll have a less likely chance to run into this problem.