Category — eBay Store Design and selling on eBay

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.

I keep getting calls from clients, potential clients, and of course my mother. With the exception of mom, many clients want to use a particular system to run both auctions on eBay and their website. This is all well and good. I’ve analyzed various huge powersellers for traffic, linking, and PR Rank with Google and made some discoveries that are important if you really want a website venue that sells on it’s own, without regard to eBay traffic.

First and foremost, realize that when you are talking to auction managers that they are selling a bundle of products and services, some better than others. Go look at the #1 seller on eBay and the #1 seller in your category. Are they running a website from an auction management tool? The time you save using these systems will be the cost and time you’ll spend later in Pay Per Click on Google, or the lost revenues that you’ll deal with if you go this route. I’m not saying that those services are not valid or good, but figure out if you are #1 or #500 and make a decision. The listing manager company is there to make money, and to sell you their products. They are not independant consultants. They are not going to tell you where to go, except to go with them. Now on some of them, I concur. Some of them have an excellent package. But you have to do the homework to find out for sure.

Auction management listing tools offer you an advantage in inventory management, but don’t get lazy. The time that is spent daily or weekly on updating inventories is only a few minutes. Integrating the sales into your back office system is a one time deal. After that you get the sales, and you fill the orders. If you work on Amazon, you’ve already had the opportunity to merge two channels, now merge three.

The issue comes in when you try to get independant traffic from your eBay buyers. Sure you’ve got plenty of traffic there, so why bother with a website? Most store owners will say they want more traffic, the abundance of traffic out there. So don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Using an auction management companies standard website offering will have some issues when it comes to PR rank on Google. Most of the rank acutally goes to your auction manager, and not to your website.

How can you tell if your auction management tool is good for your website too?

When analyzing traffic rank, get the google toolbar.Go to your favorite “huge eBay seller” and take a look at his PR rank. Is it over 4, or better yet, over 5? If not, this is not good. Nearly anyone can,with a bit of trying get a PR rank that is a 4, especially on a product site. Get the Alexa toolbar, is his rank lower than 200,000? If not, it’s a sure bet that his is not going to be reaping the benefit of a stand alone website. Although you may admire him because he looks great, his wonderful marketing has worked on you! That is what sets him apart from the other sellers that you compete with. But take a look at the inside workings and analyze his traffic rank. If his rank is nearly the same as yours, then likely you have bought the goods from his beautiful templates and branding and not based upon reality in sales and conversions.

Then there was my other favorite Bill Cobb moment from eBay Live!

If you’ve ever attended the Gala event at Live, it is a sight to behold. Who could resist walking through a greeting line of hundreds of eBay employees all cheering you on? I have to tell you this is one of the great things about eBay’s Gala night. It’s almost a throwback from the 80’s group dynamic seminars. When you walk into the hall, there are litterally hundreds of staffers who have spent the better part of two hours cheering every single person who walked in those doors. They clap until their hands are red. They cheer until their voices are hoarse. It’s a great warm feeling for every eBay seller and buyer to walk in and be famous for that one moment in time.

Anticipating yet another great time at the Gala, we stood in line, rather than go to dinner with our powerseller buddies, and we stood in line and stood and walked and stood and finally just a mere mile from the entrance to the gala event, it hit me. There’s a bathroom right over there and I can make it. I can run in and run out and get back in line. So off I flew. I came running back out, expecting to jump back in, but no. One of our friendly eBay staffers said, no cuts missy, get back in line.

I guess by now I was the second to the last person in the parade of people who entered the hall with the cheering and screaming eBay staffers. By now I would have been overcome with anger (and I was) watching my group up there at the top of the escalator and me at the end of the line… but just as I entered the line, I was greeted by that oh so wonderful face of Mr. Wonderful. That’s right it was Bill Cobb. I shook his hand, he remembered me from days of late, and a big smile came across my face. (damnit – I was planning to be miserable, mad and angry, after all wasn’t I just about the last person in the door!).
Nevertheless, that was a fine Bill Cobb moment.
Thanks for that Bill, you’re a trooper. I have to applaud any CEO, or VP for standing in a group of staffers cheering on customers. I guess if I made a gazillion bucks a year I would do it too. You can always get bandaids for those tired feet later on, eh.

Don’t forget next year, hope they do that cheering thing again. Just love that!

For those who couldn’t make it to eBay Live this year, fear not. We have the scoop.
We walked, and walked and walked and we still didn’t feel that we were that close to anything until we saw those goldenpalace casino guys handing out tickets. What’s this? Do they actually have a booth? No, but who cares. All is well that ends well.

Bill Cobb is really one of my favorites. He’s a gentle man, has integrity, stands tall, is friendly and I really like him. So why was he booed at the keynote address? Well that was the pesky little fiasco called search in stores. Everyone loved it and they took it away. Why? Well because of buyer confusion. Buyers were apparently confused when too many choices were offered. I guess that means that buyers on eBay don’t like choices. What?! Are you serious! That is the joy of eBay and something that kills every seller there. A bone was thrown out with that one and then it was taken back like candy from a baby, like a piece of meat from a pit bull. There will be no search in stores, it was just too much fun for sellers to reap profits off of that at the expense of eBay’s bottom line, or so it is said. Since eBay said one thing and lots of people guessed another thing, no one knows for sure, but that is the joy of eBay. We shall never know what really happened to search in stores. But what we do know is that eBay sellers want it back and eBay isn’t giving.

Well that’s a story for another day.

Now back to eBay Live. We walked and walked – oh right, I already said that. Walking was fun. The exhibitor hall was good. Many vendors there selling their eBay related wares. Sellathon did a hell of a business I hear. Marsha Collier was grand with her friend accompanying her, signing her autographed books at Buysafe’s booth. Buysafe is good. We recommend it to any seller needing a boost in integrity.

Now eBay has gone wiki, and eBay has gone with blogs and that is a good thing. It’s more of the Google authoritative thing. I guess I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth repeating. If you have an authoritative site, you’ll do well with natural search. eBay is on the right track here with many sellers touting the eBay Guides as a good way to SEO (search engine optimization) for those newbies out there. In fact from what I gather, doing a guide will give you almost instant gratification as an authority from eBay coupled with Google search results. Wallah! Note to self: Start writing those guides and do it now.

… well until next time… we’re off to write a guide, or .. um.. okay, gotta go do some web pages for customers that are waiting.

See you next year at Live!