eBay Marketing

eBay has over 180 million active buyers and a huge variety of product categories. It is trailing not far behind Amazon and is even more popular in certain categories such as sporting goods, health and beauty, and consumer electronics.

eBay became so huge in recent years that Gary Vee spent the majority of 2019 visiting garage sales and “flipping” items on eBay.

Here’s one of the funniest videos he’s done:

All jokes aside, why should you consider selling on eBay?

Why sell on eBay?

There are a ton of advantages of selling on eBay and you should explore them before you decide against this awesome channel.

• 90% of items listed on eBay are not auction listings, they’re fixed-price listings.
• eBay reported $95B in gross merchandise volume in 2018.
• 80% of the items on eBay are brand new products

So even though eBay is quite developed, there’s still a lot of opportunity for a new seller coming in.

If you manage your store on Shopify, then selling on eBay is even easier.

Let’s look at that.

eBay + Shopify integration

Shopify has a really easy eBay integration that allows you to create an eBay store in just a few clicks.

Step 1 - Click on sales channels on the left menu

Step 2 - Click on the + button

Step 3 - Select eBay from the drop-down menu

Find eBay on the list of recommended channels and click on the big green + button.

Step 4 - Connect your eBay account

Click on the Connect button and log in to your eBay account.

Step 5 - Finalize policies and inventory

Now you have to do is to click on “I Agree” to finalize the integration, and you will see a popup that asks you to finalize your store policies. Copy over your shipping, return, and warranty policies into eBay’s interface.

Next, decide on which products you want to merge over.

You can quickly edit the titles, pricing, and inventory numbers before you merge them. When you are done click on save and publish.

And voila!

You now have a working eBay store.

Now let’s talk about eBay marketing and how you can grow your sales.

Top eBay marketing strategies

Here are some of the top ways to market your eBay store and increase your sales.

Optimize your listings

Do we sound like a broken record?

You have to optimize your listings on every platform that you sell on.

That means making sure that you have the right keywords in your titles and descriptions. Look at some of your competitors to get some good ideas for keywords. Also, you can use the SEO work that you’ve done on other platforms and/or your own store to generate some good ideas for eBay.

Stay competitive shipping, delivery, and price

It’s always important to stay ahead of your competition.

Sometimes you come back to the office on Monday and you see that sales haven’t moved a bit. When you look into it more, you notice that your competitors lowered their pricing dramatically, or that they are offering free shipping.

That’s why you should set your shipping rates

You can use a company like Deliverr to optimize your delivery times down to 2 days per order.

When you use Deliverr for your shipping, your delivery shows up as “FAST ‘N FREE” and displays it as guaranteed, putting you way above your competition.

You can use this for your own store too by the way.

Here’s an example of what the Free 2-day delivery tag looks like on your own site.

Use a pricing automation tool like Prisync or Seller Dynamics to automatically change your pricing in your sleep. So if a competitor drops their price on the weekend, the system will automatically adjust your price to keep you competitive. You can set up rules to keep each price above a certain threshold, to make sure that you’re profitable.

Promote your listings

When you advertise a listing on eBay it effectively creates a new listing for you on the search page, so you are doubling your real estate with one click. Do this for all of your listings.

Here’s an example:

This store promoted their listing, so they showed up twice at #15 and #16 of the search results.

Sometimes a promoted listing could show up at the top of the search results as well. It all depends on the user’s search term.

Regardless of where eBay places them, promoted listings could give you a much needed bump in clicks and sales.

Here’s an example from one eBay seller, that got 354 clicks and 10 sales in 30 days by promoting his listings:

You can definitely test out different bids on those listing promotions. Here’s the full video if you’re interested in how to test this:

Use store-wide promotions

Another great way to boost your sales on eBay is by doing store-wide promotions. Set up 2-day promotions with a discount throughout the whole month. The reason for this is that eBay likes to promote the deals that are ending soon, so if you have really short deals you will get more impressions and clicks.

Here are some general guidelines for making a compelling promotion:

When I personally tried this “2-day promotion” strategy, I was able to double my sales in just a few months.

Check this out:

Provide excellent customer service

This is true for all the online marketplaces but it’s especially powerful on eBay. Make sure to respond to every single customer request or question within 24 hours, be flexible on your return policy, and always put the customer first.

Become a Top Seller

The more you do these strategies, the better your chances of getting the “Top Seller” badge which is one of the best ways you can increase your conversions on eBay.

Here are the requirements to become a top-rated seller:

• You have to be active for >90 days
• 100+ transactions and $1,000 in 12 months
• Have a defect rate of <=0.5%
• Cases closed at 0.3% and late shipment rate <3%
• Upload tracking for each order

Those are the basic requirements.

If your average order value is small then it will just take you a little longer.

Recap

That’s it, folks.

These are the main marketing strategies that you should explore.

There are of course a ton more things you can do with your eBay store so keep on learning, growing, and selling!