When you own an eBay store, you have the luxury of listing
items in your store inventory that essentially do not expire
like regular auctions. This feature opens the doors for you to
carefully think about and design a process for promoting your
items.

As with most things in life, there is an easy road and there is
a tougher road that demands more work. The results that one gets
are often direct in line with the effort one puts in.

eBay provides you with a cross-promotional tool, where you can
present a buyer with similar or related items when they view an
auction listing, and when they go through the checkout process.

The easy way out of using this feature is to simply let the
system decide which auction listings to show to the buyer. That
is probably also the least efficient way of using the
cross-promotional tool. However, if most of your listings are
regular time-limited auctions, then you do not have much choice
other than using the auto selection feature.

A more efficient and effective way of using the tool is to
promote your more expensive items when a buyer views an auction
listing. This method is actually even more important for when
the buyer is going through the checkout process. At checkout
time you know that you have a paying buyer who is interested in
the particular purchased item. Now is the time to use that
knowledge and up-sell.

Often, your more expensive items are the ones that move much
slower. That can be for a variety of reasons, such as buyers
limiting their searches to specific dollar limits, buyer
confidence in you as a seller, and buyer confidence in the
broader eBay auction system.

Hence, you must use every sensible opportunity you get to
promote your more expensive items.

To do this effectively, you must fully understand your products
and how they relate to one another. In addition, you must
understand your buyer.

You must know that if the buyer purchased your red $10 widget,
then they are most likely to be interested in your related $120
widget because the red widget works with or enhances the
performance of your more expensive widget.

In this scenario, you would list your red $10 widget as a
regular eBay auction and list your related $120 widget as a
store inventory item. Using the cross-promotional tool, you
would then manually select the more expensive widget to be
shown on in the cross-promotional tool, as well as other items
that might relate to the red widget or the more expensive
widget.

Cross-promotion can be very effective in generating more sales,
but you cannot expect the optimal results if you choose to rely
on automatic selection. Put in some thought and work, and you
should see far better results.


About The Author: Jason Griffith writes eBay Store reviews for
http://BestAuctionStores.com
(http://www.bestauctionstores.com), a site dedicated to
providing eBay Store Owners with reviews and feedback about
their stores.
 

Few things are more frustrating than visiting an eBay store and
be presented only with a mile long list of items that one has to
scroll through. It is very difficult to find items in a long
list if you are looking for a particular type or genre of item.


What many eBay store owners do not seem to realize is that eBay
buyers are not desperate to find and buy their particular items.
There are so many auctions going on at any particular point in
time, that the browser Back button is probably the most used
function when browsing or searching for items.

The default sort order for the listing display in an eBay store
is listing end time, with those auctions ending soonest
displayed at the top. There are other listing sort orders
available as well, but unfortunately none of those are
necessarily very well suited for a store inventory display.

The primary means at your disposal to make it easier for an
eBay buyer to find what he or she is looking for are the
categories.

Think of the categories as virtual aisles in your store. You
need to use those virtual aisles in your store to guide the
buyer through the merchandise on offer.

The easier you make it for the buyer to find the desired item,
the better the chances that the person will buy your item and
not someone else's.

You know your merchandise best and know how you can slice and
dice the types of merchandise into meaningful categories.
However, do not limit a particular item to only one category.
With an eBay store, you can list an item in two different store
categories free of charge. Make full use of it.

An eBay buyer might miss an item while browsing one category
but notice it in the second category. This is synonymous to
putting cans of the same cream in both the dairy section and in
the baking section of a groceries store.

You cannot predict all the uses that a buyer will have in mind
for your merchandise, but you can at least cover off the most
obvious ones. When a buyer visits your eBay store and sees the
categories, they will first think of what they want to use the
item for and see if there is a matching category.

You can have up to 300 different categories in your eBay store.
Make full use of it to help your buyer easily find the item (or
even similar item) they want to buy.

Generally, a person visits your store wanting to buy something,
i.e., with money in hand. It is a great loss when they leave
your store because they couldn't find your item that is hidden
amongst tens or hundreds of other items.


About The Author: Jason Griffith writes eBay Store reviews for
http://BestAuctionStores.com
(http://www.bestauctionstores.com), a site dedicated to
providing eBay Buyers with the ability to review and rate eBay
stores.