Said entirely the same thing in another post including the rats jumping ship.
I saw this coming 4 years ago when the ebay costs were going up and sales going down and decided to build my website bonsai-mart.com and then in another year or so started bonsai-wholesale.com. I also own the name wholesale-bonsai.com. I can sell this one day for big bucks. I now am developing Bonsai-Mall.com with higher than the norm expensive items and also own two masked, pointing domains bonsai-nursery.com and bonsai-studio.com.
I am going to buy up about 5 more primary key word domain names I have on a list and sit on them. Primary key word domain names are going to get scarce in the next year or so as many are figuring this out and owning them is cheap. The .com is the number one commerce name to own. I would suggest to all, get savvy on primary key words and at least buy up a couple domain names and at least sit on them at 8.95 or less each a year.
A web page of any kind built by your hands on your computer and picked up by any search engine or index is like driving down the highway and looking at a billboard. So what you have in essence is little billboards all over the worldwide web. Eventually someone is going to see it and decide they want what you are selling out of convenience. People are generally lazy. If the price is about right, they will buy it because they are already there in the store. I curretly have about 400 pages on the net and make a daily living in the mail order business.
On auctions, I have one auction a night in the prime time of 7:15 west coast time, 8:15 mountain, 9:15 central and 10:15 eastern. Out of the 7 auctions a week, I sell about 1.5 average. However at the heading of every auction description I have a statement that say WOW! take a look at all the items I have in my bonsaimart ebay store. Click here to go there now! I sell over a k a month off the store. My me page has links to all my websites. Back end marketing involves using your website links in all emails to and from ebay customers. I have been farming customers to my websites for about 3 years now. You must be up on the ebay rules as to what you can do and not do though. Be carefull.
In summary, I am working on tripling my outside ebay income and forget ebay or any kind of ebay like venue entirely, since a static webpage is built once and just sits there havesting income over and over. Auctions require constant effort.