I'll add my two cents - I'm also a newbie to Auctiva and was confused about whether one had to have an eBay store in order to use an Auctiva store. The answer I received from Auctiva's customer service was no - you need to use eBay to list your auctions but you do not need to have an official eBay store. So it's true that Auctiva is not a stand alone storefront because it needs to interact with your eBay account and listings but you don't have to pay for an eBay store. Visitors thru eBay would access your Auctiva store from a link on the bottom right corner of the photo carousel showing your other listings. It will NOT appear in the usual visit seller's store link that would appear in the upper right box on your listing page. If people find you through your Auctiva store's domain address, they will view your eBay items in your Auctiva store's format where they can bid and/or check out from there. All your listings of course still appear in eBay in the eBay format but all you pay eBay for is the listing fee, gallery photo, and probably a couple other items that I don't use. Creating your listings through Auctiva allows you to use Auctiva as your host for photos and you can add up to 16 or so pictures in each listing for free (eBay gives you one free and charges 15 cents a piece after that), your photos will supersize for free, templates for listing designs are free, you can schedule/create listings to list at a later time, all sorts of things that eBay charges extra for. That's a nutshell of what I've been told in the last couple days but I'm still holding off cancelling my eBay store until I test drive this for a little while!