Auctiva Store is simply a collection of all your eBay ads in one place. It is customizable, to a degree. An eBay store allows you to list items as "Store Inventory" which have their own pricing structure and listing durations that differ quite a bit from eBay's "core" auctions. The downside to an eBay store is that they don't generally show up in regular searches, and therefore require some marketing to drive customers to your store. This is generally done with low starting price auctions.
An eBay store will cost you $16 bucks a month, and if you are making exclusively unique items, then an eBay store probably won't be worth it for you, as you won't really have typical, run-of-the-mill inventory type stuff.
2)
quote:Can I put in the "About Us" part of my store the story about why I'm selling? Or would that be considered bad taste?
Not at all, and in fact, this is quite common among eBay sellers. It's an extremely worthy cause, and I think people would be quite sympathetic to your story. You can also feel free to put external links in your "About Me" page, such as the link you have in the post above. Don't put any in your ads, though - the About Me page is the only place that ebay allows this. It is, however, perfectly OK to link to your About Me page in your ads, if you wish.
A word of caution, though - stay away from stating political opinions in your About Me page (i.e. about the war or anything like that). For every person that thinks one way, there is someone else who thinks another way, and you are, after all, seeking to get people's money, not their allegiance. Not saying you would do that, but just in case
. You don't want to turn off any potential customers.3) If you are listing on eBay exclusively, there's not much you need to do to promote your listings. Create keyword-rich titles, take good pictures, and make your ads look professional.
Your items should start showing up in Google searches. In fact, I did a search for "snowflake suncatcher", and your listing came up #3 on the first page of results. Cool huh?
If your plan is to create a standalone ecommerce website, then the "promotion" question gets quite a bit more complicated.
4) Pricing is much more simple than you think. Don't bother trying to put a cost on your labor. If your items turn out to be popular, then you don't wan't to be short-changing yourself, and art is not necessarily worth only the cost of labor and materials.
Do you have a handle at all on who your competitors are? What are they selling their items for (check "Completed listings")? What keywords are they using in their titles. See what your competitors are doing right, and that might give you some guidance on how you can proceed with pricing.
Check out the handy research tool at mpire.com. It tells you much more than eBay's searches do, and it doesn't cost a thing.
Your current auction has 40+ hits after only two days, which is not too shabby IMO. Any watchers yet?
One other thing to note - be mindful of the fee structure of eBay Auctions. You added a "Buy It Now" to your auction of $25, which will cost you an extra $.20. If you had made the Buy It Now price $24.99 instead, the extra fee would have only been $.10. It's not a big difference, I know, but little gotchas like this can add up over the course of many listings.