Woman With Plan Needs Guidance

1) You can set up custom "Search Categories" in your Auctiva Store. You don't need an eBay store, but many people are perplexed as to the difference between an Auctiva Store and eBay store.

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.

Wonderful information...thanks so much!

I am still not certain about the search categories though.

Let's see if I'm understanding correctly. If I have the LINK TEXT of "Snowflakes" then the KEYWORDS should be "snowflake" and "snow flake" - and the title of the item should contain one of the keywords?

As to showing up #3 in a google search -- WOW -- I took a screen shot and am saving it for properity!

Suncatcher,
I looked at your item and it is really pretty. I am by no means an expert and am quite new myself, but I would suggest using more pictures. The beauty of Auctiva is being able to use more pictures for no charge than you can on eBay. You can have up to 16 photos for each item. You don't necessarily have to use that many, but more than one, perhaps different angles showing dimensional views and such would make an appealing item even more attractive. Just a thought, I hope you don't mind the suggestion. I love what you are trying to do and wish you the very best of luck.

Check out this site: www.etsy.com

This is a site for handmade items, you set the price not an auction format.

A great place to sell hand crafted items.

Also www.ecrater.com (which is free)

The more places you offer your wares the better.

Good luck to you, your story touched my heart.

Hi,

Just a few suggestions after I looked at your auction... Find a better template, Auctiva has quite a few to choose from, I don't think that the one in your auction correctly represents your item. Use the other scrolling showcase window to highlight your other auctions, the one that is horizontal, not vertical. Take about 3-4 good pictures of the item and list them in your auction, play around with the photography angles and so forth to get the best pics. If I was selling your item, I would experiment with the photography issue a lot because what you are selling is a visual item, people will buy because of it's looks. I would experiment with perhaps two outdoor/ regular sunlight photos and one or two light-box close-up photos to show the workmanship up close. They have inexpensive light boxes you can buy, just search eBay with the words "light tent box", you can use it outdoors or indoors to get higher quality photographs of small items, I use one for almost all my auctions. Almost all the sellers of jewelry, watches, figurines, etc, use a light box tent because it produces much more pleasing photos.

Regards,
Rick

Hi again,

I just supersized your photo from the listing, I could see what appears to be spots on the item, but is in reality probably spots on the window behind it. Clean the window... And see if you can take a pic showing the colors that should appear, if that is possible (maybe not).

Sorry to be nit picky on the photo issue, but I happen to know for absolute sure that great pics sell your item on eBay!

Rick

Morning All! Sorry I haven't responded to posts, but my Road Runner has been down and we've been disconnected from the world!

Thank you for the excellent advice.

As I said, I have soooo much to learn.

Plans for this weekend include better and more photos, AND window cleaning!

Thanks again -- SLM