Ebay verses a website?

[funkyflamingo*]

I am seriously considering getting my own website due to the cost of ebay, and their policies which is costing me money, time and stress.

 Before I jump into the deep end, I would like to know if there are other small to medium size ebay sellers who have their own website and are doing quite well.

My worries are: Are the websites getting the traffic through like ebay does?  Many of buyers only shop on ebay, haven't heard of other sites such as bEtsy, or selling on facebook. I won't go near Gumtree, as that is a time waster.

I know it takes time to build up the traffic, and it's all about marketing.  I have gone to website designers, and all of them say, that you shouldn't leave ebay all together.

I would love to hear from sellers who sell on both, ebay and a website.

Happy New Year!

New beginings for 2015

Retrovintage

[transport-posters]

I would recommend it.  I am a web developer and create and sell prints on eBay as a hobby.  I spent some time to make my own custom website to sell them through PayPal and it has paid off well, working well alongside my eBay sales.  If you can find a good, cheap and reliable web developer to do it for you then it could work out very well.

[clarry100]

As I understand it tho its not just the web site development its the developers knowledge of how SEO works to get your site out there with Google mainly.

Is that true?

We are currently getting a site built using Woocommerce(??). The developer is a family friend but he is a professional in that field. He was trying to explain the importance of SEO and how proper implementation within the site is very important but it goes over my head.

[character_parties_aus]

My website runs woocommerce so,I assume therefore you have a wordpress platform? I do all my own SEO. I know jack about SEO but Wordpress makes it easy and I rank top 5 on google for most items i sell. My website is now 90% of sales, fee free and a much better 'quality' of customer than on ebay with higher average order value.

[clarry100]

Yes it's WordPress.
So even without paying Google for adwords your search ranking is still up there. That's encouraging for us to hear. We were thinking we would have to pay them $$$ to get the new site learned about.

[2106greencat]

If you PM me I can send you a SEO pdf and links to some awesome google sites to adv your site.

I would however keep eBay for a while and use it to link to your website, you can not do this on the items pages but you can do it from your about me page without breaking any eBay protocol.

I included links on my items also, but then I was ready to get out of eBay anyway and did not care if my account was suspended. It took about 3 months after I had my site up and running to get a good customer base and good exposure.

Good luck with it, and my suggestion is you organise merchant cc facilities to negate the need for paypal, it is not as expensive as most people think once it is set up.

[character_parties_aus]

Ive never paid a cent for adwords.

Ever.

A lot of the time its a waste of money.

[clarry100]

We tried Google Adwords about 12-months ago to try to up our ebay sales.

It cost about $125 to try it for a month but $100 of that was donated by Google in order to suck us in so cost us $25.

We could clearly see the results in that when we searched for the popular words people would use our ads were always right there on top. And we asked various friends to search and they reported seeing our ads too right on top.

But we could not detect any increase in ebay sales.

We even went so far as to contact quite a few buyers during the period asking them if they found us via Google.

Not a single one responded with yes.

So we concluded that the $125 was 100% waste of money.

[ourphonecase]

I might need to invest in some growth hackers to boost up the keywords because I seriously have no clue on how SEO works. I read tutortials and all but I am just too dumb to figure out. My page is made by myself using woocommerce/wordpress templates with tweaks to the look of the page. I had to learn **bleep** by myself. However I am aware I am in a competative category and that going to the top is quite hard. I've invested like $100 on some chinese people who seem to use some method of keyword spamming to increase page views (and that I was willing to sacrafice the website anyways if Google deemed it bad). Quote strangely they caused my website to generate sales on their own without the need of adwords and it actually paid off. However sales are coming in very slow so, it didnt get me to the same sales daily like eBay.

I'm trying out Amazon now and so far it gets a few sales a day (still at 0 feedback though). Hopefully more sales will come thru when I build up the feedback.

[character_parties_aus]

The internet industry loves to create an air of mystery around SEO as some kind of amazing skill. The reason this is done is that it is actually quite easy to do your own with the correct discipline. If you have a nice and easy manouverable website good site map clean categories and well labelled pages and sort your Meta tags and content out accordingly over time you will have as much success as paying someone. How do I know this? I've done it myself on 4 websites with equal measures of success each time an never paid one cent for SEO or Adwords ( which does not improve SEO). I dont know nothing about SEO per sae, I know about structuring a website well and making sure I have highly relevant key words with a good stie structure. That is all!

Of course most people go for cruddy freebie websites with poor Content Management Systems and Structure and dont set them up well....hence they fail.

It's worth spending a bit more on getting a professional developer to build you a decent site and structuring it correctly rather than doing an on the cheap site nobody can find.

JMO

[funkyflamingo*]

Thank you to all,  to whom took the time to correspond to my question "ebay verses website".

All that information was very helpful, and I will printing out and taking it  to my web developer!

I have decided that I will get a website designed by  a web developer, since I have gone as far to get a warehouse/display shop.  I find people who pick up items just want to look at all the items I have, but it is not set up as yet, and having a webiste and open hours to the public, will also increase my sales.

As for facebook vintage sites, I am actually having problems finding them.  There is  facebay, and local area in selling but nothing really just vintage, unless it is a group in WA, but you have to be living there.  I found buy swap hippy site but that is more for clothing.

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place???

Then I thought, maybe I start my own page for vintage sales in Melbourne/Australia! Then realality set in, as  already do 100 hours a weeks, with working and ebay sales.

Again, thank you!

Retrovintage