opening a store - is it worth it??

[poig720]

Need advice...
Thinking it may be better to open a store...
I only sell buy it now items. But just wanted to know if they still show up the same way as non store items do

Any pros or cons would be helpful too

Thanks 🙂

[kopenhagen5]

You need to work out the figures depending on number of sales you have every month and margins on your items.

Many say a store is viable if you list a few hundred items plus.

Store fees - http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/storefees.html

If it's fashion you will only drop from 9.9% to 9.5% in FVF's.

But rather than 40 free listings per month you get 200 fixed price with a basic store, provided you qualify.

And if you don't sell anything in a month, naturally you still pay the 19.95 store fee.

[chameleon54]

There are probably three main reasons to open a store.

The first is monthly fees. Ebay offer non store id,s 40 free listings per month, plus 3 free relists for most sellers ( those who sell less than around $10,000 per annum )  . You currently have over 100 listings. Most of these will be costing you $1.50 per ten days unless you have recieved an offer for extra freebies from ebay. To pay for 60 buy it now listings for a month will cost $270 unless they are in a cheaper catagory.

A basic store which costs $19.95 will give you 200 free listings per month and would work out much cheaper. The final value fee for store holders can also be cheaper, offering greater savings. The higher grade store selected, the cheaper the FVF.

The second reason to open a store is branding. It allows you to build a client base who can recieve newsletters from you with new listings, store offers etc. These "followers" can become repeat buyers.

The third reason to open a store is to access a better range of stock management and record keeping tools which appear on store summary pages. These give charts of sales figures for 7, 30, 90 & 120 days offering greater insights into tracking how sales are going etc. Also great at tax time if you have kept a record of sales from these charts. There are a lot of other features offered in this system that are very useful. Probably the best feature is access to "good till cancelled" listings, meaning your listings automatically relist untill sold or manually cancelled, saving time on relists.  

There has been discussions on the boards about wether your listing visibility is affected by opening a store. I dont know the answer to this. All I can offer is that my private listing sales on non store account always sell well with lots of genuine interest, where as my stores dont always seem to attract the same interest. This could be because the listings in my stores are old and stale having sat on good till cancelled for several years in some cases. ( these listings usually do eventually sell and with 2000 of them It helps to even out sales flows over time )

[chameleon54]

Do you already have a store ?   Others will have a better idea but it looks to me like you are already listing with a store ???  You have the little red and blue door and store type graphics ????  Are you reffering to a different ID  ?

[collect247]

OP must have opened up a store in the past 2 hours?

[heihachi_73]

If you make a few hundred (or even four figures) a month and/or move a lot of things (and run out of the 40 free listings in the first week for example), it might be worth it.

If like me you are lucky to make $20 a week and end up selling 16 items over the month (in December of all things), then it isn't worth even thinking about it. The only good thing a store has to offer is Good 'Til Cancelled - no more having to relist everything when they stop relisting by themselves.

Note that if you are still limited to listing 100 items per month, you cannot make use of all 200 listings, free or not. I could easily make use of 200 listings, but it won't help me shift anything. Also, with a store, you are no longer eligible for most of the free listing bonuses which appear, since most of them are for non-store sellers (and never happened this month).

Edit: Opened up a store already, never mind!

[chameleon54]

Is it worth looking into different products to sell ?   Videos and Playstation 2 games are easy to source for next to nothing ( heck, I threw around 50 videos in the bin when I cleaned out the shed ) but if thery are obsolete and people dont want to buy them, is there any point in trying to build an ebay business around selling them ?

It takes the same time to list and pack more saleable items and if you can push your selling price point higher, you will have a much more viable business. I have a cut off point of around $7.00 starting price that I list things for. These are items I basically get for free. Any lower than this and it just isnt worth the time to list them.

The other problem with very cheap items is the postage costs are often much more than the item sells for. This is a major dis-incentive for buyers. They might buy a video for $4.00 but it will cost them $7.00 - $8.00 in postage fees. Their $4 video will end up costing $12.00.  Ebay then want their $1.20 commision on the $12 total, and paypal want their 50 or 60 cents, making the whole business model unviable.