Using ebay to drive sales to off-ebay sites

Every ebay seller knows that ebay fees are high and that ebay is a great tool to drive customers to your off-ebay site. The trick is knowing how to do that. I haven't quite figured it out yet because 90% of my sales are ON ebay even though I have the exact same products listed with the exact same pictures listed at a lower price on my website.

Makes ya wonder huh?

For me, there are a couple of problems. 1. My website needs work. I spend 90% of my time working on my ebay listings so of course it would only make sense that 90% of my sales come from there. 2. I haven't spent a dime on advertising my site. I read (and am in the process of re-reading) the Guerrilla guide to marketing so I am doing all sorts of no-cost things. I just haven't gotten my site the way I want it to look yet, so I don't want to put ad dollars out just yet. So, at this point I am using ebay as my primary traffic generator.

I can think of two main ways to get buyers from ebay to your website. 1. links and 2. direct your repeat customers there. Ebay is pretty strict on rules about linkages on their site. Can you blame them? They spend mega bucks on advertising and strategies to keep people on ebay. Notice that when you google something, anything, more than likely you will get an ebay page in the top five results. Have you noticed all the silly games and activities that they offer? This is all in an effort to get folks to spend more time there. The more time people spend on their site the more revenue they create. So, obviously you are NOT allowed to add links to your listings. You aren't even allowed to REFER to another site if it is one that has things for sale. I once got listings pulled for this line of text

"we have this product and more in our website, check my about me page for a link"

So, here are some things that you CAN do to move traffic from ebay to your site:

• link to pages that do not have items for sale. I've been adding links to size chart pages. These pages are website pages that still have the nav bars and my website logo at the top, just don't have anything on that particular page that you can buy. Click here for an example of the kind of page you are allowed to link to. *Notice the "click here to return to ebay"? that link doesn't just go directly to ebay.com, it goes to stores.ebay.com/addicted-to-rockabilly-and-punk?refid=store so that way it takes them right back into my store and if they make a purchase, I'll get a 75% discount on the final value fees! This way even if they are insistent about buying on ebay, I still get a discount on the fees. All I have to do is get them to click there.
• Promote your off ebay site through your buyers. Ways you can do this are to add coupons or flyers into the packages when you send products. Make sure that the coupons or specials that you advertise are for your website, NOT your ebay store. You want your re-peat business to go directly to you.
• Get people to look at your about me page where you do have a link. You can offer some sort of incentive to get folks to click there. I haven't done it yet, but eventually I will be offering a free tanktop on the 5th purchase and I will have the guidelines to that promotion listed on my me page. I figure FREE will get people to click! But there are tons of creative ways that sellers do this, just use your imagination.
• Host your photos on your website. This is a tricky one and with the templates I use, it would be more trouble than it is worth for me, so I don't do it. Maybe in the future when I am using more sophisticated software I'll incorporate it though. You can host your pictures on your website in a large size and then have them in a smaller size in your ebay listings making them clickable to the page on your website where they are big. It would be the same concept at the size chart that I talked about above. You can keep your nav bars, header and footer as long as you can't buy something directly from that page. Auctiva does this. If you look at a listing where the seller uses auctiva to host their pictures it says "click to supersize the image" and if you click, it takes you to auctiva's site. You can do this too, but directing people to your own site.

Technically you aren't allowed a link on your me page! Click here for the rules. But everyone does it and it is even suggested on ebay radio from time to time so I'm pretty sure that this is one of those rules that is not enforced.