[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was travelling in a train last month when I overheard the group of businessmen talking about their businesses. Most of them were in their mid-forties and were discussing their traditional methods of retail clothing. Amongst them was an entrepreneur (I guess late twenties) who quite remarkably explained how he transformed his business from a cornered street to one of the largest markets in the world in just under a month.
The young entrepreneur owned a small business that sold designer clothes made by a few in-house employed designers & tailors. He started out the conversation by enlisting the challenges he faced to market his clothes, as mass marketing for small businesses clearly involved large costs. Among other challenges were how he wanted to expand his business across regions but did not have the manpower to do so. He said he had heard about eBay making its way in to online retail, and decided to try it out.
He subscribed to a premium store in eBay and listed all his products on it. As a result, within weeks he was getting more visits for his products and an increase in orders than ever. He was receiving orders from all over the country.
He was really happy that he had associated his business on an eBay Store which really helped him put his business out in the world. Regardless to say, everyone else in the group was shocked to hear how easy it was to adapt to new technologies coming in to place.
It made me really interested to know what other benefits opening an eBay Marketplace would have, so I decided to find out more. I got in touch with a few more eBay Store owners, and found out how incredibly beneficial it is of owning one.
Firstly, eBay stores are great for medium sized businesses who want to sell online. One of the biggest advantages of setting up an eBay store is minimal knowledge of technical know-how. So even if you’re not a tech savvy, you can still run an exceptionally successful online business.
With eBay’s recent changes in its pricing plans, it offers a range of plans for all types of businesses of all scale. The lowest plan starts with $15.95 allowing you to list 150 Free Listings and paying a final selling value as low as 4% of the product price.
Having an eBay Marketplace is like having a personal brand space that showcases just your products, on top of how you would like to customise it in terms of store design, graphics etc. If you have some know-how of HTML, you can create customised shop page, add logos, list policies and a personalised about us page. eBay store allows you to choose a personal URL that will directly land to your page, which I think is a deal breaker for sellers, as customers usually don’t want to spend time trying to find something from a specific seller.
eBay has shown enormous growth in terms of marketing. Lately eBay has allowed sellers to correspond newsletters to offer promotions and discounts to its customers, building a professional brand like image.
Apart from fixed-price selling, eBay Marketplace when compared to Amazon offers an additional unique selling concept of Auctioning Products. Sellers can list their products for a limited time where customers can bid on an item until the end stipulated period.
eBay has really improved over the past few years, giving a lot of flexible options to sellers to efficiently run online businesses. You know are aware of numerous benefits of having an eBay store, so if you want to start selling online, think eBay!