Forum

ebay vs website traffic
 

Hi guys,

I am just sick of ebay and the ridiculous fees. I looked into amazon but for my category they are charging $40 a month and 20% (yes twenty!) on final value fees.

Therefore, it would just be better to pay to have my own website made.

But I'm worried about traffic. Others in the forum say they have great sales from their websites after they moved from ebay, but others have just 1 or 2 per month. How much traffic could I expect, if I got good SEO for high positioning on Google with appropriate keywords? Could I possibly surpass my ebay sales? What are your experiences? (For those who have successfully broken away from ebay!)

Thanks,

rafc

i alway want to make a website but never get round to making one
it seem such a hard job
i can get the ecommerce website templates
i know you have to buy domain and buy web hosting (Browser Update Page)
but then i don't know how to set everthing up :doh:

Only 2% make it big with thier websites, 20-30% make it ok. And the rest fail.
IT ain't easy as u think for a website. Try working it out with ebay, they got loads of traffic already.

i'm doing really well on ebay
but a website would be less hassle then ebay and could run ebay on the side
but it seems to be such hard work

Yes it is hard work and the time it would take to learn how to build a website and make one myself is too much. However, if you go to Elance | Hire professionals. Outsource work. Get jobs done by independent professionals, freelancers, and contractors. you can hire people to do it for you. If you look for providers from India, they work for very cheap. You can get a website made for around $300, that's all inclusive - logo designs, shopping cart integration, membership/login features, SEO etc etc. Domains and hosting together can be bought with unlimited traffic for no more than $100 a year. I have already had one website made by my current provider working in Bangladesh, for just $300. It looks very professional and he and his team is my great secret, I want to use their skills again to be free of ebay with a new website selling products I currently sell on ebay, but I am wondering about the traffic. I was going to go to amazon but... 20% is ridiculous. Anyone??

do you talk to them over phone ?
or by email

lol -- by email. They are very responsive and professional :)

Can you PM me your website, for an example of their work. Also; are you willing to reveal this company?

:typing:

Starting your own website is pretty easy, the only thing that took me a lot of time when I first started was configuring my site to how I liked it. There are many ways to get targeted traffic to your website once it's up and running, Google Adwords for one.

I wrote an ebook on this about a month back, I haven't really promoted it yet as I've been busy with another project, but it basically shows a person with no experience how to start their own online business from beginning to end and how to get targeted traffic to it. Check it out here >> Webmaster Blueprint – Learn How to Build & Market Your Own Business Step By Step!

i was quoted £1000 for a profesional looking ecommerce website with full credit card and debit card payments accepted.
and £500 for a simple website paypal accepting website

aspkin, so are you saying, it CAN be done? I'm just worried about spending money on a website that gets no traffic.

ebay, on elance you put up your project and you get various proposals from providers. if you restrict your preferences (filter) by location, select only india and the far east, then you will get the good prices.

Yes starting it is easy, but the hard part is getting loads of
Traffic.

i' will give it a go elance see if i can get a good deal

Yes, I mean anyone can build you a website, but do they really know what they're doing? Setting up a website that takes credit cards is easy as pie, well I've never cooked a pie, but I'm assuming it's easy because I hear things are easy as pie all the time... anyway it's easy!

For $500 you can have a professional website built yourself in just a week or two. But it does take work to get targeted traffic, and if you don't know what you're doing there you won't get anywhere.

In Webmaster Blueprint I detail how to setup your own website from scratch, and then market it for Targeted traffic.

Anyway, it's version one right now, I have more planned with it in the coming weeks.

Cheers,

The hardest thing about a website is getting the traffic. Like if someone went on google and typed in your item your selling, you want your website to come up on the first 1 or 2 pages, not page 12-13. Or even be advertised on the side a page.

I found that was the hardest thing. I tried to use adwords and such, but it didnt seem to work. I only got like 4-5 sells a month. It was nice to have both ebay and a website going at the same time. I must say I didnt put a lot of effort into my website b/c I was getting WAAYY more sales on ebay, I didnt see a point and I actually gave up and went back to ebay.

I think its good to have a backup merchant account beside paypal, but for a particular item, I would say ebay over a website.

Why would you stop selling on your website though? I mean... 4 extra sales is better than 0.

Eventually if you kept working on getting traffic to your site a few times a week, I think your site would do alright. Never give up on something that can get you away from ebay!

i have already had some good offers from india and pakistan from elance

what is the best cart which you can accept credit and debit cards from straight to your bank account ?

instead of paypal

what is a good merchant account for the U.K

that will work with authorize.net

I've found merchant accounts to be the hardest part. Some charge ridiculous fees. Worldpay is popular and reliable but their fees are really high. CCnow seems a lot cheaper.

I'm assuming getting targeted traffic = SEO?

aspkin if I could buy your book I would, but I've already bought one of your books. It was good but what with the website and costs associated with that, plus zero ebay sales, I literally have nothing left. All I have is my provider's word that his SEO is good and will work.

I hope so rafc, really you can't count of your 'providers' SEO alone to get you through. Trust me, I've been there and done that. They're SEO comes down to submitting your website to a dozen search engines that's about it. Now if they generate you 100 backlinks on high page ranked websites using your researched niche keywords, then you'll have something. But I'm guessing you haven't done very much niche/keyword research yet, most new webmasters don't. Good luck on your website though, the first sale is always the best one. :)

Aspkin,

I've been meaning to ask you about this. Does it focus on using DreamWeaver, Frontpage, etc., or is it directed towards site creation at places like AuctivaCommerce?

I have tried a few different places, but haven't found one that fits my needs properly. Not to mention that they are rather expensive compared to doing it from scratch. I carry many sizes, and I need my website to reflect that. Most of the places, you have to list all sizes in the description, or create a listing per size. Therefore, I end up having 3-4 listings of same product, just in different sizes.

I would prefer to do it all from scratch, and have tons of HTML & DB experience. Problem is, I don't know how to tie them together, so that my inventory syncs properly.

It's directed towards shopping carts, self hosted ones. The best shopping solution you can get as they're highly configurable, works with multiple gateways, has all the features you need without monthly fees.

yes, SEO is what I am worried about with my provider -- I hope his team will do a lot more than just submitting to search engines. if not, you can just get someone else from elance to do it for like 20 bucks =)

Lol, good luck with that. :)

If you want an independent shopping cart (not a hosted cart that charges monthly), zen cart has a lot of payment modules.

Got traffic but takes work
 

My website is around 15 months old. I prowl SEO forums and basically do everything I read there to generate traffic, sometimes leaving it alone for a few weeks, sometimes working on it every day for weeks on end.

You need a cart that makes it easy to submit to different search engines and shopping sites. Google/froogle, yahoo, shopmania, thisnext, thefind, live, and a lot of others. Register and claim your "brand" on Kaboodle.

You need to submit XML sitemaps (for free) to Google and Live. Yahoo charges for that now.

You need to run CHEAP PPC campaigns: Google and Yahoo are freaking expensive, 30 cents and up for my niche. I use 7Search and LookSmart and pay 3 cents and up for the same ads.

You need to post in dozens of forums, using your website in your signature. Do that in forums that get spidered (not this one LOL). The spiders will read your signature and it will count as a backlink.

Find websites that have cheap ads. $10-30 a month. In your niche, of course! If you sell power tools, prowl the power tool forums and blogs, look at their ads. Go to Alexa and see if they have good traffic. Buy ads on those sites.

Search Yahoo Answers for questions about your niche. Answer them and point to your website. "Hey, I found a great one of those at NotAtAllCrooked.com! They shipped it to me really fast and their customer service is the best!". Like that. Also answer questions without referring to your site, and refer to your site as well as 2 or 3 others to cover your tracks. If your answer is picked as best it will be permanently visible and spidered by Google constantly. If not, it will get spidered until it's buried, so no loss.

There are lots of other things to do, the only trick is to do them all, constantly. It's dreary, boring, deadly dull work, and very disheartening because you don't see results. but keep at it and it will finally pay off.

I know my various approaches are working because now I get orders even when I do no promotion at all, so people are finding me somehow. When I run ad campaigns I get more orders. My site is higher in organic listings and I show up in searches for my products. In fact, because of my PP issue I had to turn off the cart and stopped all my ads. I got emails from people complaining that they couldn't buy! So, I turned it on with check/money order as the only payment method, sure that would stop the emails. To my amazement I've gotten 4 orders with people sending me MO's through the mail!

Of course, your site has to not suck too! Test it in FF and IE. Get SSL so people feel safe checking out, and put some kind of protection shield on every page so it's in their face. If you have a decent cart it is already optimized for SEO, so you don't have to do a lot on the coding side.

I'm leaving out the obvious traffic/spider tricks like Facebook, blogging, MySpace and Twitter. Those sites make my brain dribble out through my ears and give me a headache in my eye and I avoid them like the clap. But if you can stand them at all they are very good resources.

Nice tips TapTapper, and yes this stuff is boring to do, try researching best ways of generating backlinks as I'm doing now, boring stuff.

You can also build web 2.0 pages/mini blogs with hubpages, squidoo, etc and link back to your selling site.

Also look for blogs that are high page rank with dofollow links, here are some edu backlinks for nike, replace nike with whatever you want to target.

Also utilize top sites for even more backlinks. The more backlinks you have with the anchor text you're trying to rank for in Google like 'nike shoes', the better your placement in SERPs for that keyword will be.

Boring sh*t really.. but necessary.

You need a cart that allows product Attributes. Open source of course. Skip PrestaShop, it's a nightmare. Magento and Zen Cart allow attributes. In zc you can add a free module that will manage different images for indiv attributes. Check out the zc forums, you'll see a lot of people selling clothing and custom-made stuff that use the attribute features extensively.

Since you have coding experience, I say go for a zen site! If you live and breathe XML then you could do Magento too. Even though I'm a coder I don't want to spend my life writing XML, so my Magento site is on permanent hiatus.

Aspkin/TapTapper,

This is ALL very good info. I see that TapTapper prefers ZenCart, what about you Aspkin?

:pop2:

I recommend CS-Cart.com shopping cart.

You can also advertise on Facebook, they now have a PPC program. It's the same result for me though, lots of cash paid and lots of clicks but not many sales. My sites may not have been good enough. Good Luck but it's hard to beat the traffic of FEEBAY

Does CS-Cart have similar attribute properties as ZenCart?

Check it out.. Overview :: CS-Cart :: Shopping Cart Software and Ecommerce Solution

It's one of the best shopping carts I've seen.