Cross Promotion Between eBay and Your Own Shopping Site

Last time we came across a concept that you should never limit your sales in eBay only. Building up your own shopping site is one of the strategies to expand your revenue. It can also diversify your income streams, making your business much more sustainable.

But many of you may have encountered the same difficulty: how to bring in decent traffic to an individual shopping site? Even if you can bring in traffic, how to persuade customers to buy from your site while they have never heard of it? Obviously, site traffic and site credibility are the two most challenging topics for a new shopping site.

For a new shopping site, do not expect that you can get a top position in search engines. Even you are good in SEO, it may take you 6 to 12 months before the results are satisfactory. You may consider to use PPC advertising to get some immediate traffic, but it costs money. Then what can you do without spending extra cost? No doubt that you should think about how to make use of the existing resources you have, i.e. your eBay store.

In our last article, we have talked about how to drive traffic from your eBay About Me Page. Another approach is to make use of your email communication to customers.

During the whole sales process, you should be sending different notices to your customers at different stages. For example, notice for payment received, shipment arranged, feedback left, etc.. eBay is very strict to limit promotion of off-eBay sales in the site, but they will not be able to control what you do with your messages to customers. Take a look at a sample shipment notice from an eBay seller recently:

(Quote)
Dear Customer,

**Special Note**

We have too many designs which we cannot put them all in eBay. To find out more, come visit our site (Wow Gift Mart) at:

http://www.wowgiftmart.com

All purchases in our site are protected by Paypal Buyer Protection and you are assured the highest quality level of service will be delivered as we do in eBay.


**Shipment Detail**

Your item(s) have been packed for delivery in our stock retrieval today. And the package will be departing port of Hong Kong in about 2 business days. Normally it takes 7-14 days for the physical transportation.

If you have any further questions about your purchase, don't hesitate to let us know.

Once your item arrives in satisfactory condition, please leave feedback for us. We will do the same for you.

Thank you again!
(Unquote)

Of course, not all customers will click on the link when they get your notice, or some of them may even not read the message at all. However, it is a free of charge promotion anyway. Why not taking the advantage out of it?

Another challenge for a new shopping site is: how to persuade your visitors to buy with confidence when they don't know who you are?

Take a look at this shopping site: Wow Gift Mart

Can you see that it has made good use of their credibility from their eBay history? When people buy in eBay, the feedback profile is definitely one of the key determining factors whether they will buy from a seller or not. Therefore, letting visitors know how you did in eBay would absolutely help raising their confidence level to buy in your site.

You can do it, too, can't you?