You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
We have a small business that pays the bills but the monthly cost of the e-commerce site we use seems a little steep (£41 per site, we have two sites). We also use ebay as that's (usually) the first place that people look for stuff. All three are pulling their weight but I was wondering if a couple of non e-commerce (ie less cost-per-month) sites that point to ebay listings would be a better way to do things? We've had a few declined payments on one of the sites because of the new Strong Customer Authentication measures (customer side, not us) that have been introduced yet ebay [i]generally[/i] seems to run smoothly enough.
As it is, it's not broken but it could do with a little TLC but I'm a little out of my depth with techy website payment stuff in all honesty, I like the idea of ebay doing the heavy lifting in that regard but then I get that not everyone likes to use ebay.
Any advice at all? 'Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit' isn't a solution in this case, sadly.
ebay fees can be a significant factor here. I guess it depends on the inventory numbers and profitability
If you are using one of the shop options for "free" listings it makes sense to work out which option to use and where the breaks are (e.g. is it better to have no shop fees for the amount of listings you have or the first shop with x listings
websites are great from a lower fee per sale perspective, but its getting people to access them that is the issue - might be worth sharing your website with customers who buy from eBay with a discount in an attempt to port them across?
Hopw this helps!
You don’t say what platform you’re using today but have you looked at shopify, squarespace or wix to see if they are more cost effective?
Thanks for the replies, it's appreciated. We use EKM at the minute and they've been fine* for the last ten or so years. It doesn't help that I know the square root of bugger all about SEO and all that gubbins and have little to no interest in maintaining social media accounts :/
* for a given value of 'fine', obvs.
Actually, I've just looked at Wix and it looks like it's only £22 per month. Blimey, that's quite a saving. Thanks for the pointer!
Shopify and Wix are the market leaders - if you can drive traffic to your own sites through social media and web-search you’ll make more money, but it takes a bit more effort. The both have excellent security, integrated payment, 3rd party apps etc.
The problem with having your own website and then using eBay to deliver the e-commerce back end is probably fees as well as having little control about how you rank on their search listings.
We have a small business that pays the bills but the monthly cost of the e-commerce site we use seems a little steep (£41 per site, we have two sites). We also use ebay as that’s (usually) the first place that people look for stuff.
Have you calculated the typical percentage costs per a transaction of the two channels? Fixed monthly cost (zero for eBay, £X for your hosted e-commerce site) is only part of the cost, of course.
No, not really. I'm monumentally slapdash in that regard, as long as everything pays its own way and we can pay the house bills each week I've just kind of left it alone.