Power Sellers Unite

Start UR Store · Joined: 10 Mar 2007 Posts: 37

Do you guys think it is better to pay to create traffic to ecrater or to your own website. I run www.starturstore.com and I drive more traffic and have much higher sales on my website than ecrater.com. I have uploaded a couple products there hoping it would generate more traffic to my website. But so far it is rather dead. Any advice?

lightning_lash · Joined: 22 Jul 2006 Posts: 367

There is no substitute to having your own website. You should drive all of your traffic to your website, but it takes time to build up traffic and develope a customer base.
eCrater is the best of the fixed price listing sites, and can certainly be used to promote your product. The more your website name appears on the internet, and the more links to your website exist, the easier it will be for people to find your web page.

xbaystores · Joined: 30 Oct 2006 Posts: 562

I would suggest running your own site, if nothing else so you can customize it and have full image (not cropped) thumbnails. Those two features mean more than you can imagine when buyers start shopping. If the site is difficult to browse and see what you want (like eCrater can be) then you will lose sales.

Plus, most feedback I see from sellers there is zero, and the eBay-formed mentality against zero FB sellers kills you as well. I put a link on my site to my feedback saying to read what past customers say about my products and service, and it works much better than having no reputation and "real" testimonials.

vinewood · Joined: 26 Jul 2006 Posts: 236

this is what i did i made a second site ~ to help feed my main site ~

put ecrater and your site in google url every day or so ~ things will get better ~ if you use all the tools there are ~

happy easter

angelsolutions · Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 12:46 pm Post subject: Re: Ecrater or your own website?

Quote: › docWrite("quote") put ecrater and your site in google url every day or so ~ things will get better ~ if you use all the tools there are ~

A word of caution on the submitting to any search engine "every day" --and in particular to stern Google:

You can be penalized or even banned for spamming, if you submit your site too often.

Better to submit once per quarter or so, and make sure to make use of any type of product feeds the major engines offer, such as googlebase, submitting your product RSS feed to Yahoo and your product feed to MSN.

JMHO,
sylvia

BigT · Joined: 13 Mar 2005 Posts: 305

Quote: › docWrite("quote")Do you guys think it is better to pay to create traffic to ecrater or to your own website.
All my promoting is done to my domain names - not directly to my ecrater.com stores. I do this because of my long turn big picture of my businesses.
I use ecreater.com basically as a shopping cart. Nothing more. Currently all my sites click to ecrater.com. My site is basically a home page.
eCrater.com won't bring traffic to your site. It's not made to do that. It's a shopping cart. Since you have to advertise yourself to get buyers into your ecrater.com store I don't see how that would bring you traffic to your own store. ecrater.com does not have traffic (in my opinion) unless you go get it yourself.

purdue512 · Joined: 11 Mar 2007 Posts: 34

Start your own store, for sure.

We are auctioning a store today:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=009&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&viewitem=&item=190100021315&rd=1&rd=1

HowardH · Joined: 26 Jan 2006 Posts: 159

I see that your store did not sell.

Curious, though -- if it's such a great money-maker, why are you selling it? And how much do you want for it?

purdue512 · Joined: 11 Mar 2007 Posts: 34

Yeah, we're a little sad that it didn't sell...

Reason for selling #1: I am currently running several other stores and can't keep them all going at once. I will keep a similar store to run myself while I sell off these others. I think there is opportunity for niche marketing on specific sub-sections of the product base. The Blog Directory is also taking a ton of my time because growth has been really strong and I need to focus.

Reasons for selling #2: Looking to build a community of motivated store owners. We have a ton of automation tools given our background in enterprise data management that I know many "little guys" don't have. We have tested about 6 of the major API's (Amazon, Shopping.com, eBay, CNET, WeatherBug, etc) and are looking for cool ideas for how to utilize them to drive sales. However, setting this stuff up (feeds, API's etc) is time consuming. My hope is that, over time, we'll get quite a few store owners hosting with us. We'll talk regularly about what's working / not working. I can see us ultimately deciding to join forces on some ideas / campaigns with those who have a good fit, are serious, etc.

How much do we want? Negotiable if the other party was serious and understands the requirements of Internet Marketing to make something like this really work.

PM for more discussion.

Thx for your post.

purdue512