Workshop Format

The workshop content is directly below. After you’ve read through today’s workshop, I’m here to answer your questions about building your product line and successful product sourcing!

The #1 Trafficked Holiday Site in 2006

Over the 2006 holiday season, eBay was the #1 trafficked ecommerce site on the web.

Clearly positioned as leader of the pack, eBay came out ahead in front of heavy online hitters like Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

With all of the shoppers coming to eBay ready to buy, this can mean big holiday profits for you, IF you are ready for the buyers when they arrive.

As shoppers become more web savvy, gas prices continue to rise and long lines & out of stock products at the mall become less tolerable, buyers are turning to the 7x24 online shopping convenience and selection of the web.

Cluttered, Confusing, Listings? Then Say Goodbye to Conversion

If you want to convert those holiday browsers to buyers, you simply must provide them with listings that are easy to read, provide all the information they need to make a purchasing decision, and do it in a clean, clear format.

Your visitors shouldn’t have to dig through your listings to figure out what you are selling, what the features and specifications are, what the dimensions are etc.

Nor should they have to click from page to page trying to figure out your shipping, delivery and customer service policies.

It should all be right there in your “scannable” (meaning ability to be quickly scanned by your visitor) listing.

Prepare Your Store for Guests

Target Corporation refers to their shoppers as guests rather than customers.

If you think about how you would treat a guest in your home, you would make sure that your house was spic-n-span, and that your guest knew where to find everything.

The same holds true for your eBay store.

Don’t make your customer work to buy your products.

Your store should be organized in an easy-to-navigate fashion with holiday categories featured prominently.

How to Set Up Holiday Categories

Your eBay store categories are your virtual store shelves. Customers coming to your store want to be able to quickly and easily find your holiday gift items.

They also want to see the merchandise you are showcasing this holiday season!

Categories are the equivalent of aisles, shelves and “end-caps” (the displays you see at the end of each aisle in a physical store.)

Creating fresh new categories to display your merchandise during the holiday season is a must!

For example, let’s say you sell Brand Y dishes in your eBay store. You carry several lines of Brand Y every day dishes, some fine china dishes for formal occasions and assorted styles of Christmas serving platters, plates and bowls.

Rather than groups all those products in a category called Brand Y, you would create new categories that would highlight your holiday related merchandise.

For example you might create some categories called:

Brand Y Formal Dishes

Brand Y Santa Platters

Brand Y Starter Sets

People who come to your eBay store will very likely be thinking about buying formal dishes on which to service their holiday dinner, Santa platters on which to serve cookies and starter dish sets which are the perfect holiday gift.

The key to setting up new holiday categories is to think like your buyers. How would they want to see the merchandise displayed in your eBay store?

Your can organize your listings according to brand, type of item, highly searched keywords, price levels, etc.

(You can set up 300 custom categories in your eBay store that can go 3 levels deep, if needed.)

Categories can be displayed in the order you specify. Feature your holiday related categories at the top of your category list, so that your customers can find them easily.

You can assign each item to two store categories.

How to Create Pre-Shopping Lists

Pre-shopping lists can be created by simply doing some pre-shopping for your customers. Group products together and again, think like your buyers.

When they come to your custom pages to look at your lists, who would they be buying for?

What information would be helpful to them?

Create a list of 10 or so items, add some photos of your product or include the store listing itself and then write a short but powerful blurb to SELL your products.

Tell them why this would be the perfect gift to buy this holiday season and who on their gift list would love it!

If you find yourself getting writers block, pull out a couple holiday catalogs that have recently arrived in your mail. You’ll find that many of them do pre-shopping lists.

Looking at catalogs to get ideas on how to write good sales copy on your custom pages can make this a fun and creative process!

Offer Special Promotions

If you want to get your customers excited about your products and give them an urgency to buy, there is no better way to do this than by offering a time sensitive special promotion.

Special promotions such as free shipping, combined shipping, free gift wrap and gift card, rebate programs, or creating a product bundle by including something extra (for example “These lovely crystal candle holders comes with a matching demi-bud vase!”) will get your buyers excited about your offerings and can persuade them to make their purchase from instead of your competitors.