Introduction

Hello and welcome to today’s workshop!

The eBay Stores team and co-host Lisa Suttora, Founder/CEO of WhatDoISell.com™ are here today to help you get your eBay store shelves stocked and readied for the incoming holiday buyers!

eBay was the #1 Trafficked Holiday Site in 2006

eBay was the #1 trafficked e-commerce site during the 2006 holiday season, ahead of other giants like Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target.

We’re advertising more this year, and expect traffic to be even better.

More buyers than ever will be flocking to eBay, so this is your time to take advantage of the traffic and prepare for big holiday profits!

People who have never purchased online before are headed to the web to do their holiday shopping in order to avoid frantic malls, overflowing parking lots, and rising gas prices.

And eBay makes it easy for buyers to shop, with an abundance of great items to choose from!

Section 1: Preparing Your Store for the Holidays

The first order of business when preparing your store for the holidays is to do some store housekeeping and holiday set up to make sure the shelves are stocked and shining when your visitors arrive!

Create Holiday Categories

Your store categories are your store’s virtual departments or aisles. They act as the guide to help your customers find exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily.

During the holidays, you want to showcase your best merchandise at the top of your store categories list and create special categories for that merchandise.

Create new categories your featured holiday products. When creating categories use relevant, searchable, keywords. Because your store category names be indexed by the search engines.

The search engine studies show that most buyers search using specific keyword phrases, so you’ll want to give your store categories a specific name to make them search engine friendly but you also need to give thought to how your buyers will shop.

Will they shop by brand name, theme, product type etc.?

For example, if you carry a wide assortment of holiday themed plates, rather than creating a category that says “Holiday plates”, you may split the category out by theme, brand name or style such as:

“Enesco Santa Platters”

Note: Your categories should contain enough products to look full but not so many to be as to be overwhelming.

When a buyer clicks on a category, they want to see a selection and representation of the products in the category. Having only one item in a category can leave your buyer feeling unfulfilled.

However, having 190 items in a category will leave your buyer feeling overwhelmed and they are unlikely to scroll through all the pages.

For more tips on creating store categories Click here

Update Store Keywords

You’ve brought in new inventory for the holiday season, set up your new holiday categories, now it’s time to update your store’s keywords!

Using current, relevant keywords in your store are a very important part of getting your store pages indexed by the search engines.

In addition to using searchable keywords in your store category names (and of course your listing titles and listing descriptions!) you'll also want to make sure that your store description contains the keywords that reflect any new products and brand names you sell.

As an added bonus, you can increase your chances of potential buyers finding your store pages in major search engines such as MSN, Google, Yahoo by optimizing your Store’s Search Engine Keywords with relevant, searchable keywords.

You can do this in Manage My Store > Store Design > Search Engine Keywords found in the left hand navigation bar of My eBay.

To help determine what keywords to use, you can use the Stores Search Keywords Report.

The Search Keywords Report will give you a breakdown of each search keyword that has been used to find your Store and listings. You can use this report to identify which keywords are most effective in finding your Store and listings, and then include those keywords in your listing titles and descriptions.

Learn how Store Traffic Reports can help you find relevant keywords.

Section 2: Advertising Your Store Merchandise

You’ve stocked your store with some great products this holiday season, now it’s time to advertise!

Next we’ll talk about how to advertise the products in your store to increase your sales.

Up-Sell for Higher Average Sale Prices!

The holidays are also THE #1 time that a buyer is likely to upgrade to a better quality/more expensive product, almost without thinking about it.

If you’re not carrying deluxe/high end versions of your products, you’re leaving money on the table.

Showcase high-end versions of your products this time of year. Stores Promotion Boxes (which we will discuss next) are a great way to show your customers deluxe versions of a product they might not find otherwise.

By carrying high-end up-sell products, you’ll be in a position to increase your final sales ticket and the total value of each sale.