eBay vs website

[deano24]

Hi all,

Wanting to get your thoughts on marketing and selling products through eBay or a website. I have a small business currently only running trough eBay but thinking about expanding with a website. With the great numbers of people using eBay I wonder if making a website is worth the hassle or get more products on eBay to help with this expansion. Any thoughts??

Thanks

[veikoh]

You can brand and price your products much better than being in eBay. But you need skills or buy skills to do following:
1. eCommerce software (you can get those from free open source but you need to install and possibly change or configure those)
2. Website design
3. Onsite SEO and keyword research
4. Link building

[TelecommutingMom]

I agree, you should have both. Some people don't like ebay for one reason or another or some people search for things in a way that it may lead them to your website rather than ebay. I also think you can price things differently when they are not on ebay.

[Mochajava]

With ebay you can get tons of traffic but you will end up paying fees and losing profit but with a website you have to pay for advertising and traffic.

[rogercbryan]

Why has no one mentioned Amazon - They are much easier to work with then eBay. I have an online bookstore that sells a decent amount of books. I actually gave up on my own site because of the time and money it takes to develop and market the site. I look at it like this... I can spend $2000 a month advertising my site to get 100 sales or I can give Amazon & eBay 15% and sell 10,000 items. These are legitimate numbers based on my experience. I sold a little over 156,000 books in 2010 of those 156,000 maybe 200 were from my site so less then .001%

I just launched a bath products site Bath Bombs - the main thing I'm working on right now is getting my site integrated with eBay and Amazon. I know from experience that this is how I will make the most money.

[liquidx]

my experience is that expanding to website is great however you need to find a great seo to sell a high volume as large as ebay and amazon. With SEO it is for the long term and but once you get in the top rankings you will be banking a lot more than amazon and ebay. With ebay, it is super competitive many sellers are hit with fees as well as pricing so competitively that they make little profit but it does help bring you traffic to your website. Amazon does well you are charged about 20% commission hence you should mark up your products by the same number atleast thats what I do and with Amazon people are willing to pay the higher price because of the Amazon brand and what they have built up . Hope this answers your questions. if you are in need of a SEO i think i do a good job. lol

[rogercbryan]

my experience is that expanding to website is great however you need to find a great seo to sell a high volume as large as ebay and amazon. With SEO it is for the long term and but once you get in the top rankings you will be banking a lot more than amazon and ebay. With ebay, it is super competitive many sellers are hit with fees as well as pricing so competitively that they make little profit but it does help bring you traffic to your website. Amazon does well you are charged about 20% commission hence you should mark up your products by the same number atleast thats what I do and with Amazon people are willing to pay the higher price because of the Amazon brand and what they have built up . Hope this answers your questions. if you are in need of a SEO i think i do a good job. lol

I'm not sure I like your advice based on my experience. So many people think that rankings alone drive sales. That isn't true. Once you get your site to rank you have to cultivate the buyer via trust, content, check out process, product offerings, etc.. I'm pretty damn good at SEO yet I make way more money selling my products on Amazon and eBay then I do from any of my sites including those that rank well.