Should I Open an eBay Store or an eCommerce Site?

I have been asked this eBay store question a lot and I have worked with a lot of people that were faced with this option.

Let me tell you a little story.  In late 2008 I was asked by a colleague if I would be willing to sit down with a friend that was looking to start selling products online.  Seeing that this is my passion, I had no problem helping someone out.  Afterall, I was once in that position and would have given anything to have spoken with someone that had my experience in online sales.

I met this person at the local coffee shop and quickly found out that he had hired a developer to begin building his ecommerce site.  Not a problem I figured until the conversation got into the details of the situation.  That was about the extent of the knowledge of this guy as far as his awareness of what he was getting into.  He had no idea about configuring product files to upload all of the pertinent product information into the store.  He didn’t even know what information he should be sharing about each item with his customers.  We were at square one.

This guy was not working and only had a few months to get this store up and running or he would have to get a job.  I explained that he needed to understand his goal and his goal should not have been to get an ecommerce store up and running.  His goal should have been to generate enough income so that he could begin working for himself and not have to go back into the workforce!

This guy already had product sources and they were all drop shippers to boot.  And we’re talking killer niche too.  I was stoked and said, “You can open an eBay store in no time and you can begin selling just in time for the holiday rush!

Long story short, the ecommerce sight was all this guy could see himself working towards.  So let’s jump ahead to late spring 2009.  I had actually wondered what ever happened to this guy.  We had a few short correspondences over the winter but I had no idea where his project stood.  So sometime in may I get an email.  He wants to meet again.  He was working a day job again and needed to talk right away.

Not a problem.  I don’t know if I wanted to help as much as my curiosity was peaking about the urgent situation that I was called upon to lend some insight to.  Low and behold, we sit down and the conversation started like this:

“Thanks for checking out my new site.  Before we get into any suggestions about how we can improve the site, I have a bigger problem.  I have thousands invested here, am back at my day job, have a beautiful site with great products, but I really need to know, how do I get people to come to site so that they can buy things!!!”

Needless to say, I was not surprised in the least, was dying to blurt out “I told you so!” and even felt a little bad for the guy.

With millions of users perusing eBay everyday, I am 100% in favor of eBay stores and using that foundation to branch into traditional ecommerce.  In my next post I will get into a little more detail of my thought process here, the benefits of an eBay store and why it should be the foundation of your ecommerce efforts when starting out.

3 Reasons to Open eBay Store Before an eCommerce Site

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