by: David Curtis

With Special Thanks and Help from:

Monique Swann (Tampa Agricultural Products) and Maria Greene (Easy Street Home Decor)

 

This is useful instruction to whoever needs to set up a store.  Part of this information I received from Maria Greene who works at Easy Street Home Decor in Brooksville, who has her  own successful eBay store, and part of this information comes from my own reading and research.   Fairly obviously, the first thing you should know is that you need to be a registered member of eBay to get started.  For the majority of cases you also have to have a feedback number of 20 or greater after successfully auctioning enough items on eBay prior to this point, and finally, you need to have a PayPal account in order to receive payments.

 

Ok, so now you're ready to begin.

 

Go the the eBay home page (http://www.ebay.com) and click on eBay Stores.  You will see an area where you can click on "Open a Store" and "Manage My Store".  Click on "Open a Store".

 

Here you will enter your eBay user name and password which you had to create when you set up your account.  After logging in you will be presented with an agreement form which you must accept in order to continue.

 

At this point you can begin setting up the basics of your store.  First you will want to choose a design for your store.  Now give it a name related to what you sell and underneath that there is a box for you to give your store a description.  Be careful with both of these as they will help guide customers to your store.  You have 300 characters to use as keywords, separated from one another by a comma, to help people find your goods.  Include brand names and whatever specials you're offering.

 

You can now choose one of their icons, or upload a picture of your own to use as your store logo.

 

At this point I will inform you that there are three levels of participation for subscribers selling items from their eBay stores.  These levels are Basic, Featured and Anchor.

 

For most people, the Basic subscription is probably good enough for getting started.  Those whose sales volumes are greater may feel the need to move on to the Featured subscription level, and those with a full blown fast paced businesses will want to opt for an Anchor level subscription accounts.  Marketing support is available as part of the package at the Anchor level.

 

Whichever level your store is set up at, you'll want to customize your pages under the "Manage Your Custom Pages" section in order to describe whatever rules or policies you create regarding merchandise return etc., to describe yourself and your qualifications or to display your credentials.  You can also use these custom pages to help describe your products better.  Your store comes with 20 Custom Categories numbered 1 - 20, which you can rename (use something useful which the search engines can find when people searching the internet type in their key words).  After creating these area headings you can divide up your merchandise into these categories to allow people to get a better focus on what you're selling. 

 

The Basic Subscription eBay store does not allow you to minimize the eBay logo.  Only the two higher store categories allow you to place your logo on top more aggressively.  This is not a major issue, however, since most people know they are shopping on eBay to begin with, and eBay is a trusted name, not related to any one product or another.

 

Customizing the look and feel of your eBay store is done with "Store Builder".  With Store Builder you can change the font, color, design and any text you have entered in your store to describe it.  You may want to customize the look and feel of your store for various reasons, including the reasons you would want to change the appearance of any store - such as decorating for the holidays or for special sales events to draw attention to a deal.

 

You are going to next want to list your store inventory for sale, and then use the eBay seller tools to help you on your way.

 

On the eBay "Sell" page (once you have selected "Sell" on the menu bar) and under the section on the page which says "Sell Your Item: Select Category" you will see that there are five areas to prepare you item for sale.  These five areas are numbered 1 - 5 and are:

At the top of the screen under Category you will be able to choose the custom category you would like to put your item in.  The custom category would be one of the 20 custom categories you created which I described earlier.

 

Still under 1 - Category - you now put in your "Buy it Now" price.  With a store item, there are no bidders so you always have to put in this price.  Now you have to select the duration of time that the item should remain on sale.  You must choose between the following 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, or Good Until Cancelled.  You also have the option to set it at 30 days and have it set to automatically renew at the end of each 30 days until you decide to cancel that item manually.

 

The cost to you for inserting an inventory list is only pennies.

 

From here, I have found a listing on the internet for most of the things I have started explaining here to you, as well as an entire group of downloadable PDF articles which you can download yourself from eBay University.

 

PDF Printable Articles:

 

eBay Store (6 "Chapters")

 

 

eBay Shipping Made Easy (5 "Chapters")

 

 

eBay Photography Tutorial (6 "Chapters")

 

 

And, for those of you who need to deal more in depth with PayPal

 

eBay PayPal Tutorial (7 "Chapters")

 

 

As you can see, the beginning steps are quite basic, and eBay offers plenty of help getting started and help growing later on.  If you are an artist who makes jewelry or paints paintings, eBay stores are often quite friendly and can offer you a nice outlet for selling your artwork yourself.

 

Once you have set up your basic store with its own name and have created some categories for your products to be placed into you can start to add items to begin selling.  Here's how (thanks Monique Swann for your notes revealing the exact sequence of steps [Jan, 2008]:

 

I hope this piece was helpful to you.  Good luck with your eBay adventures!