How to tie in EBay to your e-commerce strategy
Thus, EBay has established itself as a pretty major corporation with millions of active users. It pretty much goes without saying then that any e-commerce site worth its salt will want to take advantage of EBay, particularly in its early days as it attempts to establish a worldwide web presence.
Another obvious reason for Magento e-commerce developers to use EBay is that the corporations have purchased Magento itself. This means that EBay has made it easier for Magento-built sites to tap into the functionality and customer base that EBay offers.
Although EBay does charge a monthly fee to have a listed shop, the option is always there for people testing the water in EBay e-commerce merely to list items for free as a regular user. This is a good way to test out your EBay strategy, but in the long run it is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. If you want to make EBay a serious part of a wider e-commerce strategy, then you would be well advised to pay the monthly fee of around US$25 and create a branded presence on the website.
Test the market demand
One of the obvious benefits of using EBay is that you can test the market demand for products that you're selling, or are planning to sell. It provides a low-cost entry-level way to acclimatise yourself with the market that you're intending to work in, and you can actually test it out before launching your own website if you so desire. Many viable and successful businesses have launched on EBay.
Alternatively, if you already have a site then you can direct people towards your e-commerce store on your shop's home page within EBay, meaning that you can reach a potential audience of millions. While you can't expect to attract all of those customers, you may find that a sizeable chunk of them do end up checking out your e-commerce site.
Another obvious advantage of using EBay is that if you brand your EBay store diligently then you can build up an online reputation either before you launch your website, or one that goes hand in hand with your existing e-commerce store. EBay provides editing tools to ensure that magento developers linking their site to EBay can ensure that their EBay store has a very distinctive and brand-focused appearance.
Once you've built your e-commerce web store with Magento, the challenge in the incredibly complex world of the internet will be in attracting people to your site. The best way to do this is to build up a truly integrated and social media-heavy web presence, which will make your e-commerce store look like a vibrant and attractive place to be and, thus, give your business a credibility that will give it a distinct advantage over competitors.
Thus, operating on social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, can be very helpful to an e-commerce site, as can using techniques such as blogging about your business and the industry in a technique often referred to as link building. But, unquestionably, EBay can also be a massive part of creating a web presence. Googling the names of numerous businesses will bring up their EBay store right near the top of the links, and this not only lends credibility to a business name, it also offers virtually unlimited feedback. Virtually every transaction that is carried out on EBay gains customer feedback, so the aspiring ecommerce developer can really gain a lot of rep from a simple EBay store.
In the long run, if you want to build up a large and successful business then EBay can only be part of that strategy. If you've taken the time to acquire e-commerce site-building software such as Magento then you naturally want to produce your own distinctive e-commerce store and attract people to that. And the profit margins on sales through your own site will be considerably better than anything EBay can offer. But EBay offers Magento e-commerce developers in particular a valuable platform to help grown their business in the beginning, and it would be foolish to ignore the opportunities that it offers.
