If you’re a volume seller of commodity goods, the standard eBay auction and fixed price listing formats may not be ideal for you, for a variety of reasons:

• Listing fees may not be economical for high-volume, low-cost items
• Auctions and fixed-price listings run for a limited amount of time—seven days or less (or ten days, but with an additional surcharge)
• Your visibility is limited during this period of time by the number of listings you post, meaning that costs are either higher because you post many listings, or because you must post them often

Given the amount of time and resources it can take to manage a large number of auctions that are ending every seven or ten days, it may not make sense to try to sell items this way that are only worth cents or a few dollars. For some types of limited-demand items, on the other hand, non-auction listings that don’t expire quickly would give sale items time to find their market and generate interest. Antiques and some types of high-end collectibles can fall into this category, amongst other things.

Using eBay Stores

For situations like these, eBay has an ideal solution—eBay Stores. You may have noticed eBay stores items in the past when they appear at the end of some eBay search results. eBay Stores offer certain benefits to high-volume commodity sellers that are often more appealing than those offered by auction-format listings:

• Drastically reduced listing fees beginning at $0.05 per listing
• Longer durations, from 30 days to “good ‘til canceled” (indefinite listing)
• Access to subscription tools to manage listing, selling, and feedback in volume, along with tools for market research, accounting, and store web traffic analysis
• An online storefront integrated with eBay’s own site to which you can send customers and repeat buyers

A number of other benefits, tools, and eBay features are also available to you as the proprietor of an eBay store—far too many to list here.

For all of these reasons, volume sellers of commodity goods and sellers of low-demand, high-value items often find that eBay Stores are a better, more economical, lower-overhead way to leverage eBay’s huge international customer base.

Requirements

There are several requirements and/or prerequisites for opening an eBay store:

1. Be an eBay member with an active seller’s account.
2. Meet one of the following criteria:
   • Have a feedback profile of 20 or higher, -or-
   • Be ID Verified, -or-
   • Have a PayPal account in good standing.
3. Pay a monthly subscription fee depending on the size of the store you want to maintain, with subscriptions starting at $15.95 per month for a basic store for managing up to 250 listings per day.

Once you can meet these requirements, opening an eBay store is as easy as visiting the Open an eBay Store link.

Running Your eBay Store

After opening your store, you can drive success by focusing on the four aspects of eBay Store selling that eBay says are essential:

1. Building and customizing your store
2. Carefully managing your listings and sales
3. Promoting your online storefront and listings
4. Monitoring your success and making adjustments as necessary

As an eBay store owner, your starting point for mastering these four aspects is the eBay Stores Toolkit, where you’ll find access not only to the eBay Store tools that will help you to accomplish these goals, but also to a wealth of tutorial and advanced selling information and help provided by eBay. Though there may still be many occasions on which eBay’s traditional listing formats are useful to you, maintaining an eBay store can be an important (and even central) component of your online ebusiness.