How To Run Your Own Ebay Store
February 12th 2009
Our Internet School > Website Marketing > Auction Sites
Passive income strategy 4 – Run your own eBay store
Being an active buyer or seller using eBay could not really be defined as a business model that generates a passive income, because you would have to be actively involved in running the business at all times. For example, if you were making your money by selling products that you are obtaining from drop shipping companies, you would be on a constant lookout for new suppliers, continually having to list new auctions and so on.
If, however, you were able to send visitors to a page on your site that offers them the ability to buy targeted products or services from your own eBay store, that is an entirely different matter. More importantly, if that store was regularly and automatically updated, your involvement in running the business after the initial set up would be minimal.
It is possible to do this, and you can set the whole thing up at no additional cost once you have your domain and web hosting accounts set up. Learn how to do this at Our Internet School
In order to do so, the first thing to do is apply to be an eBay affiliate through the eBay Partner Network. Once this account is set up, then every time someone buys a product from eBay through your partner link, you will be paid a percentage of eBay’s fees as a commission. A good way to earn as an affiliate
Although the exact percentage of the fees that you will be paid varies from one eBay site to another (depending on which country site you work with), it is probably best to become a partner of the main US site in any case (because of the number and range of products available). In this case, the percentage varies from 50% to 75% of the fees payable.
You have already seen how you set up a WordPress blog on your own website, so now you need to log back in to the admin control panel, because you are going to create a new page where you will host your new eBay store.
In order to do so, you need yet another plug-in of which there is a free and a paid version available from phpBay. The different ‘versions’ can be found by following the ‘Products’ link on the home page.
Although the ‘Pro’ version of the plug-in is far more fully featured and flexible than the free ‘Lite’ version, even this can produce an extremely attractive and user-friendly eBay store on your site. For instance, this is an eBay store page created using the Lite version:
Once you have downloaded the plug-in, install it on your blog and then create the new page from the ‘Write’ tab at the top left:
Give the page a title that is related to the products you want to list in your store and then create the store on the new page by following the plug-in instructions. Use the primary keyword that applies to the rest of your site (which could, for example, be an AdSense site built as per income strategy 1). By doing this, the plug-in will only include products in your store that are related to that keyword term.
Your store page will be automatically updated as older auctions expire and new ones are added, so there will be a regular flow of new products for your visitors to view and bid on. You could easily make a membership site this way.
The final thing to remember is to add a link from the front page of your site to your auction store, because without an appropriate link, it is going to be very difficult for visitors to know of the existence of your store page.
Once again, after you have initially set this up, you can leave the store to run itself!
Why do people get addicted to ebay?
Mail this post