Many people have discovered the convenience of selling their unwanted goods online to earn a little extra cash, using websites such as eBay to reach a ready-made audience of willing buyers. Some sellers decide to take the next step, building on their trading success by actively buying goods to list and resell at a profit. While this can be enjoyable as well as generating some welcome additional income, it can quickly become unwieldy to manage individual listings as your sales volume starts to increase.
The solution is to set up an eBay Store, which is a halfway house between selling individual items and setting up your own independent ecommerce operation. An eBay store allows a good degree of control over how your items are listed, and you can also edit the color scheme, insert your own logo, and add original content to adapt the look and feel of your store.
However, the problem is that the vast majority of such stores end up looking very similar to each other, which can have an adverse effect on your selling ability. It’s often said that familiarity breeds contempt, and if a visitor has seen many other similar-looking stores before landing on yours, there’s a high chance that they’ll simply move on without examining the products you’re selling.
Enter the Custom Template
The solution to this problem is remarkably easy. eBay allows sellers to use custom templates to provide a much greater degree of control over the appearance and operation of their stores, offering several powerful advantages.
Stronger Branding
When you develop a distinctive look for your store, you begin to build a brand identity of your own. This differentiates your store from the thousands of others you’re probably competing with and helps to build trust and encourage customer loyalty.
Better Looks, More Sales
A custom template gives you the opportunity to make your store look far more like an attractive, independent website than a mere subsection of the eBay behemoth. You can more easily tailor the design to appeal to your target market, and so greatly improve your sales rates.
Greater Flexibility
Custom templates make it easier to control the placement of your products. For example, you can make sure your best sellers are given greater prominence, or link similar items together to provide cross-selling opportunities.
It’s important to note that custom templates don’t magically unlock any extra features of an eBay store, they simply make it much easier for the non-technical store operator to manage and experiment.
Where to Get Custom eBay Store Templates
If you’re just starting out as an eBay store operator, you may not wish to invest in your own fully customized template. In this case, try searching for “free ebay store templates” or similar on your search engine of choice. This will bring up plenty of sites offering downloadable templates, or even online tools to help you build your own. This will give you the chance to try out the concept to see if it could work for your selling business. There are many offer this service on Fiverr as well.
However, such an off-the-peg approach will still suffer from many of the problems of the default eBay template – lack of individuality, a one-size-fits-all design, and so on. To take things to the next level, consider approaching a local web design company to have a genuinely unique template built to your exact specifications. Technically, eBay templates are fairly simple and won’t present too much of a challenge to an experienced web designer, and so you can expect to get an inexpensive deal.
Not only will a professionally designed eBay Store template look great, it’ll be truly unique to your selling business and designed to appeal to your customers, helping you to move a few rungs up the ecommerce ladder for very little cost.
