One of the main debate out there for us dropshippers is whether we sell using EBAY(Wider market but big competition) or through our own site (no bleedin EBAY Fees!)
EBAY Fee's can be a real pain to dropshippers... for e.g I recently dropshipped a Wii at a £22 profit margin... I only made £9 profit as it was done through EBAY (insertion fees, seller fee, paypal fees).
I've been paying these fee's for a while, so now I'm dropshipping through my own site... problem here is getting traffic to the site!
I'm now using a combination of both... EBAY to sell the odd item, but in my EBAY ads' I'm placing links to my site, which has driven up my hits considerably.
Anyone else in this predicament...any thoughts on this from the forum?
No question about it. You need to use both sales venues.
eBay might not give you massive margins but with the right marketing you can use eBay to capture customers and transfer them to your website.
When you make an eBay sale you need to slip a leaflet in with the item telling them about your site. Also, when you dispatch their item send them a confirmation email that also includes a link to your site and offer them the chance to sign up to your newsletter.
You don't need to list all of your products on eBay but put the ones that sell in the most in terms of quantity. Look at eBay fees as marketing expenses, not just cost of sale costs.
On a side note the reason eBay fees are so high is because they are worth it! You sold a Wii and it cost you £13 in fees. How much would it cost you to sell it on your site? You may say nothing but you have to attract that customer to your site. That may be by spending money on SEO or PPC and this costs!
It is a great idea to use both. You can use ebay to provide some traffic for your website. You will need to do a lot of SEO work to get your website receiving enough traffic that will get you the sales to compete with ebay. Of course once you have established your website then at least you are not necessarliy reliant on ebay.
Most people start on ebay as its easy targeted marketing for your particular product. Of course if ebay decides to no longer allow you to sell or paypal blocks you then you have a problem
Have to agree with the posted comments as I am just venturing down the route of selling on ebay and starting a website dealing with Childrens UV Sun protection clothing.
One thing I have noticed is that despite putting a link to the website, few if any actually visit the website.
I do get the feeling that (despite a few years of running websites) the punter is purely interested in the lowest price on Ebay and most realise that external websites generally the prices are incresed, its very much a case of using ebay as a loss leader sometimes to tempt the punter to buy other goods.
All in all I think its horses for courses, ebay might not nescessarily be the right target audience for your products.
Seems there is pros and cons for both. I am looking to start to drop ship. But I am going to go down the route of running my own site. For the reason that I can customize the shop and also I can run a affiliate program with it. Getting people to work for me as well.
Website vs Ebay
my view
Linear Mode
November 2009
