I have always wondered if Anchor Stores were worth the extra £270 a month over featured stores. To recap, the advantages of a Anchor store over a featured store are:
- More emails – 5000 vs 2500
- More custom pages – 15 vs 10 (but who is ever going to use that many)
- Logo on the store homepage
- More frequent exposure in the related shops box on the eBay search results.
A full comparison shop subscription levels can be found here
Out of these the only thing for which might be worth paying £270 is the chance of more traffic to your listings and shop homepage. The problem is there is has been no data available on whether having an anchor shop actually has any effect….until now. Being the scientific types we are at Auctioning4u we did an experiment to establish if having an anchor shop had any affect on our traffic.
Before I get into figures, I should first point out that as Auctioning4u is constantly changing its stock and the number of items listed, it is difficult to make a comparison over time. It we have more items listed then it is likely that our listings will get more traffic overall. What I have done is divide the traffic by the number of listings to try and massage the results. Still this is far from perfect.
Anyway we ran the trial for month of April. The following table compares April’s figures (as reported in the eBay traffic reports) with the preceeding two months and here are the results:
|
|
February |
March |
April |
|
Bids per listing |
5.79 |
6.29 |
6.8 |
|
Page Views per listing |
172 |
196 |
195 |
|
Homepage views per listing |
29.44 |
37 |
41.43 |
|
Unique visitors per listing |
32 |
36 |
35 |
As can be seen the results are far from conclusive. The number of bids and homepage visits has gone up but not massively and the nubmer of visitors per listing has actually gone down. Sell through rate and average selling price (not shown) were also not significantly changed.
Going by these figures, I would say the the case for getting an anchor shop is unproven at best.
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