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eBay store Design – Does it help?

by trevor. Average Reading Time: about a minute.

There was some interesting information contained in the newsletter from Aswas.  Debbit Levitt states that some sellers found that custom designs reduced the amount of traffic driven to their products.

We had a few sellers tell us that they had their custom eBay Store home pages "professionally" designed, but that when they checked their Traffic Reports, they noticed that they had MORE people (than before) leaving their Store from the home page… as in people were hitting their Store and leaving without clicking on ANYTHING. That’s bad! This supports our theory that even a professionally designed home page has the potential to confuse or distract visitors, who are used to seeing items as soon as they get to an eBay Store. This is part of the reason that we try to talk everybody out of doing custom eBay Store home pages.

This is very interesting as the likes of frooition say that their designs boost sales.  That said, there are custom homepage and custom homepages.  Frooition reskins the storefront leaving the products in place, whereas other custom homepages completely remove the products.  It is probably this second type of store which are loosing sales.

The best homepage designs I have seen are from a company in Germany called Create your template.  Their shops look great, but show few products and therefore probably hamper not build sales.

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  • http://www.kidsontalks.com Elizabeth

    I don’t think professional ebay shop design has a negative effect on buyers. Having been an ebay buyer for the last 7 years? in the days when ebay.co.uk did not exist I can vouch that I am an avid ebayer (OK I don’t shop anywhere else) What does put me off straight away is BAD ebay shop design. When only the header is being filled with html junk and the sellers ebay listings start way below the fold.
    I do believe there is nothing in between, if you want to invest get yourself decent design for branding purposes. If not, stick with the ebay standard and a logo.
    I designed my own bit part store :

    http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Rubber-Girls-Boutique

    I am a bad designer but it doesn’t detract from the normal eBay form, which keeps my customers comfortable and familiar. Professional ebay design is ebay’s version of Web 2.0, its new, its fresh and it can be darn funky and soon customers will be as comfortable with professional designed store as they normal eBay standard. I certainly don’t flinch.

  • http://www.aswas.com Debbie

    Oh, I’d love to tell you more about what I said, which I believe you grabbed from one of our newsletters.

    The bottom line is that the sale is made or broken in the listing. Not all of the sellers who reported that their designs drove people away had not taken the items off the home page.

    We approach eBay Store design differently than just about everybody else on the planet. We like it that way. :) We know that anybody who wants a Frooition “skin” should hire them, and anybody who wants our approach will hire us.

    And the above comment has a point too. We find that it can be better to leave the eBay Store in a default design than to overdesign it. Overdesigning may get you an award, but more and more, we are seeing and hearing that it can make your traffic leave. I’d rather have a Store that works than one that wins an award. :)

  • http://www.EGadgetBay.com Jags

    I do not think that eBay store design has a -ve effect of visitors of a blog or a webpages…

    It depends on what type of ebay adds are put in. One can easily integrate ebay adds to a blog post… What do you say about
    adds seen at blogs like http://www.EGadgetBay.com/ http://www.YogaValue.com/ http://www.TumkurInfo.com/ just to mention few…

  • http://www.dZine-hub.com Noel

    A professionally designed home page does have the potential to confuse or distract visitors, ONLY if it is designed without giving a thought to the user’s perspective. This generally happens when a “designer” designs the storefront without consulting an ebay expert, who actually understand the buyer’s perspective better.
    Sometimes, the general ebay store works and in some other cases, a lot of design works well for clients. Design is particularly important when you want to brand yourself, especially when you sell luxury items.
    And, to be honest, it is your listings that drive the sales. Based on our research, an ebay store gets less than 1% of the combined visitors that the listings get. This is based on an average of 1000 active listings. And this figure drops down drastically if sellers have more than 1000 listings.