I have noticed that several businesses promote their eBay listings prominently from their websites. For example:
I suspect that the reasons for doing this are two fold.
- Drive traffic to the eBay listing and thereby get more sales
- Save on eBay listings fees by an getting affiliate payment for driving traffic from the eBay site.
I think that giving this kind of website promotion of eBay listings is a mistake. The eBay listing fee is your payment to eBay for marketing your products , if you feel you have to drive more traffic to the site then you are not getting your money’s worth. Furthermore, the volume of traffic which will be driven to your products from your website will probably be small compared to the traffic which are driven via the eBay search.
Another reason not to place links to eBay, or any other site, on your homepage is that it drive traffic from you site, which should be the preferred channel as it incurs no fees, to a site where a fairly hefty fee is payable.
Ask yourself the question, do I want people to buy products from my website or from eBay. If it is your website, don’t place a link to eBay on you homepage. Building traffic to a site is hard, don’t throw it away.
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