You raise some very valid points. We do mention paid traffic in the post, and this is about the only way that you are going to be able to drive traffic to a stand-alone e-commerce store.

As we mentioned, you are going to pay for your traffic one way or the other. Either pay eBay fees, or pay for traffic via search engines.

eBay is a great venue to sell if you are selling a unique item. If you are selling something that everyone else is selling, then the laws of supply and demand are going to dictate that you are not going to make any money selling these items. This problem is just magnified on a site such as eBay where people have a garage sale mentality and really want to pay zero for just about anything.

In other posts we discuss finding a unique product niche where it is very hard to find a supply of the items and there is little to no competition. If you find this holy grail, then you will have no problem making a good living on eBay. If you choose to compete with the masses, then you will never get ahead.

Comparing eBay to organic search engine traffic is missing the point about online selling. A more valid comparison would be how does eBay stack up against paid for traffic. We now spend that $1000 a month on Google adwords, and the benefits have been amazing. It was a learning curve, sure, but then so was eBay when starting out. We find the customers who find us through Google ads to be far more honest – real business people who want to build relationships rather than amateurs who want a quick bargain.

Also, there’s no competing against stolen goods.

We say in theory, because if you are selling in a highly competitive niche, then you might be selling an item for $30 that costs you $25. After eBay and PayPal fees, you are making absolutely nothing!

We have had the most success selling in niches that are not saturated. Of course, as we have explained in other posts, these niches have become saturated and we have had to move on to greener pastures.

The only thing that we have found lower priced items ($2-$5) good for is building up your feedback. For a while we sold a line of products in this price range and we were able to build up our feedback quickly. However, it is a whole bunch of work to sell lower priced items for a very low profit.

As we have explained in our post entitled “Finding the Right Product to Sell on eBay” (http://www.lizardwisdom.com/finding-the-right-product/), the key to selling successfully on eBay is to find an under-served niche and sell products in that niche. It is much harder than it sounds, but that is what it takes to become an eBay success.

Once you find your niche, you cross your fingers and hope that nobody notices that you are successful and decides to get a piece of the action. Once this happens (and it will happen), you get to start over from square one.

As you noted, it’s very important to understand and track costs vs. profits on eBay or any business. Not doing it has been the downfall of many.

Add to this the fact that eBay has been playing around with the way Store listings show up in search, and you may be facing an uphill battle if you are only selling your items in your Store.

We have used the time tested strategy of using Fixed Price (or Auction) listings to drive traffic to our eBay Store. In other words, say we have 10 different styles of widgets; we will have a Fixed Price listing for one or two styles and reference in the listing that we have many more available in our eBay Store. We then place a link in the listing that takes the buyer directly to our widget selection in our eBay Store.

This works fairly well and is really the only option if you are competing in a competitive niche.

However, we also sell items that we only list in our eBay Store. These tend to be more expensive items where we only have one or two competitors. Even if the competition has Fixed Price or Auction listings, our Store listings will show up in the search results due to the limited number of total listings.

You have to fine tune your eBay strategies and figure out what works best for your particular products.