Making Your eBay Store Search-Savvy
By Beth Cox
June 30, 2004
Anyone with much experience as an eBay seller will tell you that driving traffic to your eBay store is crucial to success -- largely because the listing fees are so drastically reduced from what one has to pay for an auction or a Buy It Now listing.
Everyone should be linking from their regular listings to their eBay stores, of course. But what if you want to draw customers from outside eBay?
Well, it's a no-brainer to put your store URL in all your outgoing e-mails, and on your business cards and paper correspondence. You should also point to your eBay store through your regular Web site, if you have one. I've been doing that for quite a while and we get a few customers that way.
But we want a lot more eyeballs looking at our products on eBay, and one of the best ways to drive traffic, of course, is through search engines.
Like a lot of small eBay business people, I know a great deal about our products, but I don't pretend to be an Internet search engine marketing expert. We have a little Google ad campaign for our main Web site (Google makes it amazingly easy with AdWords), and we sometimes run a keyword campaign on eBay itself to direct people searching for orchids to our listings.
eBay knows that its sellers need assistance, and has been making serious efforts to make it easier for search engines to read the content of eBay stores and display those URLs in search results. The auction giant recently changed the default structure of URLs for eBay stores to make them easier to get picked up by outside search engines.
And it's working. I've noticed that when I do general searches on Google and Yahoo!, eBay store listings for our little orchid business are showing up more and more frequently.
Ironically, eBay's own search engine generally does not pick up Stores results, although in April, eBay rolled out a modification that allows Stores results to appear if there are fewer than 10 regular eBay listings returned from a keyword search. For those of us with lots of competition (which is the case for most eBay sellers, I'd guess) that really doesn't help much, though.
When I ran a Yahoo! search for "cattleya orchid," one of the paid listings was from eBay itself, and a click directed me to an eBay page that displayed the results for the same search terms on eBay. eBay has a similar arrangement with Froogle. I thought those were a nice touch, although the pointers are to auction and Buy It Now listings, not to eBay Stores listings.
As a result, it's still tough to ensure that your Store items are listed in the major engines.
Taking it to the next level
eBay also allows its store operators, most of whom are PowerSellers, to export their inventory in a file and send to those search engines that accept data feeds. That capability seems likely to reap the most rewards -- at some point. But when I decided to take eBay up on its offer to create a file of our eBay Store listings for distribution to the search engines, I ran into some stumbling blocks.
Initially, the process of creating a data feed is easy, and eBay provides simple directions:
1. On the Manage Your Store page, click on the "Export listings" link.
2. Click "Make a file of my Store Inventory listings available," then Save Settings.
Within 12 hours, eBay will create the file and post it to a URL based on your Store's URL, and will be available for anyone (or any search engine) to download.
But after that, it gets a little harder. That's because, as eBay tells you, it "is then up to you to make arrangements with third-party partners to download the file from the URL. eBay is NOT responsible for coordinating how the file will be used with a third party."
eBay's Help file on the process can be found here, but unfortunately, I found it distinctly unhelpful.
So, here I am with a nice URL for all our store listings, but I kind of need a search engine for a dance partner (better yet, a half-dozen) and there's no real good information on which search engines accept the file.
I tried Google's shopping search engine, Froogle, but their support for picking up eBay Store URLs is questionable. Their FAQ says they don't accept data feeds from affiliate marketing sites, and it's unclear what how they consider an eBay Store. (Google itself often picks up our store listings, however. When I searched for "paph" -- a kind of orchid -- one of our store listings was the 45th result.)
When I searched Froogle for our company name, I found bunches of our individual eBay auction and Buy It Now listings, but none of our Store listings. I learned long ago to put a link to our eBay store in each listing, so anyone who finds us via a listing that shows up on Froogle is really only two clicks away from our store.
The problem is, I want the customers who are searching for more generic terms, like "orchid" or "cattleya."
When I asked Froogle about eBay store feeds, a spokesman said only that "we don't provide specifics on the feeds of Froogle merchants."
You might think eBay would go the next step and offer a list of search engines that accept their store URL data feeds, but no. So I sent eBay customer support an e-mail, asking for a list of the search engines that accept the XML files.
I was pleasantly surprised to get a response in less than 24 hours. But I wasn't really happy with the answer, which amounted to a reiteration that it remains up to me to make arrangements with third-party partners.
"eBay is not responsible for coordinating how the file will be used with a third party," the e-mail read. "Unfortunately we do not have a list of product search engines that may use this."
I asked Chris Sherman, associate editor at SearchEngineWatch.com (in my opinion, it's the place to start if you want to learn more about search) for his take, and he said he's not sure which of the shopping search engines would accept the eBay data file.
"They all have their own formats and guidelines, so it's likely the eBay feed would have to be tailored for submission to another service," he said. "That said, some of the shopping engines will crawl XML files, so even though it's not a pure feed submission, content in an eBay file might get picked up by some of them."
You can find a list of major shopping search engines here, including links to BizRate, Shopping.com, DealTime, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, MSN Shopping, mySimon, NexTag, Kelkoo, PriceGrabber.com and others.
Clearly, this is a complex subject, and few people I talked with seemed to have good answers. Indeed, consensus among many knowledgeable online auction watchers was that the situation is pretty much uncharted territory.
Said one, "... as for eBay's XML file, I think it's not of any use to anyone, but was a diversion for eBay Store owners who wanted to submit to Froogle."
That said, eBay has at least responded publicly to concerns about utilizing the search engines. On recent post said eBay is beginning to experiment with submitting some Stores listings to Froogle and is encouraging individual eBayers "to follow up with them."
The last line of the post reads: "Thank you very much for your patience as we work through this!"
fr.: http://se-daily.blogspot.com/2004_07_11_se-daily_archive.html#108985875044079703
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