Well I used to think the same, we built up a good company on ebay with several stores, all postive feedback, DSR’s of 4.8 or above, sales booming each month bigger than the last, just invested over £1000 in new store designs for two of the shops, then BOOM suspended for 12 months, no questions no if’s no buts all gone over something that happened 2 years ago and we didn’t even know about!

That happend 6 weeks ago and we have nearly lost the business as our income was gone over night! I have had to let staff go and cut back and now we are making headway buy using other avenues. We had our own websites but where so busy on ebay we did’nt have time for them. Now in the last 6 weeks we have taken more on our own websites that in the last two years, just by spending the time on them. We are also using other avenues to spread the sales across a number of different ways to protect ourselves in the future.

All I will say to people is, DON’T put all your eggs in one basket, or someone elses basket, we thought we were safe, we couldn’t of even predicted this! SO if you think your safe, still look at other avenues I can’t believe how much we are taking now on our own website and it costs us the same amount of money if we sell £1 or £100000 a month so no escalation of fees!

Stu

Imagine a parallel universe where ebay decided to take the theatre in Aberdeen’s word at face value and wrongly suspended you for dealing in stolen items (even though they weren’t).
A scenario that isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

How would you control your destiny then?

All you can say is that ebay works for you at this present time, with the changes that they can and probably will make you cannot say that with certainty for the future.

finding it at the right price is the trick

ebay provides us with more customers that we can cope with, why should we spend more money finding more

there is nothing better than ebay, on this planet! or any other planet!
for my type of item,
I believe its the type of goods you market
rather than the the amount of outlets you cover that should dictate your sales strategy

blighty
my destiny is firmly in my own hands

I use ebay

I dont rely on it

But in general, it seems that a multi-channel approach is something that the vast majority of sellers can be benefiting from. I agree that at the lower end it can seem difficult to justify but I’m sure that every powerseller can do something.

It also seems to me that if sellers are looking to grow swiftly, that a multi-channel strategy is vital, especially as eBay continues to grow more slowly than ecommerce in general.

It’s not glory North, it’s having your destiny in your own hands.

The next change or the one after that may make ebay become unworkable for you, it’s happening for others, so don’t say “That will never happen to me”, because you just don’t know.

Having other options is the wise move.

we dont have a website
and we dont need one

we are in this for profit
not glory

There’s no excuse for not having your own website as well as eBay. The bar for Amazon is slightly higher, but to consider more channels you’d need to be turning £10-£20k/month in my opinion to justify the effort/costs/time.

(I might be wrong there…. if someone has other opinions feel free to post )

This is an area into which I am now turning my focus, whilst I don’t think that I have completely maximized my sales and operations on eBay yet, I still feel that it’s prudent not to have all my eggs (or shoe racks!) in one basket!

Our website is currently under construction and sales from other channels seem to be improving and slowly gaining on the volume we get from ebay.

I just wish these outsourcing services were a little cheaper to implement. I understand there is a lot of work for both parties (which I have no problem with from my end) but the costs are just so high, it seems to me, that unless you are shifting £1000′s worth of product a day they are not economically viable.

Maybe a different pricing model for smaller e-sellers would be beneficial to the people who provide the outsourcing and those who wish to use it. If these service providers are confident that their offering would improve sales volumes, then they would benefit in the long run when the positive impact of their expertise kicks in.