For Amazon and eBay sellers

Your sales are great! So why build a website? 

 

Lets consider the following points:

 

• No seller fees / equity share risk 
• No “race to the bottom” with competing stores 
• Customer / brand loyalty 
• No risk of suspension 
• Clear, dedicated branding. 
• Marketing data capture via multiple channels 

 

For new merchants, marketplaces like eBay and Amazon are the perfect place to sell. By dominating search engine results, large online marketplaces make it easier to gain initial visibility for your products. But successful sellers know this comes at a price. 

Seller fees are the first pain-point when considering the cost of doing business this way.  

However, the longer a growing merchant trades though a particular marketplace, the more dependent they become on it too. Changes to the terms of service, conflicting business interests of the marketplace itself, or something more dangerous like arbitrary account suspension or termination could result a commercial disaster. 

Branding (or lack of) will also become an issue.  

To the consumer, a product purchased from an eBay store is something “they bought off eBay”. It may not be something they consider purchased from the seller themselves.  

Even if your eBay store is “branded,” products searched by keyword will be listed alongside competitors. In such a controlled environment, it is extremely hard to differentiate or communicate your value proposition. This can result in a pricing “race to the bottom.” 

So, we have seller fees, changes to contractual terms, vulnerability to termination and no brand-loyalty from your customers. Doesn’t sound great? Well, it is not all doom and gloom! Ebay got you where you are today. However, to take your business to the next level, you need a branded, e-Commerce website your customers. 

How can Equahost help? 

In partnership with Elle Nelson Design, Equahost builds and hosts eCommerce websites using Umbraco CMS and BigCommerce. We can synchronize your eBay or Amazon store to a custom, branded website your customers will return to. 

 

How does it work? 

It is important the products on your eBay or Amazon store are reliably synchronized to your website. Usually this requires values like name, SKU, price, and inventory level to be updated on both after each transaction. 

We synchronize a customer’s eBay or Amazon inventory to BigCommerce using a tool called InkFrog. Inkfrog maintains consistency between the two systems. (www.inkfrog.com)

Once Inkfrog is set up and configured, we deploy our Umbraco CMS front-end for BigCommerce with any customizations required.  

  

How does Equahost ensure my website is successful? 

 

• High performance infrastructure  
• SEO 
• Marketing plan

 

An effective SEO strategy and high performance is key. So clean code, plus a caching web application firewall with image compression gets you off the blocks. Since the Umbraco front-end is decoupled from BigCommerce, we are free to choose any size application server to run it on. 

Page titles and meta-descriptions are filled or automated (or a combination of both) plus a sufficient word count is maintained on each page. 

Then a marketing plan!  

Once launched, you will need to get the word out. To ensure your site consistently ranks highly with Google, you will need to release high quality content on a regular basis. Google continually refines its algorithm, and it needs to be convinced your site represents an active business (at the very least) 

Overwhelmed? Fear not! 

Together, Equahost and Elle Nelson Design can handle all of this for you. Contact us for a non-obligatory discussion and we will show you how to develop consistent revenue streams via your own sales channels and develop independence from online marketplaces.