Ebay has this selling thing down to a fine art. You are provided with tools to help promote your eBay store. These tools have been well thought out and are very effective when used. You wouldnt open a store on Main Street in your home town and not promote it, would you? You need to promote your eBay store as well. Ebay has much experience in promotion. You will be wise to make use of all of the tools they provide.

1.Customized Header: To turn on this feature, click on the checkbox, Show my custom listing header in all of my listings. The header will then appear at the top of the item description on all of your listings and in your item descriptions. The Custom Header will help promote your Store and bring more traffic to your store.

2.If you always have items for sale in all of your categories, you will want to include in your Store logo, a search box that allows buyers to search your Store and links to your custom categories, custom pages, and About Me page.

Note: Do Not use this feature unless you always have items for sale in every category.

3.Use customized e-mail feature to promote your store and the items you have for sale to customers on your mailing list. To create a mailing list, go to the, Manage My Store page in My eBay, and click on the Email Marketing link in the Stores Marketing section in the left column.

4.Print and distribute flyers to advertise your eBay Store and specific items in your store. To create your stores promotional flyer, first go to the Manage My Store page in My eBay and click the Promotional Flyers link in the marketing section. Then click Create Promotional Flyer.

RESTRICTED ACCESS EBAY AUCTIONS:
Believe it or not there is a mature audience only section of eBay. The items that are offered are of the adult nature and are not suitable for general audience viewing. Frankly, it is rather shocking to find out that eBay allows this kind of material on its otherwise family oriented site.

Ebay did go to the trouble to limit access to these adult items. Advertisement of the items is not allowed on the regular eBay pages. They cannot be listed in the gallery or featured anywhere on the site.

The listings and advertisements for these items are restricted to the mature audience only section of eBay. In order to view or bid on items that are listed in the mature audience only section of eBay, a user must be eighteen years of age or older.

(That is some comfort...at least the kids cant see this stuff...or at least they arent supposed to be able to see it.) Bidders must also produce credit card information prior to bidding on items in this section as well.

The theory behind this is that those under eighteen dont have access to a credit card....which is certainly questionable. Anybody with a social security number (whether it is their own number or not) and a fake ID can get a credit card in this day and age.

Its reported all the time that even a dog can be issued a credit card so this doesnt seem like much proof of age. It is mostly left up to the parents to supervise their teenagers closely enough to insure that they are not viewing or bidding on items that are listed in the mature section of eBay just
as they are responsible for keeping their children from watching X rated movies.

Stephen Campbell is a Business Consultant, Internet Marketer

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