I work for the site mbare , and my boss wanted me to look into setting up a store on eBay to go along with the online store we have now. I can see how this could help us get a lot more exposure, but I see that for the premium store(which we would need to handle the amount of product we have) costs $49.99 a month to set up. Is it worth the money to do this, or would this money be better spent elsewhere (Adwords, for example). Does anyone know how much traffic/sales eBay stores bring in?
Ebay stores don't get a lot of traffic unless you direct traffic to them. Ebay store listings only show up in ebay searches that return 20 or less results which is rare with the shear number of products on ebay. One way I directed traffic to my ebay store was to post regular auction / buy it now listings and then offer a discount when you buy 2 (or more) and put a clickable link to the ebay store listing. Here's what I mean, I'm an artist and I specialize in realistic pencil drawings. I also sell how to draw DVDs. I have a dutch style ebay listing with a buy it now price $24.95 for one of my drawing DVDs with a link that says "buy you can draw portraits 1 & 2 together and save 20% click here". After I did that, I started selling more DVDs. So to some it up, you don't really get any traffic to speak of with an ebay store. You must drive traffic to it. The advantage of the ebay store is very minimal listing fees. So you'll want to have regular auction listings that try to drive traffic to your ebay store.