Showing posts with label online eBay store. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online eBay store. Show all posts

Monday, 13 August 2012

eBay hurting sellers with advertising strategy

eBay's recent addition of placing advertisements on sellers pages has been met with some hostility by a number of different sellers.

The advertising strategy, which was launched by eBay at the beginning of May, places an advertisement under the sellers information, giving customers details about various products on sale by a number of different major brands who have stores on eBay.

Do online sellers have a right to feel aggrieved by this? While eBay have categorically stated that these adverts will not include products from other rival sellers and that the sole aim is to bring additional value to the view item page, the last thing any seller would want is for a customer to open up the page of a product they are interested in, only to be then to be shown an advertisement of a similar product provided by a major brand.

While the product sold by the seller's eBay store could be much cheaper in price, store owners may find that many customers leave the seller's page in order to visit the brand's store, resulting in a loss of sales for that online seller.

The question also arises as to the ethics behind it. With a small ecommerce business spending their hard earned money for the ability to list their products on eBay, should the company be allowed to place advertisements of other brands on pages sellers have paid for without their permission? 

Although the ads on some sellers pages are in house advertisements and have nothing to do with the products a store owner sells, eBay should have some parameters in place to ensure that a conflict does not occur with the brand advert showing similar products to what the seller provides. 

What it seems from an outside perspective is that eBay are using small eBay stores as a platform to advertise their bigger brands. While this will generate greater revenue for both the large brands and eBay themselves, this is seemingly at the expense of small sellers, who could see an impact in their store's popularity and sales as a result. 

To combat this, many users of eBay have now looked to remove these advertisements altogether from their browsers through the use of various ad blocking programs. 

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Tuesday, 7 August 2012

How to create a successful marketing campaign

Whether your a small ecommerce business, a large corporation or a charitable organisation, creating the perfect marketing campaign is something that we all strive for. We want to create something that makes a number of people aware of what the business is, creates an interest in the products or services that business offers and then compels them to visit your store or site to act on this impulse.

If you are running a small ecommerce store, the success of your various marketing campaigns is going to determine how successful your store will be. When planning out your marketing campaign, you should look to consider four key areas which have become synonymous with all marketing campaigns: 

  • Attention - Grab the attention of your audience. This doesn't have to be anything specific to do with your business, it could simply be something that is entertaining and compels users to view it. Essentially, it is the hook that will draw them in, giving you a chance to then advertise your product. Some of the most innovative marketing campaigns have created this attention by simply showing the craziest and most random things that they possibly can.
  • Interest - After you have drawn them in to your marketing campaign, you next need to create an interest. This is where specific audience targeting comes in to play. If you create a campaign and then send it to anyone and everyone, you are going to find it much harder to create high levels of interest. What you need to look to do is aim your marketing campaign at individuals who you know will have an interest in your product. This will ensure that you are focussed on creating as much interest as possible. However, there are exemptions to the rule. For example, if you run an online eBay store that provides a wide range of clothing to males, females, small children and babies, then you target demographic is going to be anyone and everyone. In this case you should look to broaden your campaign to really as many people as is feasibly possible rather than focussing on a specific target audience.  
  • Desire - Now that you have peaked their interest, you next need to create desire within your audience. This essentially means that you need to make your audience think that they have to have an item or service from your store. Depending on the type of products that your business offers, the way in which you create those levels of desire are going to differ. If you run a store that offers a number of different goods, you could look to offer products at a discount or make your audience aware of unique items you sell that your competitors don't. The first two steps have essentially got the crowd in and set the stage, now it's up to you to promote your products to your audience in a way that is going to leave them with no other choice but to purchase from your store.
  • Action - There is no point getting your audience all worked up over a product and then leaving them with no place to go. After you have got them hooked and ready to give you their money in exchange for goods or services, you then need to point them in the right direction to complete the transaction. The end of your marketing campaign should give users some form of action to purchase an item from your store. This generally involves providing the address of your ecommerce store, eBay store or Facebook store.
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