I had always wanted to take my eBay business and build a online website but had no idea what I was doing back in 2014. It was a real struggle. I didn't get any shopify sales for the first 6 months so I started to think of creative ways I could drive traffic to my website from eBay. 

I tried to private message my eBay customers but found out real fast that eBay doesn't like sending links in private messages. So how do you get around this ? I started to send every customer a private message once I shipped the order that read. 

"Hey NAME I just shipped your order and you should receive it by DATE. I'm also in the process of building a online store. Is it OK if I add your email address to my newsletter ? Thanks Clayton"

This method worked extremely well for me. Once I got 10 emails it was time to send out my first email. I put together a email talking about my brand new website and why I built it. Also adding a 10% off offer discount. 

Cha-ching my first Shopify sale come through. I was seriously jumping up and down in my spare bedroom / office. I'd finally landed that first website sale. I used this method for years. In my first 100 website sales at least 50 of them come from this method. 

One of the problems with the private messaging was that not everyone replied back so I thought how can I double down on taking advantage of eBay to drive sales. 

I got a bunch of flyers and business cards made up. I knew I had to stand out because really how many people even care or read the business card or flyer ? Something I had been doing on eBay for years was writing out a hand written message to the buyer. A example of this. 

Hi CUSTOMERS NAME thanks for your purchase YOUR NAME 

Depending on the sale I would add more to the message. The response I had got from this in the past was great. Stacks of buyers were leaving personal feedback on my eBay account. Like thanks so much Clayton for example. So I used this method with my newly printed out business cards and flyers. Offering a special 10% off eBay discount on each one. About 20% of my eBay customers started using this code on my new website. 

One of the biggest problems with eBay and amazon is its extremely hard to build a connection with your customers. Something that is so important now days. The advantage of having a shopify website also is you can build that connection and add value to your customers. Something eBay and amazon cannot compete with. This is a great way to build a brand. Telling your story. Communicating your message. Writing fun and creative articles and writing blogs solving problems. The one thing I have noticed lately is most people have forgotten how important building a connection is and how much more sales are possible when this connection and relationship has been built. 

While stacks of people use eBay and amazon to search for products. Thousands and thousands  of people still use google to look for products. The massive advantage of having a shopify website is that you can out rank eBay and amazon on google for product searches. Two ways of doing this is by have detailed product and collection descriptions and using blog posts. 

Having detailed product descriptions and collection descriptions can help you to generate thousands of free visitors to your website. In 6 months I was able to rank page #1 on google for over 1,000 searches. Driving tens of thousands visitors to my website. I was even able to rank position #1 for nearly every popular search term in my niche. I couldn't beat eBay for the most popular search but still ranked position #3 and that's not to bad with just a little bit more detail I added to each product description. 

Everyone loves finding out how to solve their problem. A great way to generate more free traffic to your website is by solving a problem in your niche. People are always searching ways to solve that problem that is annoying them. If you craft a great blog solving this you can easily rank high on google and build a connection with your visitors. Something that is nearly impossible to do on eBay and amazon. Half the problem is getting people to your website and this is a great way to add value and get visitors to buy your products. 

One of the main reasons I wanted to have a online store in the first place is because I had about 10,000 items to sell and eBay can be very expensive to list that many items. The way to use eBay and shopify to your advantage if you have lots of items is to sell your popular items on eBay and use the above methods to drive traffic to your website that has all the not as popular items for a fraction of the cost it would be to list on eBay. Shopify have monthly plans that online cost $29 USD with a 14 day free trial to see if you like there platform. So using these methods has its advantages when it comes to cost. 

Once your business name is ranking page #1 result #1 on google a great way to drive more visitors from eBay is to add something interesting in your product descriptions to make the viewer want to leave eBay to go to your site. A good way to do this for example. 

Our Website Has 7,500 more items listed 

GOOGLE 

YOUR BUSINESS NAME 

Look forward to seeing you there 

YOUR NAME 

In 2016 over 10,000 people searched my business name in google. At a guess not all of them were from eBay but it would be safe to say lots of them did come from there. Just something to keep in mind. 

I hope you found massive value in this article and see great results from what you have learnt. If you ever need any help shoot me a message I'd be more then happy to bounce ideas of each other. I've also got a FREE website checklist you can download below to help you out if you wish to build a online website. 

Cheers 

Clayton Bates #inspire