New and would like some advice

[johnparis]

Hi, I am totally new to running your own eCommerce website, so please forgive any silly questions I am about to ask. I have been playing and I think zen cart is the system I am going to go for, but I have one question. I currently have a moderately eBay store, nothing heavy, about 20 sales per day. What I want to try and do is drive business away from eBay and towards my own site, as eBay is taking £4ish per sale from me in fees, which is 50% of my profit. The way I thought about achieving this would be to offer a voucher with a unique code (probably their eBay username) that would give them a %age discount. But I dont quiet know how to achieve this.

Any advice would be fantastic. Thanks

Oh and hello :-)
(this is my first post)

[swguy]

Welcome to the Zen Cart forum, John. You can send someone a gift voucher from admin->Gift Certificate/Coupons->Mail Gift Certificate. Alternately, you can create a single use coupon and just email them the coupon code. admin->Gift Certificate/Coupons-Coupon Admin.

[schoolboy]

Remember to adhere to eBay rules... they do not allow any linking to, or reference about, a stand-alone webshop - so you cannot advertise your own webshop on eBay.

The only advantage of eBay is that it is a MAJOR portal, so it attracts big traffic. You are getting a little of the spinoff with the sales you are achieving.

When you launch your own site, it is little more than a tiny leaf in a massive jungle of trees (look at an aerial photo of the Amazon Jungle, and - if you can - identify just one single leaf on one single tree... that's your website relative to all the others).

So... with your own website, you have to do a LOT of hard work to drive traffic to your store.

With care and diligence, you can get to a point where sales on your own site compensate for any volume-loss of sales on eBay... but run BOTH in tandem until you are confident of your own site's ability to generate sufficient revenue/profit.

When you send out orders to purchasers from eBay, put a little leaflet advertising the new site, and offer incentives for the customer to visit your own site.

[swguy]

This needs to be marked as the canonical answer to this complaint. You're paying eBay to get eyeballs.