New and would like some advice

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)

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.

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.

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