I looked into opening an ebay store and besides the 30 day listing and the listing fee discount I don't see that much of a benefit to this. They charge you at least $16 a month and on items less than $10 they charge double the final listing fee and overall the final value fees ar higher. It also seems overall store items get less views then auctions. Am I missing something or is this just a rip off :confused:

I think it is only better if you have a huge amount of items to list.

It costs $15 a month and for me, while I was selling a lot of joes, worked out well. I put my high dollar items up on auction and tehy help draw attention to me as a seller and more of my lower cost items sell via Store Inventory. The final value fee is higher (x2) but the insertion fee is much lower (5 cents rather than 20 cents and so on...) The cut off for making it worth while is $15.00 forthe price ofthe item. Above 15, Fixed Price BIN is better value as a seller. Mind you, I use Gallery Pictures and pay 6 to list rather than 55 cents.

I was also selling several hundred items a month for a period, so it was definitely worth it for that reason. My wife sells scrapbbok stuff and started off with just a few items on auction. THe more she makes, the more se shifted her to Inventory. She was incurring $80 a month in fees and a store dropped that to $15 +20 saving us quite a bit.

John M>

Ever notice how the store items have prices typically jacked up above normal live auction prices? Items actually sell at (some of) these higher prices. As a store seller you can control your price. The eBay market does indeed fluctuate but with a store you are able to sit on your item at that higher, fixed price and still have a good chance to get what you want for it.

Anecdote time...
Recently, I had a complete '84 Transformers Megatron I wanted to sell on eBay. After seeing a range of live auction prices from about $60 to about $90 I worried I could be stuck at the low end of that range. I called up a friend who owns an eBay store and agreed to sell Megs to him for $75. After putting it in his store he squeezed $130 out of it a month later. Megatron rarely climbs that high in live auctions, but it happens eventually with store items. It may sound like it defies physics, but it actually works out this way.

One think you cannot do is search ended Store items. You can search ended auction items to get a feel for what items have sold for in the past, but unless you are searching on a particular user's store, you cannot get prices from ended /sold store items. Thus it appears that store operators have higher prices, but what that indicates to me is that they are sitting on higher priced items... those higher than sellers like me who lowball using the store system. I sell almost everythign I post and only end up sitting on a few things. I use the auctions to get a base price average for what I should sell something for and then go with it. A few times, I'll see a figure that goes for anywhere from 99 cents to 2.50 or so and i might post it at $3.00, but I also have shipping for one figure at $1.75 while some of the auctioneers might put shipping at $5.00 for one figure. I figure htat balancing a higher price with lower overall shipping helps the buyer in the end because they know they're not going to get cheated on shipping with me.

JohN M .

One think you cannot do is search ended Store items. You can search ended auction items to get a feel for what items have sold for in the past, but unless you are searching on a particular user's store, you cannot get prices from ended /sold store items.
JohN M .
O RLY o_O

http://search.stores.ebay.com/_GI-Joe_W0QQcatrefZC6QQfclZ3QQfisZ2QQfobfmtZ1QQfromZR1 0QQfsooZ2QQfsopZ2QQftrtZ1QQftrvZ1QQsabfmtsZ2QQsaca tZ1167QQsaobfmtsZsifonlyQQsargnZQ2d1QQsaslcZ2QQsbr ftogZ1QQsofocusZsoQQsofpZ4

:)

well you do see more action in an ebay store vs a regular store but the fees can kill you. also you have to worry about npb and crap like that. i have a small store and it does fine enough that ive avoided ebay altogether for the most part and im happy with it.