Build a Niche Store for eBay - Are they Joking?

This was my thought when I discovered the sales letter for Build a Niche Store - especially when I saw I would be building an eBay store. I mean eBay is huge, and sells a huge range of products. How would people find my store? Stores and Malls don’t work online do they – unless you are a well-established retailer. So would I Build a Niche Store?

A niche store or a mall?

The thing about the internet is that people come looking for a particular product or type of product. I mean, if you’re looking for a used Chevy Camaro you are not likely to buy a pair of shoes because you could not get the car you wanted. You will just huff off somewhere else to get what you were looking for. How would Build a Niche Store handle that one?

OK, I’ll admit that I’ve been burned by these slick salesmen with their malls and stores, which end up with them making money because you signed up, and you and I never making a penny. By the way, they didn’t make a penny from products either.

Still, I decided to look a but further into this Build a Niche Store business. Well, the first thing I discovered was that, yes, you do build an eBay affiliate store, but that you can select the products you want – actually you can set up over 28,000 different stores when you Build a Niche Store. Let’s say you have a golf site, well you can just have a golf store. That’s a step in the right direction.

How much will you make?

But then I wondered how much you would get from each sale on an Ebay niche store. Well, you get 40% of what eBay gets. Hmmm. For some products there won’t be much profit to go around.

EBay gets just over 5% so you can expect 2.1% on most things. That means $2 on a $100 watch or $4 on a $200 golf club.

So while Build a Niche Store is a good idea, it is useful only if your site is related to products costing over $1,000, like used cars. Good if you can get someone to buy a used car for $5,000 and sell some good accessories as well. But don’t bother to Build a Niche Store if you have a site about vitamins or bicycle accessories or e-books or anything that sells for less than $1,000. Unless you have a lot of traffic that is.

At 2.1% you need to sell a lot of watches at $100 to make, well, $100. You need to sell 50, which means that on average you need 5,000 people to see the page.

On the other hand, if your site is about airline tickets, antiques, boats, cars, collectibles, hotel accommodation, jewelry, motorcycles, musical instruments, real estate or tapestries – or any other fairly high-price products, you could do very well by Building a Niche Store.

But forget for cds, dvds, cheap watches and things like that – unless you get a huge amount of traffic.

You can Build a Niche Store and customise it

Now I’ve got that out of the way, lets’ look at the potential of Build a Niche Store. Are they malls? Or are they customised? Well, the first thing is that you can customise the store to suit any eBay sub-category. These are quite small niches and this shows that Build a Niche Store does allow you to build a genuine niche store – it is not a mall.

The second thing is that the product is well documented, and installation is simple. But what if you want to link from one page about, say, Callaway golf clubs to these products in eBay? Well, if you can’t do it directly, Build a Niche Store’s support team will write a few lines of script for you.

Also, Build a Niche Store does have a truly excellent support system, which is good to know.

By the way, there is one more problem with Build a Niche Store. At present you can only sell US products, which is fine if you live in the USA or Canada, but not much good if most of your customers come from Australia, the UK, or Europe – or anywhere else.

An update for Build a Niche Store that will allow you to choose either ebay.co.uk (UK) or ebay.com.au (Australia) is coming, so you need to hold fire and ask them when it is happening if you live in those countries.

You can get your pages ranked by the search engines

But back to where we are today. Will your Build a Niche Store get ranked? New pages like this always do best if they are added to an established site, so that is the way to go if you can. Otherwise it will take a bit longer to get indexed.

But what about ranking? Won’t it be obvious that all the content when you Build a Niche Store is the same as eBay’s? Yes and no. The first thing about ranking is that your content needs to be relevant and interesting – this will be OK so long as you really match the eBay products you are promoting with the rest of your site – that’s essential. You can do this with Build a Niche Store, but make sure you do.

Is duplicate content a problem?

What about the problem of duplicate content? Well, although it obvious that when you Build a Niche Store, it contains affiliate pages, they are unlikely to be the same as the ones Google or Yahoo spider at eBay. This is because they will not spider your site daily, and at exactly the same time as eBay’s pages. The whole point about eBay is that auctions are starting and ending every minute, so the content differs every minute.

In fact, if you Build a Niche Store you will get fresh content each time someone clicks – the search engines like fresh content so this a bonus. But because your content is just a ‘snapshot’ of eBay it is very unlikely that you will fall foul of the duplicate content problem – and in fact the guys who devised Build a Niche Store took this into account.