Plugins to Give Your eBay Site the Edge Over Your Competition

When you start an eBay store, you know you’ll have a lot of competition and that you’re going to have to do some marketing to get your items noticed. The best way to make sales isn’t to just sit and wait and hope.

Selling on eBay is just like selling anywhere else – you have to make some noise. One really interesting way to do that is to integrate your eBay store into your own WordPress website.

eBay is one of the most popular sales outlets on the ‘net. Virtually anybody can set up a shop on eBay and run an online store. Integrating your eBay store into your WordPress website will give you an advantage because you have a platform to promote your items from. You can take it even further by becoming an eBay affiliate through the eBay Partner Network and make even more money from affiliate sales.

Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:

• The eBay Partner Network
• Integrating with eBay
  • What This Is Not
  • What This Is
• Posting eBay Listings to Your WordPress Website by Hand
• Several Good Plugins for Integrating eBay with WordPress
  • Auction Nudge – eBay on your own site
  • WP eBay Product Feeds
  • WordPress Automatic Plugin
  • WP Robot

The eBay Partner Network

One reason to display eBay auction items on your own website is you can get a commission from the sale. Anyone who goes to eBay through your link and makes a purchase is an affiliate sale for you. This is done through the eBay Partner Network (ePN). You can get a good commission through this network. The affiliate rewards vary depending on the category and location.

What’s even cooler is that you get a commission for the sale even if it’s your own products that sell. So you get paid twice – once for selling the item and once for being an affiliate and having someone buy through your link. You can share these links on several sites and social networks. Just make sure that when you share your eBay listings that you follow eBay’s policy. You can post links on other sites, but buyers must come to eBay to buy your items.

To optimize your affiliate sales, and promote your own items from your WordPress blog, you’ll want to follow these tips:

• Write relevant and value-added articles
• Update your site regularly
• Drive traffic through social networking
• Encourage users to write product reviews
• Always inform users that your links are affiliate links
• Always inform users they are going to eBay with your affiliate link when they click on your links
• Direct traffic to the most relevant eBay site by using geo-targeting
• Send users directly to the products they’ve clicked on
• Provide Advanced Search options on your website
• Target new users
• Target users that haven’t bought on eBay in a while (you get an extra bonus for this)
• Use analytics to your advantage
• Integrate eBay listings into your site using pages, posts, widgets, and embedded into your theme

This last tip will be the focus of the rest of this article. The listings can be your own or someone else’s.

Integrating with eBay

There are many advantages of integrating eBay listings within your site. We’ve already seen the advantage of affiliate sales, but there are also advantages for your own sales and your business and brand. Integrating your eBay listings into your WordPress website increases your brand awareness. It also gives you a platform where you can discuss your products and promote them.

What This Is Not

This is not a way to post scripts to eBay automatically. This is against eBay’s HTML and JavaScript policy. This is not a way to post to your eBay seller’s account from your WordPress website. This does not let you manage your eBay store from WordPress.

What This Is

This is a way to show your (or anyone else’s) eBay listings on your WordPress site. That’s a great way to show the products that you have for sale on eBay. There are two ways to display eBay listings on your WordPress website: posting them manually, and using plugins.

Posting eBay Listings to Your WordPress Website by Hand

WordPress makes it easy to paste outside links into your posts and pages, but it’s not the same process as just pasting a regular URL. For eBay links, this will only display the URL and not the eBay auction. To post the auction, you just go to your ePN page, select tools, select Link Generator, fill in the information, generate the link, copy the URL, and paste it into your post or page on its own line.

This works great for a few posts. One problem is there is no way to automatically handle the post after the auction has ended. This means you either have to delete the post, manually update the post, or have a post on your site that links to an auction that has ended. This can get very time-consuming if you run a store on eBay and you want to post all of your items (which could be a LOT of items).

A better way to handle this is by using a plugin.

Several Good Plugins for Integrating eBay with WordPress

There are lots of plugins that display eBay listings in WordPress. You can display them in several ways including pages, posts, widgets, and even theme integration (instructions are included with many of the plugins, so they help make this easy). Most use shortcodes and allow you to choose what to display using categories and eBay user ids. Here is a look at some of the better, and more up-to-date, plugins that will perform these tasks easily without having to use other supporting plugins.

Auction Nudge – eBay on your own site

With Auction Nudge you can add your eBay listings to posts, pages, and widgets using shortcodes. You can display your listings based on your eBay user name, your user ID, or your eBay page. It is available for 13 international eBay sites.

You can integrate:

• Your listings – your most recent active items. You can filter them by keyword or category, and show up to 100 items per page. It updates every 15 minutes.
• Your listings as an ad – an interactive banner ad with your most recent listings. You can choose from different sizes and colors. It updates every 15 minutes.
• Your profile – all of your profile information including your feedback rating and the date of your registration. It will display this as a badge. It updates every 6 hours.
• Your feedback – your recent comments. It updates every 6 hours.

It has lots of display options such as a theme, number of items to show, number of pages to show, number of columns, width, number of items to scroll, whether or not to auto scroll, image size, open in a new tab, and whether or not to display the eBay logo. You can also insert your own CSS rules so you can modify the appearance.

It has a help file that shows you how to use the shortcodes and paste them within your pages and posts, from within the theme files, how to modify the CSS, and where to get more information. There is also a 7.5 minute video tutorial to step you through using the plugin and its features.

Action Nudge makes it easy to embed the code into your theme files. To embed the code within you theme, you first generate your snippets from the Action Nudge website. You then go to the Action Nudge settings and choose Within Your Theme. You then paste in these functions:

<code>
 /* To display Your eBay Listings */
 <?php an_items(); ?>
 /* To display Your eBay Profile */
 <?php an_profile(); ?>
 /* To display Your eBay Feedback */
 <?php an_feedback(); ?>
 </code>

That’s it. It couldn’t be easier. You can generate and paste as many snippets as you want.

WP eBay Product Feeds

The WP eBay Product Feeds will allow you to place eBay listings in posts, pages, widgets, and themes using a shortcode. You specify the feed and the number of items to display within the shortcode. It also has settings where you can specify the default feed, number of items to show, whether or not to open in a new window, no follow links, and fallback text (what to display if the links fails). There is also a debug mode if you need it.

It also has a widget that lets you specify the title, text, number of items to display, and the eBay feed to display.

This one doesn’t have as many features and settings as the others do, but that’s not always a bad thing. If you just want something simple that you don’t have to fuss with, this might be the one you want.

WordPress Automatic Plugin

WordPress Automatic Plugin automatically post eBay auctions to several different sites, including WordPress websites, based on keywords that you choose. You can choose a specific seller, so you can post only your items if you want. It’s compatible with 13 countries. With all of its automatic features it stands up to its name.

Your posts are campaigned-based and you can set up unlimited campaigns with different keywords for each one. It even has keyword suggestions. It will post to your website under a specific category, as a specific author, and use keywords as tags. You can specify two ad slots for each post. It supports custom post-types, it will auto-hyperlink keywords, you can choose which words must exist within the content, and you can exclude words and phrases if you want. It will automatically set a featured image and cache the images on your server.

It will automatically translate the content using Google Translate. It will automatically add custom fields. It will auto search and replace. It uses thebestspinner.com to automatically replace synonyms. It has support for post templates. It even has set and forget and internal cron jobs.

It has unlimited keywords with automatic keyword hyper-linking, automatic link-striping, spintax support, multisite and proxy support, and automatic TrueMag theme integration.

Updates and support are free. If you have any issues you can submit a support ticket to the help desk. It also contains help files that introduce each item and its features.

WP Robot

The WP Robot plugin lets you post auctions from eBay to your WordPress site automatically so you can put your site on autopilot. The automated posts include a screenshot of the product, the current bid price, the buy it now price, and the product details. It comes with a customizable template system so you can make your posts look any way you want. You can include your own text, ads, and links. You can post based on an unlimited number of keywords.

It connects to your affiliate program so you can earn money through the links. It will create content in one of 9 different languages. You can place as many auctions in a single post as you want.

Wrapping Up

Integrating eBay auctions into your WordPress website has several benefits. You can promote your own sales and you can make money through the eBay affiliate program. Integrating eBay auctions is so simple that it should be included in your marketing efforts.

Now I want to hear from you. What’s your favorite eBay plugin for WordPress? Do you prefer to post your listings from eBay onto your WordPress site?

Tags:

• WordPress
• eBay
• tutorial