There were reportedly 167 million eBay users at the end of January in 2017 and reportedly, 25 million sellers. If you’re not tapping into the biggest online marketplace, it’s very important to consider why. The reality is, in many cases, eBay is the first place online shoppers even look which means that really, it should be the first place you’re seen.

Let’s face it: there aren’t too many people out there these days who haven’t at least heard of eBay (even if they don’t use it or know what it is exactly). As mentioned, it’s the biggest online shopping network in the world and often, the first if not one of the first places, a potential customer looks for a product online. eBay attracts thousands of shoppers each day looking for a wide range of products - from cameras to hobby kits for their kids, to exotic spices and even healthcare products. Remember, anyone who logs onto eBay looking for an item you sell, is a potential customer.

There’s just one problem. What happens when all of these thousands of potential customers don’t know about your own website? The website you’ve invested a decent amount of time and money in and you know provides your customers with the best user experience possible. Sure, eBay is likely to be the first port of call for a first time customer who has never been exposed to your brand but ultimately, your aim should be to direct this customer to your website in the future to make purchases direct from your site. So how do you tap into this huge customer database with relative ease?

This is where you need your ecommerce platform to integrate seamlessly into eBay and that’s exactly what Avenue excels in doing. Avenue offers an optional add-on to allow you to automatically add your customers' eBay orders into your database. All that you need is your seller’s eBay credentials and from there, it’s just a matter of loading them into the system (which Avenue does automatically). It’s easy to set-up product orders to be automatically loaded straight into Pronto Xi that are paid for on eBay. This takes full advantage of the entire Avenue sale automation for GL entries - the system goes straight from this point to printing a picking slip for every order without any human intervention at all. How fantastic is that? For many of our Avenue clients, this really is a game changer!

As customers browse through your products listed on eBay, they’ll be offered a “also by this client” recommendation. This helps you to achieve what we call a Gruen Transfer. If you haven’t come across this term before, the easiest way to explain this is to think about the last time you walked into a store with the intent to purchase one item only. Yet once inside, you’re drawn to numerous items and end up walking out of the store with more than what you originally intended to buy. This is applicable to the online space too. A Gruen Transfer can be achieved with a well designed website that entices browsers to purchase more than what they originally visited the site for.

It’s also important not to forget to provide your customers with a direct link to your core Avenue site on eBay. As mentioned earlier, it’s always best for your customers to engage with you directly on your site than to go via any third party site. In a perfect world, you could very well lure a customer away from eBay so that you can make a direct sale through your own site. At the very least, you’re increasing your chances of getting your customer onto your site and exposing them to a number of related products. This increases the chances for the Gruen Transfer to take place.

As always, we’ve aimed to ensure that you have the ability to fully test this high performance website marketplace. With your eBay sandbox credentials, you can load items from your test site into a sandbox eBay. This is essential for testing out the entire flow of sales, right from creation through to purchase and the creation of the picking slip.

Ready to organise eBay integration via Avenue? Contact our Pronto team today and we’ll be in touch!