eBay Store Gives Toy Rocket a Boost

If your online store offered Freddy Krueger dolls in three flavors — regular, bloody and extra bloody — you’d think the world would beat a path to your URL.

You’d be wrong, as James Bullock discovered at ToyRocket.com, his Internet store for all things action figure. A year ago, Bullock was having trouble finding a place to sell large periodic overstocks and, more important, drive traffic to his Web site. He’d tried search marketing through Overture, was listed on shopping engines such as BizRate and Froogle, and ran print ads in specialty and collectibles magazines. But the buyers weren’t showing up.

So about a year ago, Bullock opened up a second front in the marketing wars with a showcase on eBay Stores, a retail mall section on eBay’s site designed for professional online sellers that offer multiple items at fixed prices. That’s given him special access to eBay’s 114 million users worldwide.

Bullock already was selling unique items on eBay’s auction site, and that made the decision to launch the eBay store a logical progression. “We have two basic categories of customers,” he says. “Parents who are buying toys for their kids like to use Froogle, BizRate and the other shopping engines. And collectors are used to checking eBay auctions for items. Many of them also use PayPal, which is possible in an eBay store.”

Listing stock on an eBay store is cheaper than in the auction area — 1 or 2 cents per item per month vs. at least 35 cents — and while auction listings expire after 10 days and must be renewed, eBay store listings persist. Monthly fees start at $10 for a basic store, going up to $49.95 a month for a featured service and $500 a month for an “anchor” position. Bullock’s featured service level gave him 10 Web pages and enough control over content and design to make his eBay store look and feel like his standalone Web site.

Bullock also looked at setting up stores with Yahoo! and Amazon, but found their arrangements too costly. Listing 800 stock-keeping units (SKUs) in an eBay store costs him $30 a month in listing fees, he says, but would run to hundreds of dollars a month on Yahoo!. Yahoo!’s store design and programming were less customizable, preventing an easy marriage with the standalone site. And Bullock objected to Amazon as the intermediary for payments, which he felt isolated him from his customers.

Another of eBay’s advantages is its dominance in paid placement advertising. “They basically outbid anyone on earth for any keyword you could imagine,” Bullock says. “No matter what you search for, toys or toilet plungers, you’ll pull up a sponsored link that says you can find it on eBay.”

Toy Rocket still sells unique single items on eBay’s auction site, but now Bullock chooses the products — rare, desirable, higher-priced toys — strategically to drive traffic to his eBay store by means of a “Click here to see more” link.

Downsides to an eBay store include stock listing and inventory control. Toy Rocket has to dedicate a full-time employee to enter the SKUs, descriptions and prices of the items it wants to feature in the store — and then needs to repeat the feed every month. And at the moment, Toy Rocket’s staff needs to remember to subtract sales made on eBay from merchandise listed on the store’s Web page.

Reviewing traffic figures is a January job for a toy retailer. But Bullock is convinced that setting up shop on eBay Stores gave Toy Rocket a turbo boost in 2004.

“I know it’s helped us reach customers who might not otherwise have found their way to our site,” he says. “I don’t know how many just yet, or how much they bought. But I will.”