Christmas is the busy season for Jim Bullock, the owner of Toy Rocket, a Web-only retailer of action figures and collectibles. But when DIRECT Tips reached him in late December, he and his small staff were moving from the sell-and-ship phase of the holiday to the where’s-my-Boba-Fett-with-the-kung-fu-grip? phase. As a result, Bullock was glad to take some time to explain Toy Rocket’s decision to open up a second front on his target market and launch a store on eBay.
The move began, Bullock says, when Toy Rocket had exhausted all the traditional means of driving traffic to its standalone Web site. The company had advertised in specialty toy and toy-collector magazines in the past but experienced disappointing results.
“We’d done a lot of print advertising, which is good for catalog or phone orders but lousy for directing people to a Web site,’ says Toy Rocket owner James Bullock. “Most people find it much easier to just click through than to see an ad, read it, flag it, and remember it later when they’re sitting in front of a computer.”
Toy Rocket needed an Internet location with better visibility. So Bullock sought help for his traffic problem elsewhere on the Web—at eBay Stores. This is a section on the popular eBay site that is set up to exhibit the stock of single sellers with multiple SKUs. It’s separate from the standard auction site and is run according to rules that make it more congenial for retailers with plenty of varied merchandise. For example, product listings stay up longer in eBay Stores without requiring re-listing; items can be set at lower price points; and the cost of the service can save money over participating in the standard eBay Auction channel. The cost of setting up shop in an eBay store starts at $9.95 a month for a basic sales platform and steps to $49.95 a month for a Featured service or $500 a month for an “Anchor” position. The more you pay, the more Web pages you get, and the more monthly e-mail you can send to customers. The higher levels give a retailer access to eBay’s traffic and sales reporting tools; the Anchor package also gets 24-hour live customer support.
For Bullock, one of the most important aspects of setting up shop on eBay Stores is paid placement advertising. EBay has tons of cash and essentially no expenses,” he says. “So they go to the search engines and basically outbid anyone on earth for any key word you could imagine. As a result, 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.” While the ads list items, not specific retailers by name, Bullock found that those ads invariably ranked higher than the organic listings he was getting for the same item from search engines.
Bullock had already been listing some of his stock in the eBay Auctions channel but found it prohibitively expensive for low-priced items. In eBay Stores, he pays a penny to list each SKU, no matter how many of that item he has for sale, and another 2 cents an item to run photos on the side. Those listings can remain up for 30 days before being renewed.
“If you do the math, you can have 1,000 products in an eBay store for $30 a month [plus the subscription fee],” Bullock says. By contrast, the pricing to open a store in Yahoo Stores runs higher. Toy Rocket now has about 4,000 items in its eBay store. “In a Yahoo store, that would cost us hundreds of dollars a month,” he says. “In addition, it’s my understanding that they take a percentage of your sales. That didn’t appeal to me too much.”
Toy Rocket still sells on eBay’s auction site, but now Bullock chooses the products strategically to drive traffic from the items listed there—rare, desirable, higher-priced toys likely to draw attention—to his eBay store by means of a “Click here to see more” link in the auction listing.
To get away from the generic look of many eBay Stores and to make the site more usable, Bullock and his Web designer spent a lot of effort crafting the eight Web pages in the Toy Rocket storefront to suit the categories being offered for sale. Once they’ve reached the storefront, customers can use the on-site search function provided by eBay to look for items within the site. They also worked to give the eBay store the same highly customized look as Toy Rocket’s original Web site—something that’s much less possible in other Web retail programs such as Yahoo Stores.
Maintaining an eBay store as well as the standalone Web site has some downsides. For one, Toy Rocket has to employ someone full-time to enter the SKUs, descriptions and prices of the items it wants to feature in the eBay store—and then needs to repeat the feed every month. For another thing, inventory control between the two sites can be tricky. Right now, Bullock and his staff need to remember to subtract sales made on the eBay site from merchandise listed on the main Toy rocket Web page. “The last thing you want to do is to disappoint some customer by having to tell them the item you said you had in stock is actually gone,” he warns.
Some of these problems could be alleviated by software links offered by Web hosting companies such as Aplus.net, which specializes in small-to-medium business sites. Kurant Corp. also offers software that hooks independent Web sites to eBay stores.
On the whole, however, Bullock is convinced that setting up shop on eBay Stores has given a turbo boost to toy Rocket’s sales this year. He can’t give specifics just yet on how much extra lift the new store has been: “I’ll sit down in January with the eBay tools and crunch the numbers to get a better picture of traffic and conversions,” he says. But he knows that opening an eBay store has helped Toy Rocket capture more business from one of his two core customer groups.
“We have two distinct markets: parents buying toys for their kids, and toy collectors buying for themselves,” Bullock says. “What works for one group does not work for the other. Moms love shopping comparison engines such as BizRate and Froogle, where we’re also listed. They assume that anyone listed on those merchant programs is trustworthy; they can comparison shop in one stop and then click through to buy. But the collectors are more likely to find us via eBay. Because we carry a lot of out-of-production items, a lot of them assume that is the place to find us. Many of them also prefer to pay using PayPal, which we don’t accept on our standalone site.”
And for those last-minute shoppers with a child or action-figure geek on their shopping lists, what’s the hot item this Christmas? “Anything and everything Star Wars or Lord of the Rings,” Bullock says. “They just re-released the movies on DVD, and that’s driving our sales tremendously.” That, and the ability to pull customers to two Web sites simultaneously. Use the sales force, Luke.
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