Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, local marketing tips, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
Ive just been checking the comparitive costs of advertising using ebay listings compared to google adwords.
I would consider paying ebay fees the same as paying for advertising, in fact I would put all ebay listing costs under advertising costs in my budget.
Ebay (australian site) charges around 5.25% of what you sell it for! Thats alot when your dealing with the small profit from the sale of one tee!
If you want to list a "buy it now" listing on ebay, they charge a flat $5 fee whether it sells or not AND thats for one item.
Then theres google ad words.
I have a cubecart 4 shopping cart, which im very happy with, and I pay a mere $9 for hosting a month...and I know that with google adwords you choose how much you want to pay per day, how much each click costs and you only pay for what clicks are actually made.
Im thinking google is the better option, because when you calculate all those dozens of tshirt sales you may make on ebay, they are taking over 5% away from each sale. That adds up to ALOT
What does everything think on the matter? Google or Ebay?
I used Google AdWords for a while with very little success, that said it was probably my fault, the process is a learning curve and if you're not careful you can waste a lot of money bidding on the wrong words. I was offered some start-up advice by my website company and turned it down thinking I could do it by myself but in retrospect I wish I'd talked to them.
I found the vast majority of my sales were eBay generated simply by putting a link to my website in the advert details. Not a cheap way to advertise but certainly gets a massive worldwide audience.
I used to advertise all sizes available on a single ad, S,M,L,XL etc. in the title but eBay clamped down on this and now close auctions. This mean't more work listing individual items under their own ad. and increased costs.
Best of luck whichever way you go, keep us informed.
Ebay (australian site) charges around 5.25% of what you sell it for! Thats alot when your dealing with the small profit from the sale of one tee!
If you want to list a "buy it now" listing on ebay, they charge a flat $5 fee whether it sells or not AND thats for one item.
You can not adverstise a external link on ebay. You can however link to pages to your site if ebay can not provide the service, such as larger picture (use link that says click here for a larger picture). That page can not have any links offering a sale outside of ebay however, but you can link back to your ebay store. Another example is Click here to see your color options. A savy user will see the url after clicking and modify the url go to your home page.
You numbers must be way out of wack. I'm in Canada and use Turbo Lister to list to the USA site. My buy it now is a % of the buy it now price. My cost for a listing starting at $2.00 with a buy it now for $7.95 is $1.10 and that includes features:
. scheduled in the future (I bulk list with turbo lister)
. gallery
. buy it now
. second title
I also get a lot of people coming in from ebay by sending links in my sig to the questions they ask via email. An of course, they get my link when they purchase something of mine from ebay.
I also use PPC on adwords and yahoo search marketing. But this pays off as I get many repeat visitors as I offer 49 free things a day. My google analytics reports say that only 25% of the people who click my google ads are new visitors, the rest are all repeat vistors!
If you use Auctiva does that help? It has saved me a lot in listing fees because you can add lots of photos for free. I am in the US though so it may not be applicable in Australia.
Maybe you could use ebay to target a wholesale or bulk audience, as opposed to individuals? That would help spread the fees out if it is a flat $5.00 fee.
I would suggest using Google Adwords over eBay to advertise your business.
One reason is that the whole purpose of Google Adwords is advertise, with eBay, it's more of a "side effect" from their auction listings.
Advertising with Google Adwords isn't just about picking some keywords and then letting it sit. It's not "easy" to make it work.
But if you do your research and make time to test it, retest it and change things up, it can be an effective and profitable way to get new customers.
Even if you pay $1 to gain a new customer but you make $10 off that customer, you are still netting $9 each time. With enough testing, those kind of results are possible.
Most people just pick a few keywords, pick a bid amount, deposit some money and watch the clicks add up and their deposit disappear. That will get you nowhere fast.
You can link to an external site from your "me" page.
There are a few restrictions though. Look at the instructions. One of which is that the prices on the site that you link to must be more than the price you have listed the item at on ebay...
Its my first month using google adwords----- So far I've gotten a good amount of hits and most of it unique visitors. Most of all I have had already cut even on my advertising costs off a big euro customer who told me he searched for my buisness type on google. So so far so good im going to give it 6 months and see what ive came up with.
But google adwords is great you can always say how much you want to spend so you dont go over a certain limit.
You numbers must be way out of wack. I'm in Canada and use Turbo Lister to list to the USA site. My buy it now is a % of the buy it now price. My cost for a listing starting at $2.00 with a buy it now for $7.95 is $1.10 and that includes features:
. scheduled in the future (I bulk list with turbo lister)
. gallery
. buy it now
. second title
!
That percentile I mentioned earlier is the actual price cost ebay.com.au stated but to be frank I havent looked at the ebay.com website or the canadian counter part.
Id have to say Im going to slant towards google ad words bearing in mind I shouldnt just chuck in a few keywords because I think it sounds good, alot of proper market research, testing, retesting and tweaking.
Google Adwords versus Ebay 
