How much traffic does Ebay bring in

Is it worth promoting on Ebay to direct traffic to your website

[lgn]

We have our own website, however we are considering selling on ebay and have a link back to our web site.

I know that ebay does not like these back links, however it appears that everybody does this and gets away with it (at least six months ago when I last checked).

Does ebay bring in enough traffic to warrant managing an online auction, or would this be a waste of time.

[sun818]

Waste of time. You are not allowed to link back directly to your site except for from your "About Me" page. Typically a competitor will report your listing infringement (the linkbac) and your account is suspended.

[tilt]

I put a few things for sale on ebay and have a link back to our site from the "about me" ebay page. I got a few hits on my auctions and zero referrals from the about me page. Our business is very small. It might be worth it if you have a lot of very popular auctions. Just a small data point.

[Brett_Tabke]

What I've seen work good is to sell your main product at a loss on Ebay, then sell all the high margin upsells (would you like fries with that) on your site.

[WebGuerrilla]

Working eBay like that used to be an absolute gold mine. I can remember times where eBay traffic would be more than all the major search engines combined.

I really miss those days....

[DrCool]

I have seen a few cases where people can make more money selling their products on Ebay as opposed to their regular site. A friend of mine has some custom t-shirt designs he sells for about $12 on his site and he avereages over $16 each selling them on Ebay.

As far as straight traffic generation I am not sure how much you would get. If you look at the counters for items related to what you sell you can get an idea of how many people actually view the auctions. The CTR to your personal page and then on to your site would be a very, very small portion of that.

[sun818]

I should clarify that you are allowed one "more info" type of link in your eBay description. But no links for buying products.

One promising idea is to make your eBay auction an item that is added to your store's shopping cart. Two requirements for this, I think, is:

Customer registration not required

Minimal data entry for buyer (i.e. If Paypal account already exists, leverage the address information there.)

[petertdavis]

If you do link from an ebay auction to a "more info" you have to meet a few other ebay requirements, such as there being a good reason why that info couldn't be included in the auction, and that there be no links on that page to somewhere the customer would buy the product.