The Christmas Decorations are up in my eBay shop
December 17, 2008
I’ve been far too busy to put up the Christmas decorations at home and they’ll probably not go up until this weekend, but I’ve decorated my eBay shop .
The good news is that it didn’t take me any time at all - the guys at Frooition offer a service where they’ll decorate your eBay shop for you, and what’s even better when you’re ready to take them down they pack the decorations away and restore you shop back to it’s normal appearance in the New Year.
The Frootion Xmas graphics pack is just one of the options available for Frooition eBay shops, they’ve added in a whole suite of Frooition Extras to allow your buyers to shop by Size, Price or Brand. You can select extras you want to transform your eBay shop tailoring it to exactly suit the type of products you sell and the type of buyer you want to appeal to.
I quite like the seasonal changes that are possible with my eBay shop and yes “Sandwich Lady” is still there, but now she’s got a tree on her desk 
My eBay shop design : Going live
June 5, 2008
Having given Frooition the approval on the final design for my new eBay shop it was installed in one afternoon.
Alun, the designer, has done a fantastic job although I still need to tidy up a couple of custom shop pages. I especially like the way he has changed my brand colours slightly making them deeper and more “mountcomp” than they were before.
One of the things I like best about standard eBay shops is the white space which helps to keep the page clean and fresh. Alun has managed to achieve this whilst injecting colour into the page but without heavy backgrounds.
The shop categories menu now works better than ever - Alun has styled it to make the categories stand out from the sub-categories to assist buyers to find the items they’re looking for.
One of my biggest dislikes of eBay shop search has been removed - I now have a search box which searches titles AND descriptions by default. It also searches my entire shop by every time, instead of just the category the buyer is in. This means if I have products matching a buyers search they’ll always be found. eBay’s standard shop search only looks in the category a buyer is currently browsing, although to be fair eBay do at least now display additional items found in all categories for null search results.
What was most important to me was that the shop looked and felt as much like a standard eBay shop as possible, whilst leveraging the advantages of Frooition technology. This has been achieved admirably retaining the eBay promotion boxes with curvy corners and carrying that theme across to the other display areas on the page.
I’m able to display six key products, automatically select from those available either by price, newly listed/ending soonest, shop category, or a mix of criteria. This enables me to showcase a star item, either an item with great profit, or one that I have large quantities of, and to display a further five items which currently promotes the printers I sell. Whilst the products are chosen automatically from those available a judicious use of criteria pretty much means I can identify the exact products I’d like promoted.
There’s just one thing letting my shop down at the moment, and sad to say that’s down to me and not Frooition - my product photos just aren’t up to standard and all need reshooting and tidying up.
My next job will be to update all of my listings to a new template to match my eBay shop, and that’s where the work begins for me. Up until now Frooition have done all the hard graft. I’m looking forward to it, if they look half as good as my shop they’ll be worth the effort.
Overall I’m extremely pleased with the new design, it’s cleaner, more professional, gentle on the eye, and most important of all it retains everything that was great from a standard eBay shop template and then improves on it.
It’s so much better than my old eBay shop. Quite honestly I think it’s the best looking eBay shop I’ve ever seen.
My eBay shop design : The brief
May 28, 2008
I’ve always liked my eBay shop design, which is pretty much a standard eBay implemention with a header. Even the header has been designed to resemble ebay shop promotion boxes with curvy corners (thanks to Sue and her code magic).
The time has come for a refresh though, and it’s down to Sue and her experiment with Frooition.
I’ve always had reservations with Frooition’s offering, along the same lines as Sue, in that anything that’s not eBay must be off-putting to buyers. That’s not proved to be the case though and with Sue reporting a 33% increase in sales I simply can’t ignore the results.
So I’ve bitten the bullet, admitted I was wrong, and am in the process of having Frootion re-design my eBay shop, and I have to say the initial design preview which the Frooition designer, Alun Widdowson, sent across yesterday is simply superb!
My shop has worked, and worked well over the years. Importantly it has been able to sell more product than I could physically pack. One of my main objectives will be to establish if a Frooition shop can deliver the same number of sales from fewer listings and save on eBay fees.
My brief to Frooition was to create a simple but professional design keeping my current colour scheme. I found it very difficult to describe what I wanted, as I was asking for less not more. I don’t want a complicated graphics heavy design, simple and to closely resemble a standard eBay shop was the main requirement.
I’m convinced that it’s not easy to design a sleek clean look, but that is what I wanted and the Frooition designers have come up trumps.
Simple, stylish but minimalist was the way I summed up the look and feel I wanted and that’s exactly what they’ve delivered.
As always I’m incredibly impressed with Frootions graphics, they’re simply superb and I love the way they’ve managed to weave my logo into them.
I’ve saved a screenshot of my old eBay shop for comparison. Now I can’t wait for my new shop design to go live!
Frooition offer for TameBay readers
April 3, 2008
The lovely people at Frooition have a special offer just for TameBay readers: £100 off an eBay Shop and listing template design. All you have to do is give some details on their masterpiece of an enquiry form and a voucher with the discount code will be emailed to you. You need to do this before Friday 18th April 2008, but coupons will be redeemable until Friday 9th May 2008.
And if you missed it the first time round, you can still find out if a Frooition shop design increases sales (hint: yes).
Does a Frooition shop design increase sales?
March 26, 2008
Yes.
Posted by Sue, 26th March…
Oh, you want details? 
Money is up approximately 33%: this is even better than the 20% that Frooition themselves suggested. Perhaps even more significantly, most of this increase has come from individual buyers spending more, rather than there being more orders overall, which suggests to me that buyers *like* shopping in the Frooition environment.
When we began this experiment, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to demonstrate what had caused any change in my sales. I was careful to have the same number of listings running as I had in previous months, and not to try any wacky new sales strategies. I wanted Frooition to be the only new thing. Then eBay introduced Best Match. It’s possible that BM has improved things for me, but I don’t think it’s that. If BM were advantaging me that much, I’d have seen an overall increase in the amount of traffic, and in number of buyers. Traffic is exactly the same as this time last year. The number of buyers is up very, very slightly, but that increase is nothing compared to the change in buying habits.
Prior to installing my Frooition shop front, the average buyer in my shop bought around three items. Now, they buy five. It seems that Frooition encourages buyers to take more of a look around, to add in a couple of extra cheaper items that before, they would have missed. Page views overall are down 20% on this time last year, so it seems that that Frooition shop front is making it easier and quicker for buyers to find things they want to buy.
Selling on eBay isn’t always an exact science. No doubt there are other interpretations that could be put on these changes. It might just be that a rash of spendy buyers have come along, in the way that sometimes happens on eBay for no good reason I can ever see. I might just have got lucky. But I don’t think so: I roundly blame Frooition for a lot of extra packing I’ve had to do recently. 
eBay Live exhibitors list released
March 19, 2008
eBay have published a list of some of the exhibitors for eBay Live in Chicago this June. I’m happy to see plenty of chums there: Vzaar, Frooition, Vertus and ChannelAdvisor will all be attending.
Compared to last year’s exhibitors’ list, Live 08 is looking very skimpy around the exhibition floor so far: there are just 67 exhibitors compared to last year’s 127. But new this year, there is also the ASD/AMD Sourcing Pavilion, which will “connect you to wholesalers and distributers who source thousands of popular products to help bolster your business on eBay”.
And as it’s “just a few of the companies”, perhaps there are more to be announced: perhaps there’s still time for you and your company to sign up. 
My new shop design : a sneaky peek
February 13, 2008
click to embiggen
I have the first peek at my new Shop design from Frooition. I know what I think, but I’m very interested to hear what you think. Bear in mind that I sell glass beads, so the thumbnail gallery pictures are likely to be a multitude of different colours. If you want to see the current version, here it is. What do you think?
My new shop design : an update
January 31, 2008
Yesterday I received an email from Frooition regarding my new shop design.
You can expect a design preview for you to review 4-5 business days later.
Frooition are busy, which is good, but that means that customers have to wait, which is bad. They seem to be pretty good at managing this process, both giving me a realistic assessment of lead time upfront, and now this little reassurance that they haven’t forgotten me!
I particularly liked them emphasising that if there was anything I’d forgotten to mention, I could still get in touch and let them know. I feel absolutely confident that this design won’t be finished until I’m 100% happy, and that’s really good to know. And of course, now I’m excited to see it all over again!
Putting Frooition’s money where my mouth is
January 24, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, I left a rather facaecious comment on one of Dan’s eBay Shops posts:
Are “designer†shop fronts - e.g. Frooition’s offerings - worth it? Personally I think not: eBay spend a lot of money driving buyers to eBay, and shop fronts that suddenly make buyers feel like they’re not on eBay any more are surely off-putting?
I was more than a bit surprised to receive an email from Frooition’s MD, Grenville Whelan, offering to redesign my Shop for free, if I’d only blog about it. Really, who could resist?
I spent an interesting half an hour on the phone to Andrew Pinner, Frooition’s online sales manager. He talked me through the design process - essentially, tell us what you want, and we’ll work until you’re happy - and allayed some concerns I had. Then there was a web form to fill out, which asked me what sort of feel I wanted for my shop (fun, corporate, retro, industrial, etc.) and to pick my three main colours. I could also include three other sites which I like, and as much extra instruction (”NO PINK!!!”) as I wanted. As Andrew said, the more detail a client can supply, the easier it is for them to make a successful design.
Frooition aren’t cheap: the initial design process is £795, plus £9.95 per month subscription fee (the first three months are free), which covers any tweaks that eBay changes make necessary. For some people, this will put them beyond the realm of possibility, but for others, it will be a more than reasonable price.
My design request is now in the queue for the designer; I’m told they should get back to me in the next ten to fourteen days, when I’ll get to see the provisional design and be able to request as many tweaks as I want, or even demand a complete re-redesign. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
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