My eBay shop design : Going live

June 5, 2008

This post was written in June 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

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.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Featured, Selling Tips | 17 Comments 

My eBay shop design : The brief

May 28, 2008

This post was written in May 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

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!

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Selling Tips | 9 Comments