eBay Listing Days!
Being an online retailer is not easy, especially when it’s such an interconnected world where making the right connections is the key to achieving objectives. At Arena Flowers we mull over the different online advertising channels every day, reviewing their promises to dramatically boost our visitors overnight. It would be easy if we had very few channels to choose from. But the deluge of online advertising media puts businesses like ours in a tricky situation. To complicate this, there is no proven formula to identify what works best and what doesn’t. One thing that works for sure is the ‘holy grail’ of online businesses - Google organic search.
While optimising for Google remains our primary concern to maximise our reach to flower lovers and, consequently, our flower sales, we constantly seek other avenues to promote our online presence. This is to ensure that we don’t lag in a competitive industry. But what are the alternatives to the Google monster?
There are many online businesses offering advertising and promotional opportunities. There is a barrage of online advertising channels, affiliate programmes, shopping comparison sites, directories and even social networking sites which claim to be able to augment our online flower presence. One leader of the pack chasing Google is internet auction site, eBay, one of the most popular forms of internet advertising for online businesses like Arena Flowers.
Historically, eBay auctions have been seen as a prominent and a popular channel to reach out to customers. Many companies have based their business models entirely on eBay and succeeded. We too are keen to capitalise on this, although selling our products on eBay has not been an easy choice. We had discouraging results from our initial cost benefit analysis, and had to make some fairly optimistic assumptions about conversion rates. Also, eBay is not a natural place for people to go looking for flowers.
But have you heard of heart ruling over head? So powerful is the eBay machine and the millions of page views that it generates every hour, that we decided to try listing our products anyway. We felt that, despite the negatives, listing our flowers on eBay stood a good chance of giving us some benefit either in terms of branding or in terms or our search marketing efforts.
We listed our flowers in the shop format and the auction format. We even listed one of our bouquets as “Featured Plus” in order to bump the flowers to the top of the category. We trialled our eBay flower shop and bought a couple of products ourselves, to test. Finally, on the 1st July 2007, we listed around 14 flower bouquets. Immediately after our launch, we sold a white gift wrap, which encouraged us to add in more bouquets, to give a fuller range. Fifteen days after our first flower sale, we are still waiting for the next one.
:(
In summary as it stands now:
- No. of bouquets Listed: 20
- No. of sales since our first sale: 0
- Amount Spent for listing on eBay: Quite a bit
Nevertheless, we did have some positives. We experimented using video in our listing to promote our products, courtesy vzaar, a cool new tool developed by a team of creative wizards, which aims to improve the eBay marketplace by making it easy to add video to listings. Into the bargain, we ended up being blogged about. We also had Google pick our listings and even our Arena Flowers blog on eBay (basically, the same as this one so no need to rush off and read that one too).
To conclude, in terms of SEO we’re getting some benefits, in terms of sales, it’s not working out just yet. It’s still early days, so we’ll be patient. Watch this space!
PS: If you want to buy from us on eBay (we have 100% positive feedback!), rather than through the best flower site in the world!, here are some of our listings:
- A Dozen Red Roses
- Pink Gift Wrap
- Tulip Sensation
- Pink Lilies & Roses
- White Gift Wrap
- White Lily Bouquet
- Red Carnations
- Mixed Carnations
- Freesias Bouquet
- Gerbera Bouquet
- A Dozen White Roses
- Chrysanthemum Bouquet
- Bright & Cheery
- Orange Gift Wrap
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 23rd, 2007
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I guess the big question is, are people looking for flowers on eBay?
If they are why are they not finding your shop?
If they aren’t are they buying elsewhere?
What kind of viewing figures did you get for your auctions?
Have you tried listing in core as an auction?
We’ve had several hundred visits since 1st July, half of which would be us. There are other florists who have listed their products. Their feedback suggests, they have had some success.
We did list as auctions in the beginning and one lucky eBayer bought a bouquet for £0.99.
:(
Maybe you need a couple of lost leads and 99p flowers to get the visibility on eBay.
Maybe you should try listing under categories with romance in them as a featured item?
The listings are already spread into different categories including Romance. We’ll try a couple more.
Thanks Adrian!
It’s pretty tricky…eBay isn’t an obvious place to buy flowers, so we have to kind of put our flower listings where people will bump into them and then maybe buy on the spur of the moment. But then again, you can’t argue with eBay’s massive traffic volumes, so you only need a very small percentage to buy for the numbers to work. Fiddly stuff! Adarsh’s softly softly approach is sensible though, for sure.