I just have to say that I love eBay. As much as I love what eBay is, I still understand one thing? eBay is a fantastic traffic tool, but let's remember that as great as it is, our goal is still to get the customers OFF eBay any time we can. With that in mind, I wanted to keep in the same vein of what I talked about last month and show how to use every opportunity to get prospects to go to your website even BEFORE an eBay sale.

As always, we want to stay within eBay rules. At this time, eBay says that direct links (URLs) to your own website are not allowed within the auction description. This rule applies to regular auctions, fixed price and store inventory listing formats, but both Andrew and I use direct links in eBay's Classified Ads format, more on that another time? For now we are going to talk about the regular auctions, fixed price and store inventory listing formats.

eBay User ID

Your eBay User ID is a fantastic place to start letting any casual browser know you have a website. Your User ID will be on all your correspondence with potential customers and is automatically one of the first things people see when they come to your listings.

eBay has a double standard when it comes to User Ids as they let users that had URLs in their User ID's before a certain date, continue to have a blatant website address like; mysite. For those of us who registered after the policy changed, we are no longer allowed to have a URL or email address as our User ID!

Fair, no, but welcome to life on eBay. There are a couple ways around this though and I highly suggest them. Use either; yoursitedotcom or yoursite-dot-com. If you are really gutsy you could get crazy and pull one of these; **yoursite**.

eMail Address

Another trick is to have a link to your email

you can have something that says, "If you have any questions please email me anytime at: you@YOURSITE." When I use this technique I actually make the YOURSITE section of the email address bold and possibly a font size or to bigger, just to make the URL part prominent. When I am looking to buy an item on eBay and I see an email address within the listing I always go check out the website. It never fails, I just want to see what they offer outside of ebay and other will too!

For More Info

I always have a link within my auctions that offer more info on the product or on me as a seller. The link might say, "For more info about this product, Click Here" or "Please view our Frequently Asked Questions". When they click the link they are directed to a page on my website. They key to this is that eBay doesn't allow you to sell them something from the page you directly brought them too, but I always add a "Check out my other items" or a "HOME" link on the page I directed them too.

Just the fact that you directed them to your website, even if it was just to give them more info, will make most people curious about your site and want to look around. eBay allows it so there is no reason not to use it!

There you go, a couple simple ways to 'hide' potential customers away from eBay BEFORE you get the sale. Now that you know that is a possibility you can start coming up with other ways to do it. A couple other ideas could be within a video or audio that you play within your auction listing, certainly lots of other possibilities!