Investing in an eBay design is a big move for any eBay business. It’s important that you ask the right questions to make sure that you are getting the design service that works best for your business and your customers.

• Which features do you really need?
• How will it make buying easier for your customers?
• How does it look on mobile?
• How will it make selling easier for you?
• Do all features meet eBay policy standards?
• How do I stand out from my competition?
• What will be the impact on my sales?
• How complicated will design be to manage on my listings?
• How do I future-proof my design investment against eBay platform changes?
• What about eBay banner design?
• How to change eBay design?

To be an eBay Certified Provider, design companies must undergo a strict certification process run and managed directly by eBay and have good capability to design eBay shops. This is to ensure the company is competent and can demonstrate they fully understand the eBay technology platform, eBay security policies and compliance and do provide a quality service to their customers.If not, you may risk wasting money with an agency that:

• Are not compliant with eBay’s security policies risking having your listings pulled and your account suspended without warning
• Are not proven meaning your listings may appear broken or unresponsive costing both sales and reputation
• Are not aware of eBay platform changes or technology roadmap meaning your listings could fail at any time

eBay provide an online list of certified providers which you can check at:

http://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/listing/listing-advanced-sellers/third-party-listing-tools.html

If an eBay Design company is not listed here under third party listing tools, this means they are not eBay certified.

There is no exception to this, and any company claiming to be approved by eBay who are not on this list, are misleading customers.

You should never need to give a company your sensitive information.You should never risk the security of the login details for the platform where you run your business, and handle sales and payments.

Only consider companies that install designs using eBay’s API and a secure token.

All access is logged by eBay and the token can be revoked at any time without affecting any other tools.

This incredibly technical sounding question is very important to you for one simple reason.If your eBay design files sit on a single server, you create a single point of failure. If that one server crashes, your design completely fails, your live listings lose any design and very simply, your sales will drop off.

It is not uncommon for budget shared servers to be down for days at a time. Ask yourself how much revenue would you lose if the server was down for a day? Worse still, if it happens on a Friday evening, it could be down all weekend.

Choose a design partner that use highly available enterprise standard servers ensuring your template loads from the nearest server to your customer, meaning quicker load times. If that server fails, it should automatically relocate to the next closest server. At any one time a design should be served from multiple separate locations to ensure the service maintains 99.99% uptime. As close as possible to zero downtime for your listings.

Some features proven to increase sales for established eBay sellers include:1 – Dynamic Cross Promotion.

Dynamic cross promotion is the most powerful sales boosting tool sellers can have on eBay as it can offer your alternative products within each of your eBay listings.

Dynamic cross promotion scans through your live listings, and should automatically show any related products, based on the rules you set.

The rules could be size, colour, any relevant feature. It should only cross promote listings which are relevant and live, thus increasing order values.

This is important because cross promoting irrelevant items is not useful to your customer when they are looking to buy, and it makes your listings look disorganised.

When products sell out, sellers with non-dynamic cross promotion have to go through and update every listing, or they will be cross pushing potential customers to a dead listing.

Successful cross selling is shown to directly increases sales, boost conversion rates, improves click-through and average basket orders. A positive side effect of cross selling is it also boosts brand awareness – the more listings a customer views, the more exposure to your brand they receive.

2 – Add Video

Video increases time on page by 340%. It is the easiest way for your customer to take in the information they need to feel confident about your product. That is why customers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video. Video is a powerful sales tool that is growing in popularity with customers. Choose a eBay design partner that offer unlimited bandwidth for video who choose this as a growth tool for their store.

3 – Dynamic Categories.

This is important because every eBay business will, at some point, need to add and remove categories.

It may be for introducing new product lines, or removing old ones, but whatever the reason, for a store with hard coded categories, this would mean a lot of work. The seller would need to take down each product listing and adjust each one manually.

This would cost you time and lose your sales history and ranking.

Using totally dynamic categories means that you should be able to instantly edit all listings with a simple click of a button.

4 – Multi design for a single account.

You may only have one design in mind right now but having the option for multiple designs gives you massive scope for growth.

For example, a seller selling computers and mobile phones may want one design specifically for computers and another design for mobile phones. After they start selling a lot of refurbished ipads and macbooks they may want to then have separate designs just for macbooks and ipads. Or they may choose to have a design just for apple products, or just for refurbished products. They could add custom areas for different returns or delivery policy. If they find that they are making most of their sales around Christmas, they may want a holiday template with a custom box advertising that they do fast delivery or to promote a holiday discount offer.

Being able to host multiple designs with unique features allows you to go beyond branded aesthetics and offer your customers a more personalised shopping experience, showing customers relevant information such as correct gender size charts and offers based on the item they are viewing.

Choose an eBay design partner that makes this growth easy and affordable by letting you host multiple eBay listing designs from one eBay store.

5 – Design Auto Apply.

Auto Apply features lets you list in seconds, with the design applied for you. You should have as many designs as you like, just set your auto apply so that it knows which design goes on which category or kind of items, and your listings will appear automatically designed. So easy, you should be able to list with your smart phone.

Auto Apply gives you application free design. The design is automatically applied as items go live on eBay – no matter how you listed.

There are two options for applying eBay design to existing live eBay listings; you can either go through every one of your listings and manually paste in the relevant code provided by your design partner, or you can have it automatically applied with an eBay bulk listing tool.Having to go into every live eBay listing and cut and paste code is a long process. Imagine if you had hundreds or even thousands of live listings that you had to manually edit each time you wanted to upload a design?

Choose an eBay design partner that offer eBay listing tools allowing you to list directly to eBay.

#8: How will I apply my new design to my new listings?

Manually adding new code and graphics to new listings is also cumbersome and prone to error. Use a design partner that provide the tools to allow you to automatically apply your designs to all new listings.