Creating your own store website?

I would imagine that it would be a wise idea to diversify or spread your business
if you wanted to increase revenues and/or reach out to a larger market.

Has anyone here (ebay sellers) gone ahead and created their own store on websites
like shopify or wix? Would you basically just post the same items for sale in your own
store as you have in your ebay store?

Do you save all your ebay customers emails to build up a client list and then tell them
about your non-ebay store to try and make more sales directly?

Would one of the risks be that if an ebayer finds out you have a store off ebay and were
emailing them about offers, could they report you to ebay and tell them that this ebay seller
also has an online store off ebay who is trying to make sales?

So in other words, IF someone creates their own merchant store off ebay, you want to make
sure that they are not linked somehow to your ebay store right?

I would like to learn more about this potential option.

oatmeal said:

I would imagine that it would be a wise idea to diversify or spread your business if you wanted to increase revenues and/or reach out to a larger market.

Click to expand...

IMO, much of it depends on what you sell, but unless you have a niche product that is not fungible, you make more money by increasing sales on eBay and Amazon than by starting your own site. I once spent about $4K on a nice custom site and it was getting traffic 1/10 that of eBay or Amazon and I would have had to spent thousands more on a marketing budget to increase it.

Yes, I would imagine that would be one of the biggest issues when starting up your own site.
When you spent that amount of money, did that also include marketing the site? I would imagine that if someone is already well connected with social media and has lots of friends/followers, or has a way to share in groups, pages, to spread their website, you might have a chance to get some extra sales that way without needing to spend much money? Was most of that 4K spent on registering/maintaining the domain name, and paying for the design or layout and services to run the site?

That is the biggest advantage that ebay/amazon offers (instantly in front of way more potential buyers)....