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Anyone here successfully moved a chunk of their eBay sales to their own store? What made the difference?
Summary: trmech-30 shares their experience of selling on eBay and the challenges of high fees, prompting them to explore setting up a Shopify store to reduce costs and expand reach. They worked with a team, Semark Global, to build their store and improve organic traffic. Although the new store generates about 20% of eBay sales, it operates without the per-sale fees. trmech-30 seeks advice from others on how they balanced eBay sales with their own store and asks about the tipping point that justified the investment in their store.
I've been selling on eBay for a few years now, solid volume, but the fees add up fast once you factor in final value fees plus payment processing. Started looking into building our own Shopify store on the side, partly to escape some of that, partly because eBay search only shows people who are already looking for the exact product, not people who might not know the brand yet.
Talked to a few people about it, and the honest answer seems to be that just having a store isn't enough. Without real SEO and some paid traffic behind it, a standalone store gets basically zero visitors compared to eBay's built-in search traffic. Makes sense in hindsight: eBay hands you buyers; your own store means you have to bring your own.
We ended up working with a small team, Semark Global, to build the store properly and get some actual organic traffic flowing before pulling too much focus off eBay. Slow start, but the store now brings in maybe 20 percent of what eBay does, without the per-sale fee eating into it.
I'm curious how others have balanced this, did you go all in on your own store, or keep eBay as the main channel and treat a store as a side project? What was the tipping point that made it worth the extra work?
