Is having Multiple Stores a benefit if your store is 50% of one category?

[etrader61]

I have a store with an average of 350 items (etrader61 Collectibles). Nearly half are coins, numismatics. The other half is like a department store as I am downsizing my life at 72 years old. After 4 years of monthly and yearly statistics, my sales of non-coins is about 34% and 66% are coins.

Sales are down do to the economy and I wonder as a technique to increase sales overall is to have 2 stores. 

I am a 1 person store so will costs and time spent beat me up? Some of you have multiple stores, is it worth it? Or is better organization, pictures, and so on is what I need to do?

I would love to hear any Pros and Cons on this.

Thank you,

Roger 

[stuff4divas]

@etrader61   If I had your situation, I would have 2 selling accounts (not stores) bc we get up to 250 free listings and you have 350.

So, you can split the coins, numismatics into one account and the rest into the other account.

I opened a second account for misc items, always way under the 250 free listings allotment,  that have zero relationship to my main account (store) of almost 600 items and it actually is easier for me to keep track of.

Sort of like a bookkeeping system.

I wish you well

[chapeau-noir]

If one wants to break things up completely into discreet markets and doesn't care about the category "cross pollination" (as I call it), I would also just open a second ID with no store and save money.  My reasoning has to do with the experience I've had with people purchasing multiple items from different categories, or coming back and purchasing something completely different, all from my same single store, but I have a fair number of return customers and don't want to lose that capability.

[onefootflipper]

I split into two stores just because I have 2000 regular items and 13000 trading cards. The regular items bring in far more money than the trading cards do and I want my regular item customers to be able to browse without seeing 10 trading cards for every other item. 

For a 50/50 split I wouldn't have worried about it.