eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Advertise Your eBay Listings

Use the eBay Editor Kit and Merchant Kit to promote your listings off-eBay, or promote your eBay Store right in eBay search results.

The age-old practice of advertising is alive and well on the Net, so why be left out? There are several ways to advertise your eBay listings to help turn your small business into a big one, and what’s better is that most of them are free.

Once you’ve signed up with one of eBay’s affiliate programs [Hack #98] , you can use either of eBay’s two tools for creating lists of auctions on your own site. Not only will this help promote your auctions and increase traffic to specific items, but you’ll make money for each new user who signs up and for each bid that is placed as a result of your links.

Alternatively, you can promote your listings to other eBay members by paying (as little as US$20) for banner ads to appear in eBay search results, as described later in this hack.

The Editor Kit

The Editor Kit couldn’t be slicker. Just go to cgi3.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?EKCreate and fill out the fields, as shown in Figure 7-9.

Select Commission Junction in the Provider box and enter your CJ ID in the Tracking ID field (paradoxically, you leave the Commission Junction SID field blank). The rest of the fields should be self-explanatory, and the only one that is required is the Search Term. Since you probably want to limit the search to your own listings, type your eBay Member ID in the eBay Seller IDs box.

Figure 7-9. Use the Editor Kit to ...