WIDSHOPS EBAY DESIGN

Some might say we are ‘late to market’ with now providing a solution for the SME market but we decided not to rush. We wanted to be ahead of the game and provide something that is intuitive and very ‘now’ in relation to how the world of e-commerce is progressing. We wanted to look forward with our design innovations like with our premium service eBay designs. We want you to be future proof!

Widshops is an affordable ebay design solution (set up and design around £1500) but it provides all the look and feel of a professional stream lined shopping experience. It carries a subscription cost based on number of listings (http://widshop.com/en/prices/)

The key features are:

• Fast – Your new template delivered quickly
• Easy – only the best features show up in your shop
• Economical – Sales increase, costs decrease
• Optimised – HTML template also works on iPhone and iPad
• Compatible – works with all eBay listing and sales management tools
• Professional – Project managers at your side

The best bits are:

Category and filter navigation just like on the eBay platform

We filled an important technical gap with the eBay category and filter navigation. eBay® customers are already familiar with the intuitive filter navigation. This is now available with WIDshop in your eBay® storefront as well.

WIDshop navigation sorts your items out in real time and automatically recognises in which eBay® categories, and with which items specifics they have been listed. Through this, the WIDshop generates a navigation that displays all of your eBay® categories and item specifics filters. This way, your customers can search by category and filter the results according to items specifics. Your customers will easily and comfortably be able to find the right size, colour or material! You are thereby significantly enhancing your customers’ shopping experience!

Sell more with clever cross-selling

Every eBay® customer who clicks onto one of your products is very interested in buying. You keep your customer in your shop by using clever cross-selling. For this purpose, WIDshop makes a product gallery available to you which automatically presents similar products from the same eBay® category. This way your customer sees, for example, additional t-shirts, CDs from the same music genre, more hard drives or different trainers. The WIDshop cross-selling gallery can also work with customised rules based on item specifics or keywords, if desired. We would be happy to advise you.

Reach more customers with Facebook etc.

By linking the WIDshop to Facebook and Twitter, your customers can inform their friends that they like your storefront. You benefit from this additional marketing channel, which increases the popularity of your storefront and thus, the number of your clients.

The list of search results for a positive shopping experience

The most important thing about search results is their speed. Not only have we made the WIDshop search very fast. We have also made it look appealing and incorporated a few added features for your customers, such as wish lists or the display of the item condition. The search results are compiled and loaded anew in the navigation and filters after each click. This way, your customers always have an overview and can find their way easily and quickly through storefronts, even with a larger selection of items.

Integration of custom pages

All custom pages such as the legal notice, etc., that you’ve created as personal pages in your eBay® storefront can be easily accessed through the navigation and are displayed in your storefront design. This way, the entire storefront features your corporate design.
You can also easily manage and update your custom pages in your eBay® account. Therefore, the WIDshop works like a small editing system.

Examples:

http://stores.ebay.de/Sport-Fischmann

http://stores.ebay.de/outdoorsportshop24

http://stores.ebay.at/123boerse

 
So feel free to quiz me or comment on our new service and watch our for the discount code worth £250 in the 2012 Tamebay Tools and Services Guide

http://www.kookiweb.co.uk/ – a few basic eBay design examples.

http://www.meanpixel.com/ebay-store-listing-design.htm – more ‘advanced’ look.

http://www.agenius-marketing.com/ebay-store-design.html for basic store/listing design.

eBay design seems to be the new thing to do…

Promising full store compliance lets look at the key rules broken in the last store design:

Externalised CSS

Oh yes, I am guilty so all the css will now be held within the design pages, which is a right pain if you have to update your css as every page would need to be changed. A step back in coding evolution from eBay…

Using eBay’s own ID or class based rules

OK, so again I manipulated eBays css id’s and classes. Changing them is their prerogative and I will steer clear and make up my own funky names for things. Prepare for the ridiculous.

Basically, the new store will be a nice HTML based frame with the eBay gunk in the middle. I will bust my buttons to make sure the category pages also have this frame so the design is not splash-psge-esq. If I have to jump backwards and not externalise CSS I’m not taking another giant leap backwards by splash paging.

I’ll leave the splash pages to marketing freaks.

I am going to go backwards on this one a little, providing the full code up front then working backwards and breaking it down step by step. I know there are hungry bunnies out there wanting their next eBay design project fix and my time is limited so I want to concentrate on the bulk of the task in hand.

I will update on Saturday with how far I have got. As always the code and crappy images I create will be all free free free, and I won’t even ask you to link back or credit. I would just like see your eBay shop for your take on the framework!

Here is a round up of the story so far:

Frooition/Createmystore (Yeah, they look like the same company to me too so they get lumped as one) are going to charge an upgrade fee. There has been discontentment over the fact that stores were not compliant with ebay policy previously but with the upgrade they will be. Estimate cost for a basic design £50-£100 per store in addition to the £17.95 subscription pcm fee.

Currently no other stores which I imagine will be affected listed in this post have come under fire in how they will handle the new situation but as they arise with information I will add them to this post.

The section is currently:
/* -------- Control Border on Gallery List -------- */
td.gallery
{
border:1px #FF00FF solid;
}
/* -------- End -------- */
/* -------- Control Background on Gallery List -------- */
td.gallery table td
{
background:#FFCCFF;
}
/* -------- End -------- */

Now we are going to replace it with:

td.gallery
{
width:360px;
height:130px;
background:url(http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebaybg.jpg) no-repeat !important;
}
/* making certain backgrounds transparent */
span.ebay table,
.pagecontainer table table table,
.pagecontainer table table tr,
.pagecontainer table td
{
background:transparent;
}

Notice that adding this section of code, the background to the promotion boxes/search box and the categories disappear (we shall deal with the promo boxes and search box in a later post) so to make sure you category background image stays in place replace:

td.category {
height:35px;
width:180px;
border-top:1px solid #FFCCFF;
background: url(http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebaybutton.jpg) no-repeat;
margin:5px;
}

with:

td.category {
height:35px;
width:180px;
border-top:1px solid #FFCCFF;
background: url(http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebaybutton.jpg) no-repeat !important;
margin:5px;
}

the !important tag tell eBay that your CSS change is WAY more important and should be obeyed at all costs.

I also added this nugget to add a nice border around my gallery:

table.ebItemlist
{
width:770px !important;
border-left:1px #FFCCFF solid;
border-right:1px #FFCCFF solid;
border-bottom:1px #FFCCFF solid;
}

Please as always read the disclaimer

Just to complete, the section now looks like:

/* -------- Control Gallery List -------- */
td.gallery
{
width:360px;
height:130px;
background:url(http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebaybg.jpg) no-repeat !important;
}
/* making certain backgrounds transparent */
span.ebay table,
.pagecontainer table table table,
.pagecontainer table table tr,
.pagecontainer table td
{
background:transparent;
}
/*Nice border around gallery*/
table.ebItemlist
{
width:770px !important;
border-left:1px #FFCCFF solid;
border-right:1px #FFCCFF solid;
border-bottom:1px #FFCCFF solid;
}
/* -------- End -------- */

You can see the full css file here: eBay Store Design with CSS and to see the changes to my eBay store as we go along visit : http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Hairfreax

Even though their is a credit crunch in the UK it should not stop sensible investment in your eBay business. eBay design can provide various functions, from just aesthetics to brand new functionality which can be added.

On the net your design, usability and customer interactions are key. Now we are holding onto our purses this is the time to invest. A tight ecomony breeds tight spenders, are you a cut above the rest?

eBay is designed using a series of nested tables, so in order to colour various bits of the design you need to make sure you have to mention the table or td definition the correct number of times to get the desired result. This is the snipet of CSS you can add to the previous file:

td.gallery table td
{
background:#FFCCFF;
}


This will generate the effect below:

Lesson three will look at more places to change the background colour in your ebay shop!

The listing design (ebay item template) is very important as it is the first impression your buyer will see. Buyers search for items on ebay more than they would search for your shop itself.

Great branding will make that listing stand out and memorable, but you need to make it for the right reasons. You need to make sure that your buyer has all the information needed to make the purchase. Your information has to be displayed for ease of navigation ( say, breaking up large amounts of text or specifications with bullet points etc) and also communicated to the buyer in their own language.

When you are drafting up an eBay design project make sure your professional ebay design company can consult with you on the features and functionality specific to your product type.

Plan the steps of your buyer as if making a purchase yourself and tailor the content so they see exactly what they expect to see. The stunning design should be enough attraction for the client in the first instance giving you the wow factor, but then you need to think on functionality and information.

Give the buyer all the information they need and they won’t hesitate! The visual aspect of a professional design is only touching the surface of what your design should do. eBay design needs function, and purpose.

Matt Cutts of Google Fame says that:

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

Shall we run an experiment? If I set up pages all about ebay design on this domain in those three formats shall we see which one ranks better? Now, random jibber is going to be my content filler and the pages will appear at the top of this site. I have chosen the term ‘ebay design’ as my target as it is a highly competative keyword and I am unlikely to get to the top page for this term. Which is what I would prefer as I don’t DO ebay design and I would not want to disrupt the companies that do in the search listings. This is only an experiment to see which SEF URL format would rank higher for the keyword search in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I shall use this tool to check results.

Let the experiment begin…..