I’ve been experimenting with using WordPress to make an eBay auction store similar to a BANS (Build a Niche) store. Although BANS works very well and is easy to set up there are advantages to using WordPress instead. These advantages are:
- a blog is easier to promote (using Technorati, MyBlogLog etc)
- an enormous no of plugins available to further customise your store
- using RSS feeds from an advanced search on eBay the searches can be customised in many ways
- auctions are entered as posts. This means that each item will be indexed by Google. More pages will be indexed and each post will have long-tailed keywords in the title.
So this is how I set up an eBay store using wordPress.
Plugins Used
1. Set up FeedWordPress
Make some suitable categories from your dashboard. You might want to make 1 or 2 main categories and some subcategories. Install the plugin as usual then start to add feeds. Go to eBay, select advanced search, plug in your search terms, your CJ i.d. and do the search. Copy the address of the RSS feed produced then head over to Feedburner and add your feed. Copy the feed address supplied by feedburner then return to Syndication on your WordPress dashboard and add the feed.Now press edit and select the category that you want the posts to go into.
Repeat for all the categories and subcategories.
You could make only one category and then do internal searches but I’ll leave the instructions for that until another post!
Once you’re satisfied update the feeds and the categories will be populated with auctions.
2. Make a welcome message on the home page
I used Genki Announcement to write a message above the first post.
3. Set up a search facility to allow visitors to search by category. There’s a widget available with Advanced Search but unfortunately it doesn’t include search by category. The only way to do that is to have a page for the search. This is not exactly what I would like as I’d prefer a drop down box on the regular WordPress search but I can’t find a plugin to do that. If anyone knows about one please let us know.
4. Set up Auto Delete Posts. Adjust the time to auto delete posts to something suitable. I also added a message to my 404.php file to inform anyone following a deleted post link that the auction has ended. You could put links to categories etc here too or use the related posts plug in to give your visitors more options. No need to lose visitors if they can’t find the auction they were looking for!
I’ll be interested to compare the traffic stats for my site at Air Compressors and Generators set up using this method with my BANS stores. Any feedback on what you think of the site welcomed!
Wow, very creative way to populate WordpPress with Ebay listings. For those us us new to this, could you clarify a couple things?
Go to eBay, select advanced search, plug in your search terms, your CJ i.d. and do the search.
I assume this means that I need to sign up with Commission Junction and get an Ebay affiliate account, but can you explain what “plug in your CJ i.d.” means. When I search Ebay, how do I do this?
Copy the address of the RSS feed produced then head over to Feedburner and add your feed. Copy the feed address supplied by feedburner then return to Syndication on your WordPress dashboard and add the feed.
Why run it through Feedburner first? Why not just use the Ebay feed and put that right into the Sydication area of my WP dashboard?
Thanks a lot if you can clarify these things for me and others! Again, a very creative way to use WP:)
Hi WordPress Modder
Yes you need to sign up with Commission Junction first. In Commision Junction you need to add a website then get the PID number associated with that website. In eBay click on the advanced search, scroll down almost to the bottom and you’ll see ‘Affiliate Tracking Information’. This is where you put in your PID no from CJ. The RSS will then have the no embedded in it.
If you try to use the search directly from eBay FeedWordPress (and wp-o-matic I tried both!) only picks up 1 item. I have no idea why, perhaps someone else knows.
Hi Janet,
Thanks a lot for the clarification, I never would have that affiliate tracking section without your help:)
Take care and good luck.
Good post-thanks for your help
Is there a plugin that can do all that?
Hi melo,
You could use phpBay which is easy to set up but you wouldn’t get the advantage of each auction being a post, therefore a lOT of pages for Google to index each with long tailed keywords as the title. .
Not that I know of unfortunately
dang… that makes for a tough decision then :/
thanks. it seems useful
I think it will be more useful.
It has some definite advantage but have some disadvantages also.
I think it will save our time. Thats why it is more logical.
hey great site some really informational stuff thanks .
Thanks Shipping Containers - glad you like it
Well the only thing I would like to say about this post is “PERFECT INFO”.
Its really useful for any user.
Quite good. Although I am not an online seller, but your post help my friends who are online seller find another way to sell their products. Are there any are the way to build an online Store ?
It’s very interesting, thanks a lot.
Nice post indeed.
Do you mind sharing how this site has done for you? I have been using Mony Tree, BANS and PHPbaypro and am interested in the RSS aspect of your method.
Regards,
Chris
Hi Chris
I have 5 sites so far using this method and have varied results. 2 sites are doing quite well with good traffic and a low bounce rate. They both have >1000 pages indexed with Google. The traffic seems to be slowly increasing as they age a bit. 1 site (discount spectrum analyzers) has lowish traffic (expected for this niche) but I already made some money from it so maybe the visitors are quite targeted. 1 site was really an experiment in a competitive niche (digital cameras) so I didn’t expect a lot and the visitors are quite low but they are increasing. Altogether not spectacularly better than BANS but it’s probably too early to really reach a conclusion.
Creative!WordPress eBay Store,thanks
The auto delete posts plugin is great. I have been thinking of doing the same type system with feeds of other products. I think this find has just fixed my issue. Plus I can now add Ebay auctions too. Thanks.
Excellent idea. WP also has the export / ping and sitemap options which make it preferable to using a BANS store. I am going to work on this, great idea.
Great information! I want to start an Ebay type store, but never really
knew which direction to go. Thanks so much for breaking down everything,
now I am going to give this a try. I was a bit intimidated by the process
at first, now I have more confidence since reading how you went about
setting up yours. I will give this a try right away.
I am glad that I found this post. I have experimented with bans, and I haven’t quite gotten the results that I desire yet. But since I blog a lot anyway your idea would be optimal for a person like me.
Nice explanation, I have also used phpbay plugin with Wordpress to create an ebay store with wordpress but this looks like a good option too.
Thanks for the info. I am still learning more about Feeds and the benefits of them. I went over to Feedburner and signed up with them.
And good additional tidbits you have listed here concerning this.
Nice Site and I have bookmarked it on my favs !!
Thanks for the information. I put this into my NetSnippets. One thing that has changed, eBay no longer uses CJ. You need to become an eBay Partner now and change your ID from the CJ ID.
Hi Janet,
First time I come to your blog through a search for BANS alternative. Damn I am glad I found your blog! I have been searching for ways to make a BANS store without spending $100plus on the software, besides the hosting and domain. It can add up to a lot and I am new to this make money online area. My budget is tight
Thanks for sharing your such useful info, hope you are doing well with your sites.
Hi The Blogshop Blogger Glad you find my site interesting and informative. Good luck with the site building. As you can see I’ve tried a few different methods for building sites. At present my favorite was is using WordPress and Wordbay. It’s proved the easiest so far and I’m getting good results and all the software is free. Hope you do well. Let us know how it goes
Hi Janet,
It took me a long time to set up my blog as I am a newbie to wordpress, lol. And now I am still tweaking the site. Still a long way….
I have tried your methods (feedwordpress and wordbay). Both has it’s advantages and disadvantages but feedwordpress is posting the same item over and over.
Have you or anyone encountered this problem?
Also, I used your website as a learning model (air compressors) and noticed you have for US and UK. How did you manage to do this?
Lastly, does wordbay record items as individual entries like feedwordpress does? I noticed the permalinks are not pointing to the website for wordbay.
Any help is much appreciated!
Hi Janet,
I found a plugin “FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter” that will filter out the duplicate posts and will try it and see if it works.
The plugin can be found at the wordpress plugin directory.
Hi The blogshop blogger
Wordpress doesn’t make individual posts like feedwordpress does which is a disadvantage. One thing I have found a problem with using feedwordpress and autodelete posts is that pages as well as posts are deleted. This seems to be because posts and pages are treated the same in the database. I’ve decided I like using Wordbay better as it’s easier to set up than using feedwordpress.
To make a UK sites install a new copy of wordpress in either a subfolder or as a subdomain then link to it from your US site.
Great post, will this work the same way with the new eBay affiliate program?
Hi BrightPulse
Yes it will work. You just need to enter your eBay id instead of the CJ one.
Hey Janet thanks for the tip on subdomain. Is there a way to move files to the subdomain so I don’t have to start from scratch to create the categories?
I know what you mean by wordbay is more convenient…but I am still going with feedwordpress because of the individual posts.
By the way, eBay RSS does not show store items, which is a bummer.
Didn’t know about WP. I sell on eBay and I am sure going to give this a try.
Hi, are you earning from your wordpress BANS? Thks.
Hi Happy Quotes
Yes I’m earning on the WordBay sites. Difficult to compare how well they do compared to BANS sites as there are so many other factors but they seem to do well. As I really like WordPress and find it so easy to set up I’ve been making WordPress sites only recently. I also find it much easier to add content to a WordPress site, it’s more difficult in BANS!
The Blogshop Blogger: To copy to a subdomain. Upload and install a new copy of WordPress. Export the database of the main site, empty the database for your new subdomain and then import it into the main database. You’ll have a copy of the main site for your subdomain. You could also just export and then import individual tables (e.g. just the post tables or options if you want) This works OK for both BANS sites and WordPress sites. Make sure you go through and change text in the subdomain so it doesn’t appear as a copy to Google.
HP : Please stop spamming my site! Interesting comments are always welcome but spam will always be deleted.
I understand that we cant put adsense on BANS but how about wordpress ebay store?
Hi Janet,
Thanks for the tip on subdomain and duplicate content. My site is less than 2 weeks old and nothing is for certain but I noticed less traffic at my subdomain compared to main. And I am not getting the target audience country based.
As I am using feedwordpress some posts titles are bound to be duplicates…but I am getting traffic based on keywords from the posts titles.
I am particularly concerned about this duplicate issue.
The Blogshop Blogger: I’m also concerned about duplicate content. It seemed to be OK when I first started 6 months ago but traffic has declined the last month or two for many of my subdomains. I also have two sites on different domains but essentially targeting the same market, one the US one the UK. They were both high in Google for some keywords for about 4 months then both sites slipped down for a while. One site has come back and is as high as before, one site (the US) one is still nowhere to be found. They have different descriptions but the categories are the same. I’ve thought of many things it could be, I’ve added lots more unique content and continued to build backlinks but nothing helps. I’m now wondering if they’re too much alike so I’ve now transferred one to a different host so that the IP address is completely different. Not sure if I should also cut any links between them but I’ve left them for now. I’m waiting to see if this has any effect.I believe there may have been changes in the latest algorithm change that has had an effect.
Hi Janet,
I have removed my subdomain to concentrate on the main site. Also to avoid duplicates as some items are repeated on both sites..even though I have blocked indexing of categories.
I have read about legit sites getting delisted and coming back later, time period varies. Reasons behind delist also varies..maybe due to algorithm change as you mentioned.
Dunno if you have heard of Grizzly’s Make Money Online Blog. It’s really useful stuff in regards to SERP and internet marketing. There’s also a community there that is very helpful. You may want to take a look there.
Hi Janet,
Hope you don’t mind me coming back to post questions at your site so often. If you do just shoot me en email!
Currently I have built a site targeting my local niche. And I tried to validate the feeds (after feeding them with feedburner) and found that it’s invalid. The error is I believe in the timezone. “pubDate must be an RFC-822 date-time”.
….I wonder if this would affect the tracking? The feeds are working properly in other ways. And because of this my site’s RSS feed will not work. error: XML Parse Error
Anyways, I have been getting clickthroughs at my first site (check out my link) but almost zero revenue. It makes me wonder sometimes if my links may not be tracked properly?
Have you encountered this issue with your use of wordbay or feedwordpress?
I have also asked a friend to help me test this issue. Will post once I get the results…
Hi The Blogshop Blogger
Had a look at your site it looks great! The links look OK to me. Have you had any bids at all? You say almost 0 revenue so something must be working if you’re getting something. I haven’t seen that feed error before. How exactly did you set up the feed in feedburner? Is it a wordpress feed you’re putting through feedburner. If you give me some details I’ll try to reproduce it and see if I can find a way around it.
‘course I don’t mind, glad you like to visit
Hi Janet,
I have tried testing the new site’s template with another website without feeds and the same error showed. The only RSS that shows is RSS0.92. So I guess it’s something to do with the template I am using.
The feed (taken from eBay.com.sg) that didn’t validate had an error which shows a timezone SGT (my country) and I check that it’s not a valid timezone for feeds?
But I got a friend to test out the non-validated feed see if it’s tracking and it had registered a CRU. So should be ok..
Lastly, my first site is getting stripped off from Google search results. It’s been about 3 weeks now I set it up. I checked on google webmaster tools and found duplicates from my old subdomain (mainly categories). You were right about changing the wording.
As of now, I have about 10 bids, 2 winning bids, earned about SGD$8. But sadly almost no traffic now…
All in all, thanks for stopping by!
Hi Janet,
Have a pressing question to ask. When using Feedwordpress we keep generating urls pointing to our site. But when we delete the posts (as we can’t keep the expired auctions or the database will explode), if google had indexed these posts, will it harm our site that there are so many 404s not found?
I had checked in google’s webmaster tools and found an alarming no. of urls not found….
I never knew I could set up an ebay store with WordPress. Nice find. Also check out upfuse.com you can search ebay easily there.
Well Janet,
Seems like you are doing the same business as me. Guess you can give me some tips, ha.
can i link my ebay gadget in my wordpress blog and earn money. please help me..
It may be easy to create a BANS site but do remember that you should try as much as possible to create your website as a .com domain. It is works better when it comes to getting indexed by search engines.
thanks for the great info but i really think the best way to make some money from a wordpress blog is adsence and also some affiliates link that are niche to my blog but ill might try that on one of my blogs
Wonderful tips! thanks
I haven’t gotten to work on ebay yet, got any more tips?
this site has a really good informative stuffs. i really appreciate.u can also visit here research paper help.
i really appreciate..
Alot to digest but ultimately very useful indeed. I have inmplemented much of it for my 2 sites. I’ll let you know how we do….
Personally I think you get more sales if you attack each ebay product directly, give people reason to purchase it, and let them buy it. Show how they must go through ebay, so if they’re a new member (some people have bad impressions of ebay), they might go for a shot. BANS is just a huge list of products where you try to stuff people with cookies, hoping that they click on your link.
Wow this is a lot to digest in one sitting. Looks like you did your homework! Ill have to copy paste this and read it again lol!!!
Great article but I agree with Syria that Adsense may be the way to go for a WP blog… Still, great info here.
The ways of taking advantage of blogs is increasing daily. Ive seen crazy promotions for blogs that are completely sponsored by other companies (prizes, contests etc). The internet is now full of money - you just have to find it. Good article.
Thanks for the information and I think I will try it out.
My brother told me about this site and I think your other posts are equally good.
This is a great alternative to ebay - the difficult part may be getting the credibility so people feel ok auctioning on your stie. nevertheless great idea, very creative.
This is a very creative way of implementing eBay style auction to WP. I don’t think Ive seen this done before. After writing this article, how have the results been?
This sounds like great info to try out. I see alot of guys making serious money with this.
Great article, thanks
I find a blog ideal to promote any eBay auction. The Wordpress blogs are so flexible, especially when you add the Semiologic software to them.
Can’t update a site any faster then the Wordpress blog!
I think one should include the Askimet plugin too, a it helps to reduce the amount of spam one gets via comments on the blog.
Another great plugin is subscribe to comments, as it’s sends the visitor an email after they’ve commented on the blog.
Just went to Advanced Search on Ebay and did not find any reference to Affiliate Tracking Information.
Is this still valid?
I’m not a great fan of e bay.
Well I think it has got to do with a couple of bad sales you know.
now its feel better to see your comments………..really nice
Thank you for generously donating this post Janet.
It is fairly cheap to advertise with ad words using the content next work to bring in more traffic.
those are all great tips and Ideas. I’ll and put them to use on my site. great post.
Great advices. I will try them out soon.
u know it is very nice to use for advertising and promotions.it really helps in generating customers and revenue for a buisnessman thnks
Great !! you ideas are great. soon i will try these ideas and will make a store through it.
Hi Happy Quotes
Yes I’m earning on the WordBay sites. Difficult to compare how well they do compared to BANS sites as there are so many other factors but they seem to do well. As I really like WordPress and find it so easy to set up I’ve been making WordPress sites only recently. I also find it much easier to add content to a WordPress site, it’s more difficult in BANS!
The Blogshop Blogger: To copy to a subdomain. Upload and install a new copy of WordPress. Export the database of the main site, empty the database for your new subdomain and then import it into the main database. You’ll have a copy of the main site for your subdomain. You could also just export and then import individual tables (e.g. just the post tables or options if you want) This works OK for both BANS sites and WordPress sites. Make sure you go through and change text in the subdomain so it doesn’t appear as a copy to Google.
hey thanks man.. great site for plugins..
didnt know what they were..
thanks for giving guidelines..!
Very interesting article! Thks a lot!
Good informative post. Thanks for the information!
Wordpress was invention, eBay again was invention … Wordpress is earning $$$ , eBay too earning $$$…
But why this idea didn’t stuck in my mind that if I combine Wordpress with eBay concept I can also earn $$$-$$$ , 3 for WP & 3 for eBay
Cheers.. Thank you this post Janet.
Matt.
I want to start an Ebay type store, but never really
knew which direction to go. Thanks so much for breaking down everything,
now I am going to give this a try. I was a bit intimidated by the process
at first, now I have more confidence since reading how you went about
setting up yours. I will give this a try right away.
Thanks again!
i like ur post it is helpful for me
thanks for this super article
thank u for giving excellent article
this is good information
i like this article
i like ur site
Excellent website!
As I really like WordPress and find it so easy to set up.I want to start an Ebay type store.it really helps in generating customers and revenue for a businessman. Cheer!!!
Great information! I want to start an own ebay store, but never really
knew which direction to go. Thanks so much for breaking down everything,
now I am going to give this a try. now I have more confidence since reading how you went about setting up yours. I will give this a try right away.
i just installed and it wroking great
I have found a problem with using feed wordpress and autodelete posts is that pages as well as posts are deleted. This seems to be because posts and pages are treated the same in the database. I’ve decided I like using Word-bay better as it’s easier to set up than using feed wordpress. Even I could say that using Feed wordpress we keep generating urls pointing to our site. But when we delete the posts (as we can’t keep the expired auctions or the database will explode), if Google had indexed these posts, will it harm our site that there are so many 404s not found?
this is nice. I’ve been doing this to my sites. Wordpress is not only for blogging it could turn out to be a good e commerce site too.
It seems like an easy way to rank your site.
DOING ACUTIONS ONLINE COULD BE DANGEROUS BUT YOU HAVE TO TRUST THE SELLER OTHERWISE YOU WONT KNOW HOU ACURATE AND REAL THAT WOULD BE. IVE DONE A LOT OF BUYINGS AND IM REALLY SATISFIED.
Hello Janet,
Am just in search for best Ebay listings, and I got your things along wordpress ebay store. Using Technorati, MyBlogLog are now common cases, what make different with ebay is its new updates and money affirmations. Your way to go with plugins and that 4 points are important to go along.
But right now just stuck in 404s pages for ebay… 
- SunPop
It does seem like an easy way to rank your site… hmmm
I like this idea, however I am finding it difficult to join the ebay affiliate scheme. Do you have any pointers? I was a member when it was part of CJ then forgot all about it and now I am finding it difficult to join.
Thank you
Jayne
I want to start an Ebay type store, but never really
knew which direction to go. Thanks so much for breaking down everything,
now I am going to give this a try. I was a bit intimidated by the process
at first, now I have more confidence since reading how you went about
setting up yours.
hmmmm!The Blogshop Blogger: To copy to a subdomain. Upload and install a new copy of WordPress. Export the database of the main site, empty the database for your new subdomain and then import it into the main database. You’ll have a copy of the main site for your subdomain.thank you!!!
I like using Word-bay better as it’s easier to set up than using feed wordpress. Even I could say that using Feed wordpress we keep generating urls pointing to our site.I was a bit intimidated by the process at first, now I have more confidence since reading how you went about setting up yours.