Top 11 Reasons To Pay for an eBay Store | When It Makes Sense

so in this video we're going to talk about when you should sign up for an eBay store subscription and the 11 biggest benefits to subscribing to one so signing up for your first eBay account is completely free and when they give you your account they actually give you 50 listings for free meaning that you can list up to 50 items on eBay at no charge any listing after that will cost you 35 cents though now once the item sells then eBay is going to take 10% of the sale price but besides that it's completely free to get started now at some point you will want to sign up for one of eBay store subscriptions as they call them this is a monthly fee that you pay eBay to get some added benefits and there are different levels to each of these different subscriptions so let's get back into my RV sit down at the computer and we'll go over all of them together and see what the benefits of the plans are and when you would want to switch over to one of those plans

alright so there are currently five different store subscriptions that eBay has made available there is the starter basic premium anchor and Enterprise the starter and the enterprise are relatively new those are added within the last couple of years by eBay so we used to just have three now we have five just to make our lives a little bit more complicated now when you sign up for one of these store subscriptions again this is a paid plan that you have to sign up for and they charge you either per month if you sign up on a month-to-month basis it's going to be a little bit more than if you sign up and agree to a whole year with using them so in for instance the starter plan here as you see it is for ninety five a month or if you sign up at without a year plan then it's seven ninety five a month so it's a little bit more however I always recommend that you don't lock yourself into a contract with eBay you never know what's going to happen you never know if you're going to ditch this store and start a new one or whatever so I've never done a year contract except for on one of my accounts way back in the past and I had haven't done it since I always do the month-to-month but the real question is what are the benefits of these different plans now primarily there are three main benefits to signing up for one of these store subscriptions the first is that you get more free listings remember on the free plan you get 50 free listings you get more of those each time you level up here the second benefit is that after your free listings your additional listings cost less and less so on the free plan again 35 cents per listing and it's less than that for each of these plans and the third benefit is that your final value feed is less now have it use the word final value fee yet but it did mention at the start of this video that when you sell an item eBay is going to take 10% of the sale price that is the final value fee but as you see that number that percentage does go down so those are the three benefits and that's also going to be the primary deciding factor for when you should upgrade to one of these I'll actually break down the math for you in just a few minutes but I wanted to go through the other benefits for you guys as well to one of these store subscriptions now not all of

these benefits are things that I would actually consider to be a benefit but I will show you everything that at least comes with a store subscription and then kind of my opinion on them so the first one is that it makes you eligible to use promoted listings so if you come over to eBay and search for an item like I have here you're going to see the organic search results which start right here but above those are always the sponsored listings those are promoted listings and those are only available to you once you sign up for one of the store subscriptions is not available to you on a free plan so that's the fourth benefit the fifth benefit is that it allows you to brand and customize your storefront so when you come over to any listing on eBay and on the right you can see the buyers name and if you click on that name it will bring you to a page that looks like this and once you have a store subscription once you're off the free plan you can brand this you can change this background image and this logo and make it look nicer and this is something I've started to do I didn't really care about it in the past but it's very easy and cheap to do so I just figure it's a nice thing to do it makes you look much more professional the other thing that you can do so this would be the fifth benefit now sixth benefit now is that you can change what items show up right here these are the featured items you have five of them right here and you can choose which ones you want your buyers to see first so if you have items that sell really well you might want to stick those right there so that it even increases the likelihood that they'll get sold another benefit to having a store subscription is that you also have the ability to start to use categories so you can categorize all your items into neat little categories that make sense and this helps keep your store organized honestly this is not something that I use if I have seen a lot of other sellers use it especially sellers that do like reselling for dropshipping personally I don't do it but it is available to you and I think that all of those things that I just mentioned all the past seven lead up to the eighth benefit which that all those things combined I think do result in more repeat customers it allows your buyers to see that you have a professional store it allows them to see more of your promoted listings and get in there and that does I think increase the likelihood that you're going to have repeat customers now one of my favorite features when you level up to the anchor store which is one of the higher stores is that you do get dedicated support so this would be the ninth benefit the dedicated support so when you have an anchor store and you call into eBay you're not going to get regular customer service you're going to get anchor support and they are much better they are more trained or more well trained I should say they seem to understand the issues better even if they're not the right Department who can speak to you they will connect you with the right Department and they will kind of act almost as a representative for you they do fight for you and try to get you as a seller the resolution that you're looking for with within reason of course and I have found that to be a really huge benefit because it's really helped me a lot call in they seem to know more about current policies and I find it easier to get some negative feedback removed when I speak to the anchor support as opposed to the regular support team now the last two benefits the tenth and eleventh one they're ones I really don't care about either but I do want to throw them out there so that you guys knew about them the first is that you can have a custom URL for your eBay store as a drop shipper this is not something I particularly care about but again if you're like a reseller and you want to give your friends your family post on Facebook information about your eBay account that is something helpful to have and the last benefit is that you can use vacation mode once you get off the free plan but I advise no one to ever use vacation mode I've done it in the past and my tests around it we're kind of inconclusive I saw that my store once I got off vacation mode a lot of people believe that your sales just never do as well as they were before vacation mode my cells were fine after vacation mode but there were a lot of factors that went into that there were some changes and algorithms that could have actually boosted up my sales and just from speaking with a lot of friends and colleagues and other drop shippers who have tried vacation mode with almost disastrous results I would advise you not to use it that feature I still think it's worth it eBay has been called out for this before and they haven't really had a good answer as to why vacation mode causes that to happen best thing to do is if you have to go on vacation just raise the price of all your items and then people just won't buy them or really unlikely to buy them but I wouldn't actually use vacation

mode alright so now let's actually look at the numbers because that's what's actually going to determine when you should be signing up for one of these paid plans now as I said before we start with a starter plan it's for ninety five a month but again don't do that one do the month-to-month option which is 795 a month the next plan is the basic which starts at seven twenty seven dollars and ninety-five cents a month so those are the two that we're going to look at right now and you also have to look at what discounts come with those so the starter plan you get a hundred listings for free the basic you get 250 starter plan the for every listing after one hundred it's gonna cost you thirty cents the basic will cost you for each additional listing twenty-five cents so if you stuck on the free plan and listed a hundred items that would cost you $17. 50 which is quite a bit more than the $7. 95 that it costs you to upgrade to the starter plan in fact the break-even point there is seventy three listings I won't bore you with the math but that's what it is seventy-three listings so if you have seventy three listings it makes sense for you to ditch the free plan and sign up for the starter plan now unfortunately when you should move from a starter plan to a basic plan the math isn't quite that simple it's not just a matter of how many listings you have because there's one other factor that changes and that is the final value fee so for a free plan is ten percent for the starter plan it's also ten percent but for the basic plan it's just nine point one five percent now that doesn't sound like a lot but it does add up so at this point you do actually have to do the math yourself and determine at what point based not only the number of listings that I have but also how much I'm selling each month does it make sense for me to be on the basic plan instead of the starter plan now my general suggestion for most people is just sign up for the basic plan it makes the most sense if you get to the point where you're selling about twenty three hundred dollars a month then the basic plan makes sense based on the final value fee so if you're in this to win this if you're already drop shipping and you're know that you want to make this work then you will be selling that month much every single month so it is worth it for you to just get the basic plan right away and the

good news is that once you are on the basic plan the math to move from basic to premium and then premium to anchor begins to get a lot easier because the final value fee percentage doesn't change the only thing that changes is the number of free listings and the price per listing which drops from twenty five to ten to five cents now I want to talk about some things that signing up for one of these paid subscriptions what it does not do first of all it does not increase your limits so eBay does limit each account with a certain number of listings it will tell you can only list 50 items this month or a hundred items this month and that number will grow over time they will continually increase your limits but just signing up for one of these paid services by itself will not increase that limit it also does not turn your account into a business account and in and of itself there's no clear evidence that just signing up for these will boost up your sales by itself now obviously doing things like listing more items using promoted listings and using some of the other benefits those things could in fact of course increase your sales and finally my last warning here is that these numbers can and do change sometimes eBay increases the price of these subscriptions sometimes they increase the fees or the cost of the in certian so underneath this video i hope i will have a link to the page that it just showed you so you can see what the current fees are what the current prices are so you can kind of do this math for yourself if all these numbers have changed so I hope you guys have enjoyed this video if you did you know what to do smash the like button down below and then let me know in the comments section what store you are on whether that's a free starter basic premium anchor or enterprise plan and what you like or don't like about it and consider subscribing to the channel for more content about eBay Amazon and drop shipping thanks so much for checking out this video and I will see you in the next one bye for now hey thanks so much for watching the video if you want to subscribe to the channel you can do that by clicking right here and then I have two videos for you to check out click on one of those and I'll see you over in that video in just a few seconds