Internet Marketing

How To Design an eBay Store [Tutorial for Dummies]

If you are planning to launch an eBay store, you have surely browsed lots of the ready-made resources with custom designs. We bet you are wondering how did they do that. Did you try to search for the answers to your questions? What info did you find? A number of sites trying to fish out hundreds of bucks from you for a design?

How To Design an eBay Store
Photo by Mathieu Turle on Unsplash

No worries, you can design a store yourself and you don’t need to know coding for that. This guide is going to provide you with all steps of creating your own custom store design.

What you’ll need first is an active eBay store with full access to it. You will also need a server to host a .CSS file on.

BeautyZone EBay Template

BeautyZone EBay Template

Details |  Demo

Now it’s time to start setting up your eBay store from the very beginning.

Click this link to look through some good ideas on how to create a beautiful store.

Use “Quick Store Setup” option for the purpose to set up your eBay store. When everything is ready, you can begin to Manage your store. Do this by logging into your eBay summary, scroll down and click “Manage my Store” on the left navigation bar.

You will get to the page where you will be able to edit your store and add features. We guess you will want to add some categories to your store at first turn. You can create up to 300 different store categories for your brand new eBay store. That is, you don’t need to worry about making too many of them. Add as many categories and subcategories as you need/want. You can easily create categories by clicking “Store Categories” on the left navigation.

Now click the ‘Add Category’ button and create your category. Give it an appropriate name. You can create 5 categories at a time.

Once your 5 categories are ready, you can either add more or click a particular category link to access it and create sub-categories inside.

When you create all your categories, move on to the next step. Can’t think of a particular one? Don’t worry. You can come back to it at any moment and add/remove categories.

Display settings

Now we are going to proceed with editing your Display Settings.

Use Display Settings to add a title to your store, view your store URL or change it, edit your Store Logo, and Add/Edit your Store Description.

Store Name

Your store name should include the product you sell. For instance: World of Warcraft TCG – loot cards, spectral tiger etc.

Store Logo

Choose a logo from your PC if you have it there, enter a URL, or choose a basic eBay one. Your store logo size must be 310×90 pixels.

Store Description

Don’t post such kind of messages: “Welcome to our store, we hope you’ll enjoy your visit”. Be concise, clearly state what you sell and use keywords for the items you sell. This will help with your search engine rankings on sites like Google, Yahoo, and others. If the keywords are mentioned properly, this could lead your potential customers to all of your items.

Theme and display

The Theme and Display section allows you to edit your store theme, edit Left Navigation Bar settings, and make changes to the Store Header Display. You can change the way items are listed on your homepage as well.

Store Theme

Choose one of the best eBay templates from eBay or another depository. You may just leave customizing a theme and create a custom one later. In fact, this section doesn’t really matter. Just choose something that looks attractive and matches the colors of your items.

Home Furnishing EBay Template

Home Furnishing EBay Template

Details |  Demo

Left nav bar settings

Select to show your Search Box, choose which categories to show, and choose to show Store Pages and Buyer Display options.

Store Header Display

Turn on the Store Page Header and turn it off if you are going to create a custom store. Choose which type of eBay header you would like to display. Please note that you can only change this having a premium store.

Item Display

Choose whether you want to show your items on your store as a list, or in a Gallery View. We recommend gallery view because it looks like an online store. And it’s just aesthetically appealing.

Promotion boxes

You need Promotion Boxes to place small pieces of information here and there on your store. The info may include sales and special offers promos. You can also use Promotion Boxes for creating slideshows of items you are currently selling. Moreover, you can create Countdown Timers for the items that are ending in stock.

Custom pages or the start of the custom design

Supposing you have created your store. It looks nice, the colors are eye-pleasing. Then you will see other shops that are fully self-designed, have header displays, animations, and more. Now you really wish you could also have such kind of store. In fact, anyone can design the store they want, but not everyone knows how to embed it into eBay.

Well, you can do it this way.

You need to have HTML code ready. It must include images, your design, and a .CSS file. Don’t have a CSS file? Scroll down to the relevant section and read about that because it is required to create a decent storefront.

We will start with the Header

When your Header image is uploaded to your file server, or a site like Photobucket, Imageshack, or Tinypic, and your HTML code is ready, go to Manage My Store > Display Settings > Theme and Display > Store Header Display. Click the “Change” link.

Click the Radio button “Yes, include additional information in the header” and then enter your HTML code. Save your changes.

Now you will see that you have 2 Headers Displaying: your custom header and the normal eBay header. Disable the normal eBay header if you want only custom one to be displayed. You can do this by taking the following steps:

  • Go to Display Settings
  • Go to Theme and Display
  • Go to Store Theme
  • Click “Change to another theme”
  • Go to Easily Customizable themes, and select the “Custom Header only” theme
  • Choose your colors
  • Save settings.

After these manipulations, this header will appear on all store pages, including your About Me Page

Main page – custom items list

Now we are going to edit the Body area. This is how you will create your main storefront, fully customized and designed.

Please carefully follow these steps:

  • Click “Custom Pages” on the Left Navigation
  • Click “Create New Page”
  • On the next page, select “Text Section”
  • Name the page (same as Shop Title recommended, as this will become your main page)

It’s time to enter your HTML for the page now. Do you remember that this guide assumes you already have the designs and code?

At this point, some of you may have problems. Below you will find some tips and info to help you out.

Be careful when adding your designs. Most merchants use CSS for their stores, therefore we will guide you in that way.

Search bar

You will surely need to add your search bar to your custom page to enable people to search your items. You can do this by entering the relevant code in your custom page and editing the text, which is Bold, to your own store information. Please also remove the spaces between the opening and closing signs. This is necessary to prevent the code execution and displaying a search bar.

Next you will want to make the page load the CSS from an external file. This is because eBay does not allow you to host a CSS file, and it needs to be loaded elsewhere. This can be done with the code as well.

If you are not sure what CSS File to add, or what to include in your CSS file, check out this link, it may turn out to be useful.

You will now want to add other pieces of code, which allow displaying certain things.

Here are some useful exclusive eBay codes.

{eBayUserID} – this displays your User ID, feedback, and links to your Me page.

{eBayFeedback} – this displays your Feedback.

{eBayStoresItemList DISPLAY=”n”} – this displays your items. Replace N with 0 for List view, and 1 for Gallery View.

{eBayStoresItemList TABLEWIDTH=”n”} – replace N with a value 10-100 to choose your store width. Recommended numbers are from 60 to 100.

Navigation bar (sidebar)

Navigation Bar is next on our list. You can do this by creating a Promotion Box and then remove the original Sidebar.

Here are the steps to follow to create your navigation bar:

  • Go to “Promotion Boxes”
  • Click “Create New Promotion Box”
  • Choose Communicate to your Buyers.
  • On the next page, choose “Left Navigation – Upper”
  • Enter your code, making sure to align the navigation bar correctly with your header and body areas.
  • Make sure you do Text Links instead of images so that Search Engines have more keywords to play with.
  • Click Save.

Now you need to delete the default navigation. In other words, to stop displaying both navigation bars on your store.

You can do this the following way:

  • Go to Store Design
  • Go to Display Settings
  • Go to Theme and Display
  • Click Left Navigation Boxes
  • Click the “Change” link.
  • Uncheck all the components, and save.

Now you can create additional pages like FAQ following the steps above, and choosing FAQ instead of the Text area.

To make your new custom page your Storefront main page, go to Custom Pages, and select which one you want to display as your Homepage on the drop down menu.

Your turn

We hope this tutorial was useful for you and now you know how to design an eBay store. Have any questions/thoughts/additions to it? Please leave them in the comments section. Are you ready to share your experience of designing an eBay store? Your success stories are also welcome.

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