7 WordPress Plugins for eBay Sellers #2 WordBay

By Garry HJ | October 11th, 2009 | Category: Web Site Resources | No Comments »

If you’ve been regularly reading BuildaSkill for some time, the results of using my Number 2 WordPress plug-in choice will not be new to you, although how we’ve been doing it may be.

The panel of eBay listings we use to sometimes support, and sometimes add sarcasm, to a post’s topic in the BuildaSkill Biz Blog is displayed thanks to a simple plug-in called WordBay. Referring to it as a “simple” plug-in is not to insult the extremely complex back-end programming done by the plug-in’s author, but rather to draw attention to the fact that using it is child’s play.

eBay essential plug-in #2 – WordBay

WordBay is my No.2 absolute “must have” plug-in for an eBay seller’s WordPress blog – particularly since the latest version now allows single-seller selection, rather than eBay wide product search, the latter being definable by eBay country / countries, and by a single eBay product category, or all categories (on a site by site basis).

It can also be set up to geo-target (no, not the nasty version of visibility blackouts alleged against eBay for years), which means blog visitors are shown listings from their closest eBay site first (usually same country) and supposedly if that country has no listings matching your chosen keywords, it then defaults to listings on the site you nominate as the “home” site (e.g. US or UK etc), though that default back-up doesn’t always work for my blogs – maybe it’s my own location confusing the system due to my not being in an “eBay country”?

Again this is a click and install plug-in with a settings page to complete before WordBay is fully ready to do its stuff.

The plug-in’s heritage lies in the affiliate marketing sector, and there’s a slot to input an eBay Partner Network (ePN) campaign ID so you get paid for purchases resulting off click-throughs from the products you display. As eBay recently permitted affiliates to market their own eBay listings, this is a great way to offset Final Value Fees, whilst also an easy route to ecommerce enabling your blog (from your own inventory) whilst letting the eBay system do all the work.

Side note – if you’re a US based eBay seller, you can offset your FVFs more heavily by using one or more of the other plug-ins, and then using the eBay “Store Referral Credit” system – search for it on eBay.com’s Help pages. ePN only pays you a portion of the fees earned by eBay, but Store Referral Credit gets your FVFs discounted by up to 75% – it only applies to sales from Store format listings placed on the US site where the buyer has been directed onto the site via a yaddayadda.com/listing-page&refid=”store” type link. That said, your store subscription could be on any other eBay site, and your account registered to yet another site – it is the site of the listing placement that determines eligibility … at least, that’s been my experience thus far.

WordBay will return both Auction listings and Fixed Price results from the keywords you insert between simple function tags (code word inserted like bbCode between square brackets) in the main text flow when typing a post – it must be on it’s own line, but that simplicity belies the power in the plug-in, and is it’s strength for busy bloggers and product reviewers. I’ve not yet absolutely proven whether or not it can drag in Store format listings, I suspect not, but I’m guessing that’s up to how you do the admin-side configuration during the set-up of the plug-in.

You don’t need to use it in every post, and there may be some posts where using it would be a bad idea anyway, but having it installed and configured, ready and waiting, makes it a very useful tool for monetising your blog or promoting your cwn current special offers on eBay.

In the admin set-up, you can also set global parameters such as minimum / maximum current price for results, minimum number of bids on auction listings (to weed out the dross says the plug-in’s author), and seller IDs if you don’t want listings from everyone.

The WordBay plug-in is designed to work primarily in blog Posts, but works equally well on WordPress Pages, and I know several top affiliate marketeers who use the plug-in to build niche sites, rather than using bespoke niche-site building software such as BANS.

ePN have recently changed the rules on masked referrer URLs, and although WordBay can mask the eBay URL from displaying on your blog site, the referrer URL it passes to ePN is the correct one for your site, therefore it complies with the new rules.

You can see examples of WordBay at work regularly on the BuildaSkill blog, and again, I’ll be back with a full review later in the summer. Here’s a sample basket of listing results for you -

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