Number 3 in my series of essential eBay plug-ins for the WordPress blogs and WordPress-based ecommerce websites of eBay sellers, is a useful sidebar widget to highlight your current eBay listings in one of several ways.

Although eBay themselves publish equivalents of this plug-in, the ability to style this one’s appearance to match the look of your site, takes it to a higher level that those offerings from the eBay sites, or from the eBay Partner Network. The main difference with regard to monetising your blog or WordPress-based website, is that eBay Sales Lister only allows for monetisation via the eBay Partner Network affiliate program, and doesn’t seem to support the Store Referral Credit system available when listing Stores format listings on eBay.com

eBay essential plug-in #3 – eBay Sales Lister

I’ve used the eBay Sales Lister (eSL) plug-in, and it does seem to do everything it says on the tin. My main use for it is to break out “range-branding” from the mass general listing of my primary eBay selling IDs, and divide them between niche sites focussed on individual product ranges or where I’m developing a brand-name for a product group I market.

eSL, according to the author, is a WordPress plug-in that lets you display a list of eBay auctions/sales on your WordPress blog. Your eBay auctions will be presented with their title, the remaining time and the current bid in the sidebar of your blog. Therefore you will need to use a WordPress theme that provides you with a sidebar. (Note: You can of course display the eBay auctions for any eBay username, so it does not necessarily have to be yours.)

It is important to note that this plug-in widget is designed for displaying a single seller’s listings – this is not for creating a general eBay affiliate earnings site. On this basis, it is an essential tool for sellers trying to migrate off eBay onto their own website, or seeking to supplement traffic and bids on their eBay listings by nudging own-website visitors to bid on their eBay offerings.

In the context of the last paragraph, it would also be a useful marketing tool for fully established ecommerce sites seeking to finesse end-of-line, shop-soiled, etc. inventory sales by separating those items to be sold through eBay, rather than on a clearance corner on the main site. This would allow a seller to offer their premium quality products on their own site, and their seconds (or last-season) goods via eBay – John Donahoe will be pleased with this plug-in.

The screenshots, with and without product thumbnail images, at the WordPress plug-ins repository are what got me excited about this plug-in initially. Even though this is a sidebar widget (and there are many of those that would work with the RSS or XML data feeds from eBay) it’s the visual presentation of results that are important.

This one does exactly what I needed for my niche sites, and displays the results in a way that needs no tweaking on my two favourite WordPress themes – that saved me incredible amounts of site-design time. You can see an example of where I simply uploaded the plug-in, added the widget to the sidebar, set up the ePN and keyword options, and displayed the widget with no further effort, on the lower right of this site’s homepage and blog posts. On that site it has been running since mid-August 2009, and has generated many bids on eBay.

Gaz

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