OK, own up – what got your attention more – the word “free” in the title, or the title as a whole?

If we’re to believe eBay executive management, “free” is what every eBay buyer wants … and they’re certainly chargeback-happy enough to demonstrate that in many cases. As professional sellers, we all know there’s no such thing as free. If they’re honest, the buyers do too.

That is, until we as webmasters, come across this really powerful plug-in for WordPress.

If we’re honest, the download / upload bandwidth and time isn’t free, nor is the time we use to install it to WordPress and configure it – but apart from that, it is what it says – free.

eBay essential plug-in for WordPress – #4 Free eBay Store

Ummm … OK, ignore the allusion in the name of this plug-in. Free eBay Store (FeS) allows you to automatically display eBay listings on your blog. The plug-in author says -

You just add a simple tag to a post or page, along with your eBay Partner Network Campaign ID, and the relevant keywords for the products to be displayed. You can also optionally specify the number of rows and columns to control the layout of your eBay store.

“Why pay to build an eBay store when you can build one for free?” asks the plug-in’s author. Why indeed, and more importantly – what differs in this one compared to WordBay?  Well, the main difference is in the tag that you type into a post.

With WordBay, all the static data (campaign number etc) is done once in admin. With FeS you have to add it each time you insert the tags. This increases error risk. Offsetting that, is that in WordBay you also set the number of items to display, once-only, in the admin-side settings page, with FeS you again do it on a tag by tag basis, which allows greater display flexibility.

The screenshots page (see link above) shows an example of the “automatic pagination” with a neat little navigation list of page numbers above the first items row. This is an improvement over WordBay, which provides only single panel listings of the quantity set by the blogger – as per the example output below.

For extremely busy bloggers, WordBay seems the better path – it’s simpler to use on the run. For pedantic coders and affiliate marketers with specific layout needs, FeS is more flexible and seems the better option.

FeS is an essential tool if you want an eBay store that is going to be highly ranked in search engines, heavily cross-referred on social networking sites and through tools such as Twitter, or simply want to build a store stocked with eBay products for a particular niche sector (whether your own, or incorporating the offerings of other sellers).

FeS is the foundation of building your own niche catalogue sites without having to fork out the fees for modified WordPress scripts, and similar, with well-known names such as Build a Niche Site (BANS). It’ll require a bit more tech savvy from you to do that, but it’ll be financially cheaper than some of the license fees I’ve seen. Don’t forget, once you’ve built a template site using WordPress and plug-ins, you can also clone it to as many domain names as you want, without paying a per-site licensing fee, unlike some of the ready-built commercial offerings.

As with the eBay Sales Lister widget I reported at Number 3 in my list yesterday, FeS is an ideal route to splitting up the massed listings in an existing eBay seller account, and creating either niche sites, or a structured off-eBay, eBay store for your listings. From it you’ll be able to conduct far wider and more targeted marketing than eBay allows you to do.

As with most of these tools, it fails to offer a routing for adding the Stores Referral Credit URL-suffix for US store listings, but that’s what direct input URLs are for – right? Where it stands apart from the other plug-ins in this series is the power and flexibility it offers to intermediate to advanced level web masters for controlling search criteria and results, and display of those results.

Not only can keywords be controlled on a post-by-post basis, but also other criteria such as eBay Partner Network campaign IDs (ideal for seasonal marketing efforts), number of results to display, how they’re arranged by row or column count on a page, and several other factors that reduce “sameness” on each page and post. That’s likely to be more important as time progresses and Google continues twiddling.

I’ve not yet installed the plug-in and hard-tested it, but will be doing so over the winter, and will return with my results.

Gaz