Yesterday I looked at the excellent “Free eBay Store” plug-in for WordPress, describing how that could be used by eBay sellers, affiliate marketers, and niche site builders. Today I look at an earlier-developed plug-in with a similar name.

There’s a question mark hanging over this one though, as described below. It’s included due to what it offers if the questions and issues with it are resolved. It could become a useful tool in the arsenal of an eBay seller in transition from being completely reliant on eBay to branching out to having a chain of their own websites.

eBay essential plug-in for WordPress #5 – eBayStore

eBayStore was one of the early plug-ins that took advantage of the RSS output from eBay, and the ability to manipulate that output and drop it into WordPress Pages and Posts. It began way back at WordPress v2.0.2 and seems to have stalled at v2.7 (WordPress is now at v2.8.4 as I write this).

Information on the WordPress plug-in page is scarce and keeps pointing to the author’s own website for info, screenshots, live demo etc. The live demo yielded some PHP errors at the page top, and there were several complaint-threads on WordPress.org about the plug-in having a non-functioning status. My estimate is that those came about from the all-too-common eBay-related error of users failing to read information supplied by the vendor.

Set-up is nowhere near as straightforward as the alternatives in numbers 1 through 4 of my list in this series – one of the plug-in core files needs hacked to set the country of registration of your on-eBay shop / store, and you do need to remember the eBay store ID number issued by eBay, each time you want to insert the inventory display tags. I have no idea why the author did not use the store unique name rather than the instantly forgettable store number, nor why they did not create an admin-side option to add it once and save to database.

Standard supplied css styling for the displayed items is pretty basic too, and probably needs some heavy coding to get anything as attractive as WordBay’s. That creates another layer of complexity and a new learning curve for eBay users used to WYSIWYG type and post tools supplied by eBay. CSS programming is not HTML programming, though there are similarities.

All of the above aside, eBayStore is purpose built with the single seller in mind – it’s not intended to be as wide harvesting as either WordBay or FeS. In this respect it sits comfortably alongside the eBay Sales Lister sidebar widget, and really needs further experimentation and development as an essential tool for the sellers migrating away from eBay. It should provide a useful method to pull eBay Store listings into your WordPress site (something the other tools don’t specifically target)

At this point in time, I have no idea if it works with the eBay Partner Network affiliate program or not. I would hope that it does, although that may have been the stalling point given the plug-in’s East European origins, and the changes ePN have been making to rules regarding consolidation and distribution of listing data via tiered ownership of websites.

I’ll try to find time to have a play with it over the winter and provide a how-to and review, but unless I find a project specifically needing it, please don’t hold either your breath, or me to any promise of a review.

Gaz