Leaving E-Bay, Welcome PayPal

It's good to look back sometimes, and see how different it is from more than an year ago to what it is now.

In the beginning, we were selling Shiroi Koibito on E-Bay.  Our website was pointing the traffic to go to E-Bay link of our product and user could buy item on E-Bay.

We now moved away from E-Bay model, and now have "Buy Now" button from PayPal so that users can buy the cookies from us directly.  In the beginning, it was great to have e-Bay market items for us, but now thanks to Google, Facebook and and other search engines and social medias, we have established enough popularity on the web that we no longer need e-Bay to market for us, we have enough traffic from Google and other websites.

This is good for us for couple of reasons:

1. Users do not need to register through eBay.  I had few requests in the past that they want to buy them directly and not through eBay as they do not want to register through eBay.   This kind of gave us an idea to move away from eBay style as soon as we had enough traffic to our site organically.
2. No eBay Fee.  PayPal still charge for each transaction, but lower than eBay fee.
3. PayPal does not charge any monthly fee.  They only take the fee when the item is sold.  That is great that no need for any insertion fee or any other fees associated to market through eBay.
4. PayPal BuyNow buttons are pretty straight forward to create. Once the account is created, there is "Merchant Service" tab at the top, and click on an image of "Create payment buttons for your website."  After creating the button, copy and paste the HTML to the site.  The only thing is I could not figure out how to do "Shopping Cart" which I should be able to do, but that is my next step...

One thing we were worried about was our credibility.  EBay has a great feature to be able to know about the seller's performance from past sales and feedbacks from past buyers.  Since we care for each and every package, our feedback rating was 100% positive which must have given users comfort to buy from us.  On our website, we do not have that.    The number on G+ and Facebook like icons that we put earlier is increasing little by little and that must be helping to give credibility to the users.  We took a chance, and we think we were able to transit well from eBay to PayPal world well.

I do not think if we did this right away, we may not have been successful; the route that we took to go through eBay first and all the marketing efforts must have paid off now.  That is good.