The life of an entrepreneur is often portrayed as uber-glamorous, but there’s a lot of hard graft behind the scenes. Not only do sellers need to set the stage and rally their target audience, but they also need to fulfill every order to meet customers’ expectations.
There are over 18 million sellers on eBay, meaning competition is exciting and fierce. One thing unites these sellers: everyone would love a helping hand. As one of the leading marketplaces worldwide, eBay offers its sellers an exclusive eBay Seller Hub, which compiles all the tools you need to run your businesses smoothly and drive sales.
Knowing the ins and outs of eBay Seller Hub can help you automate some of the most admin-heavy tasks, significantly improving your operations and customer service. This is crucial for scaling your business and driving long-term growth.
What is eBay Seller Hub, and why does it matter for dropshippers?
The eBay Seller Hub is a centralized dashboard that supports sellers in running and growing their businesses on eBay. It offers a range of tools for sellers to speed up administrative tasks, analyze their activity and performance, and even boost their sales.
This dashboard is free for any eBay seller. However, some of the functionalities are exclusive to eBay Store subscribers. There are five eBay Store options ranging from Starter ($4.95/month) to Enterprise ($2,999.95/month). UK-based sellers have similar options for their eBay Shop.
This paid subscription allows sellers to customize their storefront and branding, leverage more promotional tools, and access advanced analytics via eBay’s Terapeak Product Research.
However, the free version of eBay Seller Hub may suffice for many sellers. Through this centralized hub, sellers can automate listings, take bulk actions (like replying to multiple customer reviews), and see daily sales trends.
Insights you get with eBay Seller Hub
- Listings and pricing: You can see all active sold, unsold, or closed listings and adjust your items’ pricing in bulk (eBay also provides basic pricing recommendations based on past sales).
- Sales performance: Analyze your total sales and view revenue trends and conversion rates. You can also compile and download reports on your storefront traffic performance to measure visibility.
- Customer relations: Manage and respond to customer inquiries, handle return requests and disputes, and monitor feedback and ratings from past sales.
- Order management: You can track all orders and their fulfillment status in real time, access shipping labels and tracking numbers, and receive alerts for pending actions.
- Marketing: See your best-selling items and access Promoted Listings performance if you use eBay’s advertising tool.
How to set up and access eBay Seller Hub
You can access your eBay Seller Hub if you have sold at least one item on eBay. Once you have sold your first item, click the “My eBay” button in the upper right-hand corner, then click Selling.
That’s all—you’ve essentially opened your Seller Hub and can now explore the pre-defined dashboard and different tabs and functionalities. Remember that you can customize your dashboard data to get an at-a-glance view of your most important metrics.
6 tips to get the most from eBay Seller Hub
1. Paid promotion
If your dropshipping niche is becoming increasingly competitive, promoting your listings may be the most effective way to improve visibility and stand out. eBay offers two campaign strategies for Promoted Listings, which can all be managed within your hub:
- General Campaign Strategy: Your products will be showcased across key areas of the eBay website, and you will pay a fee (percentage of total sale) only if buyers click on the ad and buy your product within 30 days. You can choose this fee, but this % will determine how much and where your ad is displayed (there are over 60 placements up for grabs across the website).
- Priority Campaign Strategy: This Cost-per-Click model offers access to premium placements (depending on your bid amount). You are charged a fee every time a user clicks on the ad, regardless of whether they make a purchase. eBay determines this fee based on factors like listing quality, keyword relevance, and your bidding amount.
2. Social media integrations
Within the Seller Hub, there is also a Social page where you can connect your social media channels to your eBay store (from Facebook to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube). You can create custom posts sharing listings, categories, or storefronts with your online audience. There are a few other options to automate workflows here, too, such as scheduling posts or posting on multiple platforms simultaneously. This social media integration can boost your visibility and improve your store’s credibility.
3. Tracking sales and profit
If you’re a numbers geek, welcome to paradise. The performance tab within your Seller Hub lets you analyze every metric, compare past performance, and see trends.
One key thing to measure is cost. Analyze expenses like shipping and handling fees, taxes, and paid ad spend to determine how they impact your profitability and if there is room for improvement.
Track how many items you’re selling and your conversion and defect rates. Defect rates are accessible from your Seller Standards Dashboard and represent the percentage of sales with unresolved issues that can negatively affect your seller performance.
Compare these figures with past performance and industry benchmarks to identify areas for improvement. The goal is to boost conversions, enhance the customer experience, and reduce defect rates.
4. Measuring traffic
You can also look at traffic to your store, including page views, impressions, and click-through rates. These metrics help you understand user engagement and spot strengths and weaknesses, particularly in branding, copy, and imagery across your listings.
For example, low click-through rates mean your listings are not enticing enough for people to want to know more. You may need a new strategy to optimize them, such as reviewing elements like product description, image header, or the relevancy of the tags and keywords you’re using.
All of this data is easily accessible within your Hub. And there’s more: if you click the Reports tab, you can compile this data into tailored reports. Plus, you can set up automated customized reports to ensure you’re always updated with the latest figures, depending on what’s most relevant to you.
5. Order and store overview
As we’ve seen, you can go into great detail with your eBay Seller Hub. However, as a seller, you may have a few other things to do with your time besides crunching numbers and drafting reports. Sometimes, all you need is a high-level view of what is happening with your business to understand what fires you must put out.
…This leads us to the Overview tab, which covers tasks, orders, listings, and feedback categories by default. The listings block shows the number of active, unsold, scheduled, or draft listings. If you click on the feedback module, you can also see recent feedback to measure customer satisfaction. Keeping track of these elements helps you manage your CRM pipeline more effectively.You can customize this dashboard or rearrange categories to display your business’s most relevant metrics. To do so, click the “Customize” button at the top right of your screen.
6. Optimize listings
Navigate to “Active listings,” click on the listing you want, then click “Edit” to optimize titles, descriptions, images, and pricing.
Your title should be SEO-friendly and relevant to the keyword you want to rank for. Ensure your copy is clean and free from excessive symbols (such as “!!!”) or jargon. Hazy images or poorly edited collages are also a big thumbs-down.
Sounds complicated? Tools like Yaballe offer an option for free image templates to optimize your listings for conversions. Yaballe provides automatic repricing, so your pricing always aligns with the market or desired profit margins.
As a complete dropshipping automation tool, Yaballe lets you upload up to 10,000 different listings to your store in one action with a simple CVS file (much higher than the 500-listing eBay limit). Meanwhile, Yaballe continuously monitors your listings for issues like out-of-stock items and eBay VeRO restrictions.
Save time, scale, and sell more with Yaballe
The eBay Seller Hub can be a huge time saver for sellers who manage overflowing inboxes and endless daily tasks. It covers all the basics, from inventory management to customer feedback and marketing. However, if you want to scale and achieve long-term sustainable growth, you need more than the basics.
Tools like Yaballe can supercharge what eBay Seller Hub offers by providing game-changing automation capabilities tailored to the eBay marketplace. For example, Yaballe scans millions of items every hour to monitor product availability and align active items with inventory. Not only does it help you keep lists and product stock up-to-date, but Yaballe also offers auto-ordering and auto-tracking to help you scale your dropshipping business. Book a chat with our team to explore how Yaballe supports your dropshipping business’ scalability requirements.
