Making the Most of your eBay User ID

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I know that someday the eBay user ID will be as much a household name as Kleenex or BandAid. But in the meantime it creates a company name that doesn’t tell potential customers anything about who you are and what you sell. This, I know, is a cardinal sin, in the marketing world. Of course, to optimize your marketing strategy, the name of your business should in some way capture the nature of your business. Oops.

I chose my eBay user ID more than three years ago, and with nearly 5000 positive feedback scores associated with this name, there is no going back now. SanAndCo (“San,” from my last name, Sanchez, “And,” from my husband’s last name, Anderson, and “Co,” – you know – for Company.) sounded like music to my ears, despite the fact that it doesn’t bring to mind toys or party favors and no one knows how to pronounce it. So now, when smiling and solicitous sales people at Toy Fairs and Gift Shows butcher the pronunciation of my company name, or when I get quizzical looks as I mention my eBay user ID to my students, I wish I knew then what I know now.

Experience is always the best teacher, but I have attended some dynamite Small Business Administration seminars in the last few months focused on marketing your small business. I really recommend that eBay sellers, veterans and newbies alike, take advantage of the offerings at their local Small Business Development Center. In addition to their courses, which are almost always free, they also offer one-on-one counseling with trained business professionals to help small businesses grow. While I have gotten some great leads from my SBDC counselor about local teaching venues for my courses, it is the excellent workshops offering topical material related to running your small business that are the real draw for me. If you don’t have a local Small Business Development Center that offers courses, you can check out this link to audiocasts of several recent workshops. The sound isn’t perfect, but the content is great. My favorite audiocast for eBay sellers is the Art and Science of Selling. Most eBay don’t have backgrounds in sales or marketing and this course gives us a nice basic overview – with a snappy presenter, to boot! If you are able to attend a workshop or two, another advantage is the half-hour or so of networking that is available if you show up early. Like most people who earn a living from a home office, I find it refreshing to spend a day dressed in business clothes (not a pair of flannel pajama pants in sight!) and networking with other entrepreneurs. And for us eBay sellers, who spend our days wheeling and dealing from our computers with people all over the country and all over the world, this are a great opportunity to get to know local business owners and stay in touch with what is happening in our local communities. In the recent seminars I attended, the importance of branding and of carefully controlling the way in which your name is used to represent your product was stressed. The seminars did not touch on naming your business but they got me thinking about how eBay user ID’s can affect your sales.

Your eBay user ID is synonymous with a company name and should be considered as thoughtfully. Although your user ID is not searchable within eBay’s search engines, it is searchable through Google and other search engines. That means that every feedback you get and every feedback you give, as well as every item that you have listed under auction or fixed price is potentially searchable and is always linked to that all-important user ID. A potential customer searching for spark plugs, for example, is more likely to find your auctions through a Google search if your eBay user ID is DavesAutoParts as opposed to Dave1234 or even DavesBargains. Remember that once you do have a User ID with positive feedback scores associated with it, and you decide to change it, you will have to build your reputation and your brand from scratch – and anyone who has bookmarked you as a Favorite
Seller will find a broken link next time they try to find you.

When I am teaching my Basics of Selling on eBay class, I always stress to my students the importance of choosing an eBay user ID that reflects what they are selling. I encourage them to take a day or two to make sure they come up with the best name possible. For some reason, though, some of my students still sign-on with ID’s like Peter978 or MomTo3Kids. In some cases this may be because they aren’t sure yet what they plan to sell and don’t want to lock themselves in with a name that may not be relevant over time. But I suspect that in some cases, they choose these names because they sound like music to their ears like mine does to me.

If I could do it over again, I would choose a different user ID. I would choose something with the word party or toy in it. It makes me wonder if our slow start may have been quicker with a different User ID? Perhaps. And whether the lack of clarity in our name has limited our sales? Possibly. And whether it has hurt our SEO? Most definitely. But what is awesome about our eBay ID? Do a Google search of SanAndCo and you get us and only us. That is pretty sweet. So, I will wait patiently to become a household name, and in the meantime our eBay user ID still makes me smile.

Do you have an eBay user ID success story or challenge? I’d love to hear about it. You can share it in the comments section.