Is A Frooiton Shop Design Worth The Time Effort & Money?

We had been trading on eBay using the standard listing format for around 1 year. After a fairly good start we then chose to change our account on eBay to a business account and have an eBay store. Again we didn't change the way we listed much. We still used the eBay templates and listing tools and began to list more and more products with sales increasing as we did so. When you first start to sell on eBay you feel the fee's and time spent doing it isn't worth it all. But keep going....the more you sell the more you save. Eventually you'll become a Powerseller, this will enable you to take advantage of selling fee discounts etc....so selling becomes cheaper all of a sudden and there is a sliding scales of discounts available to you. Now seriously the more you sell the cheaper it gets for you as an eBay shop. If we had more to time to list, order and pack let alone get the stock in we would just keep listing everyday.

We saw looking at other stores that some users had opted for the Frooition designed shop fronts. Looking much more professional and giving you a sense the they were very successful sellers and you always remembered them as they obvioulsy had their own identity unlike the rest of us using the standard eBay templates availabe. Other users were trying the Auctiva templates.....they shortly plan to charge so all the customers presently using their services will shortly be in for a shock and yet another fee to pay everytime you sell an item. Anyway we decided to invest £1500.00 and have a shop front designed by Frooition. It was supposed to take 3 weeks and we took all our items off eBay ready for the application of the new templates and shop front. 6 weeks later we finally got our shop design completed after slow service from Frooiton and poor communication along the way. The Frooition website says that they have seen a 20% increase in sales for customers who have tried their templates and shop front designs. We have used them now for over 6 months and have only seen a dip in sales. We run another shop on eBay which we continued to use the standard templates on and saw no such dip in sales. In practise the listing tool Frooition supply takes twice as long to list your products on eBay and once listed take twice as long to load on the screen from a customers point of view looking at your items. If you are anything like me ...if a page doesn't load after 5 secs I click back and look elsewhere and this would certainly seem to be the case with the Frooition designed eBay store we had. We had some lovely tabs at the bottom of every page as does every user of Frooition templates detailing things we felt had been problems beforehand, contact us, delivery conditions, missing items, postcode restrictions, etc......thing is people shopping on eBay don't click the tabs let alone read the adverts fully. They just want to know they are buying what they see and how much it is. 

Keep it simple our eBay manager told me from day one and she was bang on. Use only eBay templetes, add the least amount of terms and conditions and make your adverts as easy to understand as you can.

Is it worth spening money to be different from everyone else on eBay or look that bit mopre professional? No it isn't! Save your money and your time, list on eBay using what eBay provide and you'll not go far wrong. I only wish I knew this prior to spending £'s and spending months listing items, only now to have to completely redesign the advets again to be in line with the current changes eBay have made in terms of displaying items.

P.S. When eBay made the changes on the 10th March for shopholders we had to pay Frooition another fee £100.00 to redesign our shopfront again? Ebay say well you chose an outside template design which is now no longer compataible with eBay and Frooition say.............................if you want it to work you'll have to give us more money. Stick to eBay & keep it simple!