Seller's Workshop: Create and manage your eBay store with Dreamweaver

David Howell explains how to make a splash with a professionally designed eBay store

When you've been trading on eBay for even a short time you soon realise that just having pages of items listed under your chosen category is not an efficient way for you to manage your auctions. Also, your potential bidders don't want to wade through pages and pages of items when they click on your 'view seller's other items' link. What you really want to efficiently manage your auctions and present an impressive set of items to your potential bidders is a proper eBay store. If you thought that moving into this kind of selling was expensive and technically challenging, think again. With the tools available today, you can have a professional looking online store set-up in minutes.

The basic eBay store you can open will cost you just £6.00 a month and allows you to manage any number of items, but is limited in how you can manipulate the layout and style of each page. You soon feel these restrictions and want to take more control over the layout and design of your pages. If you've already built web pages for your own site with Dreamweaver, why not combine the two? With eBay StoreBuilder from WebAssist you can build complete auction pages, and customised headers from within Dreamweaver just as you would design any web page. Once your pages are complete you can then publish them to your eBay store with a couple of clicks of your mouse.


Tools of the trade
Dreamweaver has recently gone through a major overhaul as a component of Creative Suite 3. If you've been using Dreamweaver for even a short time you'll know the power that it gives you over the web pages you create. EBay StoreBuilder broadens Dreamweaver's capabilities by adding an extension to its basic features. A new menu is created that allows you to build custom pages for your eBay store, and manage the items you already have live. Images and text can be freely added to create professional looking pages that you can be proud of, and that your potential bidders will be impressed with.

Being able to use just one application for each of the web pages you design is a great bonus. You can quickly move from designing web pages for your own site, to specialised pages for your eBay store with just a click. Dreamweaver can become the central workhorse for all your online design work.

With over 800 layout combinations at your fingertips, eBay StoreBuilder gives Dreamweaver users a whole new lease of life. What's more, if you already have an eBay store its easy to convert these existing pages for use with eBay StoreBuilder. And if you have multiple eBay stores operating in different parts of the world, you can create and publish to any of the countries currently supported by eBay all from within the familiar Dreamweaver interface.

After struggling along with eBay's own store updating application eBay StoreBuilder will be a revelation. The ease with which you can link Dreamweaver to your eBay store and effortlessly build new pages and promotional headers will amaze you. If you really want your eBay store to standout from the crowd, giving your store a makeover is money well spent. With the time you save you can list even more items and watch your business grow.

WA eBay StoreBuilder - http://www.webassist.com/