Creating a professional-looking online store is vital to your success. Your eBay Store includes powerful, easy-to-use tools for creating and designing the appearance and content of your Store. You can create a shopping environment that captures your company's personality and gives you instant credibility with buyers.

This page discusses how to:

• Use Quick Store Setup

• Build your Store's brand

• Display your products

• Get your message across

Use Quick Store Setup

After subscribing to a Store, you’ll have the option to use the Quick Store Setup feature to create the look and feel of your Store in a few short steps. This feature provides design and marketing recommendations that are popular with other Store sellers. With the click of a button, you can apply all of the recommended settings, or you can edit them to suit your needs. This feature is only available to you at the time you open your Store.

Note: If you do not want to use the Quick Store Setup feature immediately after you subscribe to your Store, you can use Quick Store Tune Up instead.

Build your Store's brand

As you build your brand, here are some general tips to keep in mind:

• Make your Store stand out from the competition.

• Choose colours, logos, and graphics that complement what you sell and highlight your strengths.

• Emphasise your Store's brand in all customer contacts. For example, use your Store colours and graphics in your eBay listings, ads, and emails.

Expand your brand with these Stores features:

• Logo: A logo usually consists of the Store name and a graphic that symbolises what you sell or the qualities of your business. Choose from a list of pre-designed logos, design your own, or choose not to have a logo. Make sure your logo looks professional—a poorly designed logo may have a negative effect how potential customers see your Store.

• Listing Frame: You can automatically display a special version of your Store's Header and Left Navigation at the top of all your item descriptions. The Listing Frame is a simple, effective way for you to help buyers discover the full range of items available in your Store.

• Store Theme: The Store Theme contains the colours, fonts, and graphics that appear on all the pages of your Store. If you're not sure where to start, try one of the pre-designed themes, which already include professionally designed graphics and colour combinations. You can also design the Store theme yourself, which gives you complete control over the individual elements of your theme.

• eBay Header Style (Featured and Anchor subscribers only): In your Store, you can display either the standard eBay navigation bar or a smaller version that takes up less space. If you're just beginning to sell online, emphasising your association with eBay is a good way to establish credibility with buyers. More established sellers might want their brand to be more prominent on the page and should opt to use the smaller version of the header.

Display your products

Use these eBay Store features to display your items prominently:

• Store Categories: Think of these as the aisles or shelves of your Store. You can create up to 300 Store Categories and subcategories. Each category can be up to three levels deep. For example, a category named Sporting Goods can have two additional subcategories: Sporting Goods > Golf > Golf Balls. Each category name can be up to 29 characters long. Be sure to use relevant, descriptive, specific and popular keywords in your Custom Category names to increase the chances of buyers finding your items. You can also choose to display all of your categories and subcategories in the left-navigation bar of your Store, or you can display one or two category levels instead.

• List View and Picture Gallery: Specify the default display style that suits your Store.

  • List View - This style is useful for showing long lists of items. Each item takes up a small space so buyers can view more items.

  • Picture Gallery - This style devotes more space to each item than the List View through a larger picture. This works well for shorter lists of items where the picture is important.

• Item sorting: You can select how to sort your items in categories and search results. This can have a subtle but important impact on the shopping experience. For example, you might choose "Newly Listed" as the sorting feature if you want to steer buyers to browse your latest listings.

• Gallery pictures: Pictures sell. A buyer is more likely to view an item when you have a Gallery picture in your listing than if you don't.

• Promotion boxes: Promotion Boxes can be used to grab buyer interest and encourage additional sales by highlighting featured items or Sales, encouraging buyers to sign up for email newsletters and more. They also provide an alternative way for buyers to browse in your Store.

Get your message across

To help reinforce your Store's brand, feature select items, or communicate policies, consider using the following features:

• Additional header information: Add more text and pictures to your Store header, which will appear on every page, to increase the visibility of newly-listed items or those on sale. This is also an excellent way to tell buyers about promotions, your Store's specialties, the latest news about your business (for example, whether you're on vacation), and other aspects of your Store.

• Custom pages: A Custom Page can be used to create a unique home page, or special pages that detail your Store policies, provide sizing guides, or more. For example, if your buyers are interested in how items from a particular category were manufactured or acquired, you can create a custom page that provides this background information.