An eBay store is an optional upgrade for your selling account. With different levels at a variety of price points, upgrading to a store provides a few extra selling tools and benefits. Is a store essential for a Trading Assistant or Selling Assistant business? Not at all. You can easily run a Trading Assistant or Selling Assistant business from a standard selling account and avoid having to pay the monthly fee for a store. But there are some advantages to having an eBay store that could prove to be a benefit to your Trading Assistant or Selling Assistant business.

• Listing fee discounts for volume sellers. While store owners don’t get any free listings a month like standard sellers do, they do get discounts on Final Value Fees and Insertion Fees. As your volume increases, you can actually hit a point where the savings on fees you get from an eBay store offset the monthly cost of the store itself until upgrading to a store will actually save you money per month. In addition to the obvious benefits these lowers fees mean for you, the seller, they can also be a marketing feature to attract clients. You’d be able to offer your customers the opportunity to sell items at lower fees than they’d be able to sell at themselves.
• A central webpage for simple cross promotion. One of the biggest advantages of getting a store is that it gives you a storefront-like page that showcases all of your eBay listings in one location. The items in your store are still simultaneously showing in eBay search results like any other listing but your store will have a custom url (such as http://stores.ebay.com/Priced-Nostalgia) that you can use to direct buyers to all your items at a glance. You’ll also get the option to create custom categories making it easy to organize your listings into groupings that fit your business. These features let you cross promote your own items alongside of the items that you’re selling for Selling Assistants or Trading Assistants increasing sales of both.
• Mailing list. Instead of paying an external service for an email marketing list, store owners get the option to create several different mailing lists and can send emails for free up to a certain volume a month at which point you pay a (low) price per list member past that limit. You can even set up automatic emails that go out on the schedule or your choice. These auto-emails fill automatically with your active eBay listings based on your custom parameters. Sellers also get the option to limit emails only to those within the free limit, thereby avoiding paying any additional fees.
• Other selling tools that you may also find handy: Traffic Reports, Sales Reports, Custom Pages for you to add your own HTML, the ability to set your store on “vacation” and pause all sales until you return, a custom listing frame on all of your items, and a Markdown Manager for creating sales, discounts and special offers. While none of these may apply directly to your Selling Assistant or Trading Assistant business, they can all be handy resources for selling in general.