eBay has been working on ways to drive more traffic to eBay Stores, including ways to make it easier for search engines to read Stores content. Earlier this month, eBay changed the default structure of Stores URLs to include dashes between the words, and this week, eBay said it would change the way Storeowners can name their custom categories. eBay also allows Storeowners to export their inventory in a file and send to those search engines that accept data feeds.
The biggest complaint many eBay Storeowners have about the service is that eBay.com's own search engine does not pick up Stores results. (Last month, eBay rolled out a modification that allowed Stores results to display if there were fewer than 10 eBay.com listings returned on a keyword search.) In addition to listing and final value fees, eBay Storeowners pay $9.99/month to maintain a basic Store.
In the latest announcement made on Tuesday, eBay said Store sellers will be required to have unique names for each of their custom categories. If Storeowners do have duplicate category names after this change takes place, eBay will add a number after each duplicated name to differentiate them.
