I’ve been building my eBay niche stores in three stages.

Stage 1: Research Stage

Here is where I try to uncover profitable niches to enter.  It goes without saying that this is the most important stage.  Building eBay stores with BANS and phpBay is very easy.  I’m not kidding.  Setting up a basic out of the box store with BANS or adding eBay auctions to a WordPress theme is under 10 minutes (if that) easy.  But if you haven’t done your research and you don’t customize your stores your chances at making decent money are slim.

Stage 2: Building Stage

Here is where we put our store together.  I find a WordPress theme which I can customize so it fits the theme of the store.  Take a look at my most store: Search Telescopes.

What I do in this stage is just build.  I’ll fine tune it with content and other features during state 3.  Right now I want to get the store out there.

My goal is to have 100 stores up and running by the end of 2008 so I’ve setting up the stores in batches of 10 before moving to state three.  But this has been probalamatic since I haven’t been going back to those other stores to add the very important components of stage three.

I’m concerned that some of these stores will hit the Google sandbox before I can turn a profit during the pre-sandbox stage.

Side-note: There is always debate about the sandbox.  Some even question it’s existing.  I believe it’s out there.  But I don’t see it as this evil blackhole.  When we’re in full force promotion mode of stage three it might raise some red flags for Google and they’ll sandbox your site while they check on it.  If you’re building quality stores you don’t have to worry.  Eventually you will make it out of the sandbox.

But, while you have one store in the sandbox, you want to have others out of it.  So the cycle won’t hurt you since at one time or another you might have a few stores in the sandbox and a few outside of it making you money.

Anyway, back on topic…after reading a post in the phpBay customer only forums from the phpBay developer, Wade.  My new goal is to put up two sites per week.  This much more manageable in a week than ten sites.

It gives me time to research, build, and promote.  Plus it keeps the inside/outside the sandbox cycle to do it’s thing so at one point or another I should have sites outside the sandbox making me money.

Stage 3: Promote

Once the sties are up with a few quality pages of content (5-10 pages at least), I can now move into stage 3: promoting my eBay niche stores.  I have a check list I follow which begins to bring traffic and backlinks to my stores.

This is the stage most of us hate.  It’s tedious, repeticous work.  The more money I make at this the more I will outsource down the road.  But for now, I do most of the grunt work.

I’m starting to use tools like Social Bookmarking Demon and Directory Submitter to speed up the process but still this a very boring but crucial step.

Forget the old line from the move: “If you build it, they will come”.  That will not happen here.  You need traffic and you need to go get it.

Yes you will get some traffic from doing nothing but the financial gains will be minimal so you have to do this stage no matter what.

There you have it.  My three stages for building my stores which I’m now doing in sets of two per week.  Following this strategy you should be able to put up over 100 profitable eBay niche stores per week.  So even if you’re stores only make a few bucks per day, that adds up at year end.