PhpBay VS Widgets Available From eBay

Fred asked a great question in the comments on this post in which I felt the answer deserved its own post.

The original question was how does phpBay differ from eBay's own widget?

In my answer, I have several points I would like to address.

First off, you can do some of the same things as phpBay Pro with the RSS Generator available to you in your EPN Dashboard, however you will be creating yourself a LOT more work.

The Editor Kit is written in Javascript and search engines cannot read it.
You better have either quite a bit of content on the page or have the ability to drive a massive amount of traffic to it. In a nutshell, the Editor Kit is not search engine friendly. I am not saying you cannot make money with it, you can. Again, it simply takes a lot more work on your part.

eBay To Go is a nice tool offered by eBay, however it's been my experience that it is written using javascript as well so it is not search engine friendly. As well, you are given several choices to create this widget - single item, multiple items, by seller or by store. The problem with using this widget is that it requires quite a bit of maintenance.

If you have showcased one item or multiple items, those auctions end within a given time frame and you will have to build a new widget with a freshly listed item(s) once the first ones expire. If you choose by seller or store, then you have to continually monitor the widget to not only see if the seller or store still has listings, but also if they are still even registered on eBay. Sellers and Stores come and go everyday.

The closest thing to phpBay Pro that eBay offers in their tools is the RSS Feed Generator. Both of these are search engine friendly, however phpBay Pro has an edge in that department. There really are some vast differences between the tools.

To use the RSS Feed Generator, you have to use the Advanced Search on eBay, enter all of the information in the boxes, depending on how you want to perform the search and when you come toward the bottom of the page, you have to click "Show" next to Affiliate Details and enter you information.

At this point, you click Search and it gives you the url of the RSS feed including your details. This is all well and good, but you still have to have a way to parse the RSS feed into a page on your site so that it will display. Depending on your level of skill, you may need to purchase additional software to accomplish this.

Now that you've taken these steps to create your first page, you have to go back and do it all over again for every page you want to create eBay listings for. This can become a monumental, time-consuming task depending on your niche.

In my opinion, this is where phpBay Pro comes to rescue. It is as simple as installing the plugin on your WordPress site, activating it and editing your Settings.

There are many settings you will only have to enter information once, such as affiliate settings, country, whether or not you want to SEO the eBay urls (make them look like they come from your own site) along with a whole host of other options. You can see many of the features in this post: http://www.melissaeaton.com/general/phpbay-site-build-setting-up-phpbay-pro/

As I stated, most all of this only needs to be set once and you will have the ability to create unlimited posts and pages with listings for your niche on the fly.

Creating the listings on your site is as simple as filling out the parameters of a tag in your WordPress HTML editor.

Once you have filled out the tag with your keyword, how many listings you wish to display, a category (if you choose) and exclusion words (if you choose), the plugin automatically parses the listings on your site without any further work on your part. (No external software) They will continually update on your site as long as there are items for sale.

It is so easy to use you can have a site built in a matter of a couple of hours or less. It also allows you more flexibility and is much cleaner looking than the output from the eBay RSS Feed Generator.

In my opinion, phpBay just gives you more control over how items are displayed on your site and is a huge time saver.

You can still earn money using the tools from eBay, it is possible. Overall, it just takes a lot more work to do so.

If you or anyone else have any more questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I will be glad to answer. I hope this helps and if you need more information, just let me know.