One of the most important steps to becoming a regular seller on e-bay is creating a memorable brand.  For e-bay your brand is entirely visual until the sale.  For this, let’s talk about initial brand creation.

The first part is thinking about your e-bay id or username.   You may already have an id like John123 or luvtoskii.  This name or userid is not something you have to keep forever.  In fact it’s easy enough to change, so you should give some thought to making it memorable.  Obviously if you have just one item you’ll be selling, it would be wise to stick to that.

Let me give you an example- you sell only bbq’s.  You could use the id:  BBQking.  But, what if that is taken?  How about BBQdreams or BBQsmokin’ or BBQsGalore?   This makes it easy for my husband to tell his buddies, “yeah, I got this great bbq from this guy on e-bay, goes by BBQsGalore.”  This means when they’re at home and want BBQ stuff they’ll be able to remember and search for you.   When you are taking a userid, also think about the group of folks you’ll likely be selling to.  Is your audience in their late teens, middle-aged, elderly, male, female, different race?  All of these things are important.  It’s not likely that BBQs will sell much to teens, so naming BBQs4teens would be silly.  However, clientele might likely be male, so using something they already have strong positive attachments to would be wise- ie:  BBQSuperbowl.

As far as memory goes, people remember what interests them.  You are more likely to remember something that creates some sort of emotional response that in turn triggers their memory.  This can happen many ways- ie:  your userid is named after their long-deceased dog spotstoys.  Or it could be an allusion to something they might already have a trigger for:  SeeSpotRun.  Our own name came about from our last name.  We often receive mail misspelled and addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Frog.  So, it was logical to us to take a user ID Frog.  Sadly that alone wasn’t enough for us as e-bay’s been around for a bit and there is already another frog user; so as I began working on a logo and came up with the current logo, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Man, that is one fat frog!”  And there it was!  It has worked well for us over the years, it’s humorous, allows us to connect personally with our customers as we tell them the story and gives them something to visually hook into.

Think about it- how do you remember a brand?  The first step is you remember the name, then visually by relating the name to an image.

In my next guide I’ll discuss the importance of creating a strong logo.