Switching from ebay to Amazon on established site

[marksierra]

I have a site that uses the BANS (Build a Niche Store) platform for selling a niche of products on ebay. It has been up for about a little over a year.

It currently ranks #1 in Yahoo, but nowhere to be found in Google. Even so, I get a small commission on the sales at ebay. But that's the reason why I want to move away from ebay and use Amazon's inventory instead (better commission).

To make the switch to Amazon products, I have to gut the whole thing and use WordPress using the ReviewAZON plugin. What worries me is the possibility of losing my ranking and not getting it back... at least in Yahoo.

I'm looking for advice on how best to approach this to at least minimize the impact I'm likely to face. I know there's no guarantee, but I'd rather make the leap for the possibility of better commissions than to stay with ebay (their affiliate program is really going downhill).

I have a few other sites using BANS that I plan on converting to Amazon as well, so I want to prepare myself by thinking this through.

Any help is most appreciated!

[Desdichata]

Mark:

I guess the decision you are faced with is keeping a high Yahoo ranking and earning small commissions or risking losing the ranking for a chance of a bigger payout. I do agree with you that the Ebay affiliate program is no longer really worth the effort. I am not sure why you have to gut your site and start over with Wordpress. If you have not already tried out the plug in I would do that before anything else.

Rankings are such a complicated and fickle beast that it is hard to say how one can minimize the risk of going down in the rankings. But speaking for myself, I believe the risk is worth it (if for no other reason that not having to dealing with the EBay affiliate program.) Good Luck.

[Adriana]

Why not leave the eBay pages in place, and just add new pages monetized with Amazon? you'll the best of both worlds: keep the small eBay commission and add the amazon to it .

[marksierra]

Thanks to you both for your input.

Why use WordPress? Well, a couple of reasons. First, BANS, like WordPress, has its own structure. You configure it on the backend to tell it what to populate on the front end. So WP plugins won't work.

And second, because it is its own platform, it's only designed to work with ebay. So I don't have the choice of switching affiliate programs with it.

At the very least, what I can do is try to preserve the site structure as best I can while keeping the page/post titles.

Ugh, not a very fun task ahead of me, but the sooner I do it, the sooner I can make better commissions.

[schemjo]

Here's an idea....I'll use my site as an example (which is also using BANS...and I too am really disliking eBay lately....)

Install wordpress in a separate directory ex. my-new-sunglasses.com/reviews and you can either password protect this directory until you're done or just block the bots from indexing it in the robots.txt file.

Now create your categories using this new structure all while your current site is still up and running. The new site would be http://My-new-sunglasses.com/Reviews/Maui-Jim-Kapalua while http://my-new-sunglasses.com/Rimless...ui-Jim-Kapalua is your existing site.

Continue to do this until you have your complete site 'rebuilt' The search engines will not pick this up quite yet because you blocked them at the root (Reviews directory).

Once this is all up and running do a 301 redirect from your old pages to your new pages and don't forget to remove the password protection or the 'nofollow' code in the robots.txt file so the search engines see this again.

You also noted that google is not picking up your site which is a problem somewhere....you could work this problem out with the 'new' site.

Hope this helps....
--Joe--

[marksierra]

Thanks for the assist, Joe. Sounds like a good plan. I'm taking it day by day, but will eventually get this thing converted.