Free eBay Seller Tools: What's the deal?

Ideally 3rd party providers of eBay seller enhancement tools should have a disclosure on their website explaining in detail how they cover their costs of providing the free (or paid) service, remember they are in business to make money, so know what your are getting and how their service interacts with your eBay account, know whether you are giving away access to your eBay customers (will your customer,or even the non-winning bidder, get spam, or unwanted ads in your follow up emails?), and not least, know whether the 3rd party service complies with your eBay seller agreement.

Protect your ebay account and reputation with buyers:

eBay has strict rules regarding external links from your auction listing, and what kind of linked pages are allowed, watch out for those little banners and links that some 3rd party providers may insert in your listing, know where the link goes and whether the target page is in compliance with eBay policy.

How much access to your eBay account are you giving to the 3rd party provider?
read the small print on your agreement with the 3rd party hosting service or gallery service.
Check out the eBay forums regarding 3rd party providers, are disgruntled buyers, or even non-winning bidders, complaining about getting spam or ads in follow up email being sent in your name, by a provider you have authorized to take charge of processing follow up emails? Be aware of potential impacts on your buyers, and ultimately your eBay reputation.

There are new 3rd party eBay promotional tools popping up all the time. Among the latest trends is the free page, or store hosted on a non eBay site, which pulls in your auction listings from ebay, and which you then can promote as a marketing tool to draw people to your auctions. This may be a useful and easy way to promote your auctions with the minimum of effort. But is there a cost?

The 3rd party site that displays auctions listing for eBay sellers may be covering their costs by getting eBay affiliate comissions whenever somebody buys on eBay by going through one of your 3rd party store links. This is one of the ways eBay affiliates bring customers to eBay, and I am not criticizing this business model.
The Squidoo model is one example of how revenue sharing,and charitable giving can be combined in a successful way

However if you want cut down on your ebay seller fees, if may be worth your while to direct some of your efforts towards promoting links to your actual eBay store that contain your own eBay store referral ID, so that you can earn valuable rebates on your seller fees.

Only you can decide the cost benefit ratio, and where best to expend your marketing efforts.

Read on for more about eBay store Referral credits and links to more information on how you can significantly reduce your Final Value Fees by promoting your own links containing your eBay referral code.

NOTE:The following information is current at the time of writing. Check the eBay web site for the the most up to date infromation.

The eBay Store Referral Credit is a credit that Store sellers are eligible to receive when they successfully drive buyers to their eBay Store directly from a location outside of eBay. With Store Referral Credit, eBay will give you a 75% credit on your Final Value Fees when your marketing efforts generate sales of your Store Inventory format listings. Learn more about how it works here: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/referral-credit-faq.html

Important: You must include a referring ID at the end of the URL that you send to prospective buyers. or you will not get the credit

For some examples of how Store URLs with referral codes would look (referral code shown in bold) see:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/referral-credit-steps.html