When you own an eBay store, you have the luxury of listing items in your store inventory that essentially do not expire like regular auctions. This feature opens the doors for you to carefully think about and design a process for promoting your items.

As with most things in life, there is an easy road and there is a tougher road that demands more work. The results that one gets are often direct in line with the effort one puts in.

eBay provides you with a cross-promotional tool, where you can present a buyer with similar or related items when they view an auction listing, and when they go through the checkout process.

The easy way out of using this feature is to simply let the system decide which auction listings to show to the buyer. That is probably also the least efficient way of using the cross-promotional tool. However, if most of your listings are regular time-limited auctions, then you do not have much choice other than using the auto selection feature.

A more efficient and effective way of using the tool is to promote your more expensive items when a buyer views an auction listing. This method is actually even more important for when the buyer is going through the checkout process. At checkout time you know that you have a paying buyer who is interested in the particular purchased item. Now is the time to use that knowledge and up-sell.

Often, your more expensive items are the ones that move much slower. That can be for a variety of reasons, such as buyers limiting their searches to specific dollar limits, buyer confidence in you as a seller, and buyer confidence in the broader eBay auction system.

Hence, you must use every sensible opportunity you get to promote your more expensive items.

To do this effectively, you must fully understand your products and how they relate to one another. In addition, you must understand your buyer.

You must know that if the buyer purchased your red $10 widget, then they are most likely to be interested in your related $120 widget because the red widget works with or enhances the performance of your more expensive widget.

In this scenario, you would list your red $10 widget as a regular eBay auction and list your related $120 widget as a store inventory item. Using the cross-promotional tool, you would then manually select the more expensive widget to be shown on in the cross-promotional tool, as well as other items that might relate to the red widget or the more expensive widget.

Cross-promotion can be very effective in generating more sales, but you cannot expect the optimal results if you choose to rely on automatic selection. Put in some thought and work, and you should see far better results.

Jason Griffith writes eBay Store reviews for BestAuctionStores.com, a site dedicated to providing eBay Buyers with the ability to review and rate eBay stores.