Thursday, November 30, 2006
Selling on Ecrater
A few months ago, fed up with Ebays latest store fee increase, I closed shop and began looking for other venues. One of the many I ended up with was Ecrater.com
I have to admit - this one looked almost too good to be true. They offer a full store front website complete with checkout for the very low price of -$0- . Not trusting anyone who doesn't want my money I spent alot of time looking for the catch. There was none.
I promptly moved my previous Ebay store items into two Ecrater store fronts. It was without question a good move. The stores are designed with a clean and uncluttered design that make Ebays busy pages look like the bad side of town. You can take a look at one of my sites HERE. Set up was relatively easy, with the only hassle being the lack of set up information provided. The community boards are fairly active and there is a lot of info provided on getting started. Adding and deleting inventory is a simple and quick process. As with anything free or otherwise there are both positive and negatives. A few of the positives:
I have to admit - this one looked almost too good to be true. They offer a full store front website complete with checkout for the very low price of -$0- . Not trusting anyone who doesn't want my money I spent alot of time looking for the catch. There was none.
I promptly moved my previous Ebay store items into two Ecrater store fronts. It was without question a good move. The stores are designed with a clean and uncluttered design that make Ebays busy pages look like the bad side of town. You can take a look at one of my sites HERE. Set up was relatively easy, with the only hassle being the lack of set up information provided. The community boards are fairly active and there is a lot of info provided on getting started. Adding and deleting inventory is a simple and quick process. As with anything free or otherwise there are both positive and negatives. A few of the positives:
- Free - this really is free. No listing fees, no FV, no nothing
- Google uploads - Ecrater is very good about uploading inventory to Google and does so on a frequent basis
- A subdomain that is picked up by the SE's. Your store URL is yourstore.ecrater.com. I've had no problem with the search engines indexing them.
- Checkout supports both Paypal and Google checkout.
And the downside:
- The system does not allow HTML. This keeps the pages neat , however there is no way to link back to your website or do link exchanges
- No inventory control. Once an item is sold it is up to the store owner to manually remove it.
- Lack of a central directory. No main pages directing potential buyers to the stores.
As for traffic, they do get a fair amount. I am assuming its mostly search engine driven or possibly just word of mouth. To date I have had moderate sales success to with both stores. Nothing spectacular, but considering the only overhead is credit card/Paypal fees its been nothing to complain about. I definitely recommend them to anyone seeking an alternative to Ebay stores.
I also recommend anyone seeking alternatives to Ebay in general to visit The Internet Auction Directory. This is a site I have had up for several years with hundreds of alternative and niche market auction sites as well as a lot of articles and general auction information.
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