Prostores – Build an off-eBay presence that links to eBay
One of my more recent additions to my sales venues collection is a Prostore that I opened up in July 2007, after eBay Live 2007 in Boston. Katiyana’s Handmade Collectibles has some distinct advantages over my other handbuilt websites.
First, I can upload my product via an Excel spreadsheet, which makes it VERY easy to add categories and products to the site, where on my other two websites I have to add things manually by coding them into the page.
Second, I have both Google and Yahoo feeds turned on so my product feeds are automatically being sent out to the search engines with no extra work on my part.
Third, you can import products from your eBay store (and in fact run a “mirror” site to your eBay store if you wish), and use checkout redirect to collect a customer database.
Fourth, if you have an eBay Store, you get a 30% discount on your monthly subscription cost. My Business Level would normally cost $29.95, but I only pay $20.95.
A major con to a Prostore – IF you also use the Paypal Shopping Cart at one of your other websites you’ll probably run into a bug where your buyers who pay via Paypal are double charged S/H fees. This is because of the way Prostores reports the order amount to Paypal, Paypal sees it as a shopping cart transaction and applies S/H fees per the table you have set up with Paypal. If you don’t use Paypal’s shopping cart, you don’t run into this problem at all.
If you want to give it a try, you can get a Business Level Prostore (what I have) free for one month using by clicking on the banner below:
There are already third party services developping around Prostores. One examples is Sales In A Click, which is an automatic monthly newsletter that is sent out to your Prostore Database featuring your products, as well as articles based on the categories you select, and you can add custom text as well. This is a service I learned about at eBay Live 2008 in Chicago, and have been running for two months now.
Tags: paypal, prostores, sales in a click
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