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eCommerce Business Options
There are currently a plethora of low-cost, low effort eCommerce options for businesses. Below we have a few mainstream options to consider.
Homestead
Choose a customizable template, insert your own graphics and text, then publish your website.
Pros: Over 2000 templates, completely customizable, choose your domain name, uses PayPal. If you are not comfortable creating your own site, Homestead will create one for you.
Cons: Having Homestead customize your website can be pricy.
http://www.homestead.com/
Etsy
The goal of Etsy is to allow people around the world to buy and sell homemade products.
Pros: From one website, people can browse and choose items. It costs 20 cents to list an item for four months.
Cons: Sellers do not have individualized websites.
http://www.etsy.com/
Ebay Stores
Create a store and post items on ebay. Allows for posted items to be bid on or people can purchase at the set “buy it now” price.
Pros: The auction element allows people to bid on your items, thus the pricing may rise. Additionally, ebay is a trusted, high traffic website.
Cons: There is a fee for listing items on ebay and an additional cost for having an ebay store.
http://stores.shop.ebay.com/
WebStore by Amazon
Sellers upload items to Amazon which then can be searched for from Amazon.com.
Pros: Amazon is a trusted site, hence increasing buyer trust in your store.
Cons: Amazon collects a commission from each item sold. Additionally, sellers are charged a monthly selling fee.
http://webstore.amazon.com/Online-Store-Feature-Tour/
Craig’s List
Allows people to post free, online classified advertisements that are targeted to a local demographic.
Pros: There is no fee to post an item on Craig’s List. Larger items tend to sell better on Craig’s List than they do other websites.
Cons: Often people only accept cast. Best to use on a local basis.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites
Yahoo Stores
Sellers can create a website using a yahoo.com template. Sellers can also customize the website domain name.
Pros: Customizable templates are available and easy to use.
Cons: Yahoo takes a percentage of the profit from the sellers and additionally charges a monthly merchant fee.
Google Stores
Products are uploaded to Google and customers are allowed to browse though products they are interested in.
Pros: It is free to post items on Google. Seller can choose the key words, or attributes, for their products.
Cons: some people have found that there are too many search results making their products difficult to find.
http://www.google.com/base/help/sellongoogle.html
Have you ever used any of these products? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Let us know!
