posted on February 5, 2005 08:32:46 PM new
Hi All,
In light of the upcoming store fee increases, I thought that I might look into starting my own website. Does anyone have a suggestion as who & where I might start?
Thank you,
Rosanne
posted on February 5, 2005 08:43:08 PM new
I am seriously considering starting a yahoo store. It is about $40 a month, no listing fee, and a 1.5% FVF - There is no long term contract, so I can throw a thousand items in there, try it out for 6 months and not be out too much. I am going to survive this fee increase on ebay, it is the next one that I think will do me in. I totally expect my store costs to go from 2 cents/30 days to go to 10 cents/30 days the next time around, so I definitely need to start looking elsewhere. I won't give up on the ebay platform because I think it is a great way to get customers. Once I get them though, I think I can market enough to get them to keep buying from me off ebay...
posted on February 5, 2005 08:52:39 PM new
Hi Ebayvet,
I agree with you. I don't want to rule out Ebay but direct bidders to my own website as we did with out stores. I am hoping that Replay will check in as I know he always includes his website in his postings. My son will help with this project since I am not computer literate to attempt such a project.
thanks,
Rosanne
posted on February 5, 2005 08:58:30 PM new
this is reliable(seldom down) and rather easy to build. I guess you are talking about your own website http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/
posted on February 5, 2005 09:23:35 PM new
I have a domain all paid for and hosted, just waiting for me to do something with it. As soon as Ebay sent me their increase email, I figured now is a great time to get it up and making me money!
In searching different sites, I jotted down the designers name on the bottom of the sites I liked and put in a request for estimate from three of them. I only heard back from one of them and his estimate was $2500 to build it with my 1000 items/photos. His quote left me with more questions than answers, i.e. what are the monthly charges? Do I have to switch hosting companies? Can I easily add more items? etc.
I'll have to go back to him with my entire list of questions but since I haven't heard from any other sources, I'm left to wonder whether $2500 is in the ballpark?!
posted on February 6, 2005 06:29:16 AM new
seriously considering starting a yahoo store.
eBayvet - As I have talked about before, for 1 1/2 years, I worked for a guy who had a Yahoo store. Wanna talk more, I'm at AOL. Got lots of hints and ideas for you. Louise
posted on February 6, 2005 06:21:59 PM new
The designer fee is most often about $2000. to $3000. The reason... is it takes about two or three weeks to build a big store and then you have to maintain it.
I have built 4 websites for myself and friends. Three were on Yahoo. It has a self editing tool easy enough for most novice starters. No software required, it's built on the web. I have had these websites for 5 years and think they are just about perfect for ease of use.
The $40. store gets you into Yahoo shopping and yahoo is still the most used search engine. A small business web site is about $14.per month. The only difference is it doesn't have the built in shopping cart.
I have never used the Yahoo shopping cart however. Just felt better with PayPal and I only have one card as a Merchant's Card. Paypal has five and I don't want to set up 5 Merchant accounts just to make the shopping cart process through the Yahoo Store. You need at least one merchant's account to build a store on Yahoo.
Yahoo, in the past, has had a free trial period on Websites for 30 days. You can change the Store into a plain Website if you don't like it.
Just plan on about two weeks to set it up. Take a chance, its a lot better than the Ebay Store. The Vendio store is also pointless. I dropped both like a hotcake.
Greengate
posted on February 6, 2005 07:23:33 PM new
One cheap, easy, fast, good solution is a shop on www.shoporium.com. You can have your own domain name so it is your own website. You can have an unlimited number of items, no per item fees, no final value fees. Comes with a basic shopping cart and search engine. Look and Feel similar to eBay so easy for your eBay customers to use. You get free software to manage your store inventory (also works with ebay, amazon, yahoo) and it is under $20 a month. Helpful and friendly webmaster too!
posted on February 6, 2005 07:54:02 PM new
Ebayvet,
I had received an e-mail from Yahoo that they were dropping the $50.00 set-up fee for a limited time. I though that was different,they are hoping to get some of the E-Bay sellers giving up their E-Bay stores to give them a try I guess.
**********************************
Two men sit behind bars,one sees mud the other sees stars.
posted on February 6, 2005 09:39:03 PM new
MAH645 .... They have ALWAYS had that same promotion......its a FAKE FREEBIE! Noone has ever paid the set up fee of $50
I have a yahoo store feel free to take a look.
IT IS SO DAMNED EASY COMPLETELY PLUG AND PLAY!
You fillout a webform for each item fill in the blanks like description and price etc upload a picture and VIOLA! No html programming you don't have to use their database, inventory tools blah blah I never have in 2 1/2 years. It comes with webhosting account that I don't ever use, since my store items pics are held by yahoo within the store item desciptions.
Way back when I did my own site and html etc etc and it was a nightmare if anything ever changed or I added new items.
Entering your items in the yahoo shopping pay-per-click is optional so you don't have to buy into that either.
The meta-tags are nicely organized so that when you show up by search in a search engine they are clear and consise.
The only downside is they all have the basic template........ You could customize it if you want to or have the time.
You do need a merchant account A REAL ONE! If you have an offline merchant account that is fine but you still have to enter the account number or Yahoo won't let your store open for business and take in orders PERIOD!
posted on February 7, 2005 12:17:29 AM new
I'm glad to hear that $2500 is over the top! I went to the Yahoo site to sign up and it's trying to charge me the $50 set-up fee. All of the coupon codes I found on the web for this have expired. Anyone have a current code that will waive this fee?
posted on February 7, 2005 09:22:18 AM new
this is reliable(seldom down) and rather easy to build. I guess you are talking about your own website http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/
As I said as soon as I read your thoughts about your own website - Yahoo is the easiest to setup and is seldom down.They may be cashing in on "eBays" big mistake. The $25 or $50 setup fee is still worth it.
posted on February 7, 2005 11:40:04 AM new
A friend of mine started a web hosting, design and domain name company. He only charged me a couple of hundred dollars. You can check out his site. southjerseywebsites.com. He has a portfolio you can look at. Also he can Pay Pal shopping carts if you wish.
posted on February 7, 2005 08:59:30 PM new
A while back I posted a link to my OSCommerce store. Now I'm playing around with another free package called phpBB, with the phpBB-auction mod added on.
I'm still working on the site layout but feel free to poke around. It's basically a message board with a functional auction script tacked on. Please note, still in pre-beta stage.
The advantage here: it's free! If you're not into scripting you can have a friend set it up in an afternoon. After that, you're just paying for web hosting, which comes to $5 or $10 bucks a month.
Google AdWords are a pay-for-click service. There's a $5 setup fee, then you pay a nickel every time someone clicks on a link to your page. That's a buck per 20 views. Seems reasonable.
Another nice thing, if you decide to move, you don't lose your store. You can take it with you anywhere.
