TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

Quote:osCommerce

Quote:In years past, alternatives to eBay had a low chance of success, particularly if they were free sites. However, in the market targeted by eBay Express (fixed-price items), it appears this is changing. There are a number of ecommerce sites that have become quite popular. We're going to look at a couple of them that have an added bonus - they're free.

At the moment, the most talked about is ECrater (http://www.ecrater.com). This is similar to eBay Express, but is currently far higher ranked on visitor volume than the eBay counterpart. As a buyer, finding items is a little clunky, but there are other benefits. ECrater has a feedback system that already integrates some of the better features of eBay's Feedback 2.0; the design is very sleek; and it's not hard getting used to it...

Quote:eCrater is in many respects what eBay Stores should be. An independent stores platform and marketplace. This is an excellent tool for eBay Store Sellers to ween themselves off of eBay Stores. It is free, easy to use, part of a marketplace and allows sellers to accept Google Checkout and post listings automatically to Googlebase.

With the reduced exposure for eBay Store listings and the excessive fee structure at eBay, eCrater seems a reasonable alternative to eBay Stores. It can also serve as the transition between eBay and your own website...

Quote:The beauty of eCrater, and I think one of the reasons for its success, is that it is so simple. It literally took me only two minutes to get a store set up and begin entering inventory. It's a very user-friendly, fill-in-the-blank system. Sellers can point their websites to their eCrater page using URL masking, so buyers will only see the seller's website address (not eCrater's). This makes it seem more professional, and more like your own website rather than a page on someone else's site (as you get with eBay Stores).

eCrater has a feedback feature just like eBay, and some of the better features of Feedback 2.0 were integrated, well before eBay launched them. eCrater allows sellers to accept PayPal and Google Checkout and has plans to add Amazon Payments...

Quote:I started selling on eCrater in March of 2006. The store was very easy to set up and took me a few hours to get everything in place, and about 3 days to stock it. The set-up is very user friendly for the most part, and anyone can do it, especially the HTML illiterate because the set-up is all in plain text, everything is very uniform, thus resulting in a very clean and organized look. All stores have the same set-up....