Review of BuyItSellIt Storefronts

[mandy]

BuyItSellIt.com, an ecommerce storefront hosting service that seems tailor made for the current recession. For no monthly fee, budding entrepreneurs can set up a storefront complete with a shopping cart and accept payments from buyers through PayPal Pro, Google Payments, or a merchant account they set up with a bank and with the payment gateway Authorize.net. If they upgrade to a monthly fee of just $4.95, they get domain name hosting and the ability to customize their site. They can also sell digital files such as MP3s and e-books for additional fees that start at $9.95 per month.

BuyItSellIt (or BISI, as it's often called on the site's discussion boards) was purchased about a year ago by the auction service provider InkFrog...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y208...bu0228/s04

[xwpopper]

My review of BISI:
It's a PITA to add products. 7 different tabs that you must visit to enter all details of title and category, description, shipping and price, google base attributes, keywords and meta tags, inventory number, and images. Then, there is no "copy" feature to save all this if you sell like products. Then, they only accept XML files for bulk upload using a form that is 9 pages long.
It is more of a PITA than any cart I have tried. It appears to be built for PHPProbid masters that are used to a 7 page listing form.

[amy]

[quote author=xwpopper link=topic=18774.msg73450#msg73450 date=1228737768]
My review of BISI:
It's a PITA to add products. 7 different tabs that you must visit to enter all details of title and category, description, shipping and price, google base attributes, keywords and meta tags, inventory number, and images. Then, there is no "copy" feature to save all this if you sell like products. Then, they only accept XML files for bulk upload using a form that is 9 pages long.
It is more of a PITA than any cart I have tried. It appears to be built for PHPProbid masters that are used to a 7 page listing form.
[/quote]

translation for fulltime sellers: when you factor in the value of the time required to list, the "free" BISI cart suddenly becomes much more expensive then paying for webhosting and using an open source solution like Zen.

[LittleOnlineStore]

BuyItSellIt aka Highwire. I will not advertise or post in support of them any longer.

[Kristijntje]

Price increase announcement effective May 1, 2009

What is being announced?
On 3/15/2009, we announced our pricing and membership structure effective 5/01/2009.

What are the pricing changes?
We have consolidated our plan offerings to three separate plans, Free, Standard and Digital Delivery. Free accounts will now include all buyitsellit features excluding domain hosting and bulk edit/import. Additionally, free accounts are now limited to 10 products. The standard plan has changed from $4.95/mo to $9.95/mo. We have consolidated our digital file delivery service to one plan which is $14.95/mo and now provides domain hosting. All plans remain flat-rate and do not include any sales percentage fees.

Why are you changing the pricing?
There are several factors why we decided to change our pricing structure. buyitsellit has offered "free" stores since November 2007. By offering totally free stores, we have had an increased amount of free stores participating in fraudulent activity and using system resources available for legitimate sellers. By changing our pricing, we will be able to provide a much more reliable and dynamic service to our members.

How long do I have to choose a plan?
All pricing changes will be effective 5/01/2009. You will be prompted to upgrade your account if you exceeded the free account limits or if you have not changed to the new pricing structure. All accounts will need to be compliant with a new pricing plan before 5/01/2009.

What if I decide not to change plans?
If you have not changed your pricing plan after 5/01/2009, you will still have full access to your products and orders via the buyitsellit admin. If your account is not compliant with a new plan after 5/01/2009, your storefront will be interrupted until a plan has been selected.

If I upgrade, do you offer any money-back guarantee?
Glad you asked! You bet, if you are not satisfied with in the first 30 days of upgrading your account, please contact support and we'll issue a full refund of your first payment.

Can I cancel or change plans anytime?
All plans are month-to-month. There are no long term commitments and you can cancel or change plans at anytime.

Additional Questions?
If you need help understanding these changes or would like help choosing a plan, please contact support for further information.

announcement: http://community.buyitsellit.com/Topic32680-4-1.aspx

[regic]

On 6/30/2009 we experienced a major database outage that resulted in lost data.

In our attempts to restore to the latest backups, the last fully restorable backup was from 6/26/2009 8:00AM PST.

All data entered or updated from 6/26/2009 8:00AM up to this current point has been lost. We are doing our best to restore this data at this time, but all attempts are currently unsuccessful. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are working to prevent these problems from future occurances.

http://community.buyitsellit.com/Topic43032-4-1.aspx