Contrary to popular belief, we are happy to report that there is life after EBay.
As many of you know, Ebay has been going through a massive upheaval for the past several months. First the fees were raised again, then they changed the feed back system so that only buyers were allowed to leave negative feedback - then they changed the 'neutral' feedback so that it counted as negative......and when the dust settled, thousands of power sellers were no more....
My husband and I have been EBay sellers for several years, with 3 stores through the EBay 'partner' company ProStores. This was actually our second attempt to make it work with ProStores - we wanted to use it because it offered more automation and frankly, when you have 10,000+ items listed on EBay - you NEED automation to manage things.
About 3 months ago, we sat down and really reviewed what was going on - the margins were getting eaten away by the increasing fees, and PayPal was also starting to hold funds for anything they suspected was a dropship item! This was bad as we sell mostly through dropshippers and many of them are our own very unique resources! But we have to pay for the products before they will be shipped - which mean that we would be paying much more than out the door than our profit was coming in!
Even retailers don't normally pay for their products first - but PayPal - with no warning to anyone - had decided that it was going to enforce this new rule!
So, after almost 5 years on EBay - we made the decision to shut down our EBay stores and move on.
We have spent time looking and playing with a number of different store and shopping cart systems, and have settled on two: YahooStores, and Shopster.
The new Yahoo! Store,
OurTeamShop.com is still 'under construction', but Yahoo! stores do seem to get indexed into the search engines quickly - obviously a great plus. The Yahoo! Store system is not the easiest to understand though - and adding 'non-product' pages, is quite honestly a real pain. I know that some very large companies use Yahoo! Stores, and we are using mainly because of the SEO and marketing features, but personally, I am going to let my husband fight with it - patience is NOT my strong suit!
Shopster, on the other hand, is a pretty unique program, as it combines a true affiliate style program with a "you build it" store front system. A number of other dropshippers have tried similar programs (DOBA & Amazon, for example) but I haven't seen one yet that offered this level of customization.
You actually get to have your own domain name for your store, not a subdomain, which looks a lot better! You also get to not only pick the products you want - but you can also set your own prices! It interfaces with EBay, just in case you are brave enough to
want to continue selling there :-) and they handle all of the shipping etc.
The
Shopster system itself is so slick to use, we built a store with 11,000+ items in it in just a couple of days. If you are not a techie - this is definitely the system for you! The templates are pretty good, although I always want to tweak things, but really, you can use them just the way you are, and they still look pretty good.
Our
Shopster store is
I'm Your Number 1 Fan - and everything in the store is from their dropshipping program. The funny part is that they work with many of the same companies that we were working with before - but now, we don't have to send in the orders, track the shipping etc - which means that we are probably saving about 3 hours a day of work time! Time that can now be spent marketing or building other stores or hey! Maybe we can do something non-work related! LOL - however we use the time - this is best possible way to outsource!
This is like finding your very own customized 'private label' affiliate program - sell under YOUR BRAND and YOUR WEBSITE - but let someone else do the 'grunt' work!
This is a real winner in our books!
Shopster. Sign up now for a 7 day free trial. No commitment, all the upside!
