Wednesday, August 5, 2009

eCrater - the best eBay alternative....

Well, eCrater is the best in our opinion because a) it is FREE, b) it works and c) every Google search for eBay alternatives - as well as eCommerce articles - seem to put eCrater as one of the top two or three eBay alternatives. Let's face it, eBay fees have gone so sky high that one has to look where one can to cut costs. Pretty much we just use eBay to market our other selling channels - it is a minor player for us.

Another nice eCrater feature is that they host all the photos. That allows merchants to put up some really low-cost merchandise since they don't have to host the photo on their own server or on some other image hosting service. There are no limits on the number of products and the number of categories or sub-categories - that is nice. They give you your own subdomain like...um, er... walkinwilliescomix.ecrater.com for example - so you can build your own store.

In fact, the only criticism we have is that there is no alphanumeric sort for products. Really.... that is the only criticism we have. Yeah, it would be nice to have an inventory download (they have a bulk upload but we haven't tried it yet) but we can live without it.

The admin interface is very, very clean. Google attributes are very easy to add which helps immensely in Google product search. If you have someone to scan books for you (Thanks Melissa!), it makes it even that much quicker.

How can it be free? Well eCrater makes a little on any sale using Google Checkout, they make some on premium product placement on their main eCrater site and then they use Google Adsense in certain places on their site but not in your store.

Well, as far as Walkin' Willie's Comix is concerned, we are loading up inventory on our eCrater store. We are adding hundreds of books per week so check us out - and if you have something to sell yourself, you can't go wrong with eCrater and the price SURE is right....

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