Instant Online Shops: phpBay, BANS or EasyNicheStore? Which is Best?
If you want to run an online shop, there are many routes you can take. But one method that’s gone absolutely crazy in the last year has been building niche online shops using the eBay Partner Network. And the reason it’s gone crazy? Well, two reasons:
- It’s been made easy by phpBay, BANS (Build a Niche Store) and EasyNicheStore!
- It’s proving to be a sure fire winning way to earn money working from home
What I like most about anything to do with eBay is that it’s understood by people, millions of people worldwide use it every day, it has respect. You know who you’re dealing with when you deal with large international companies (one of the reasons I also love Google Adsense!).
Alternatively, you can even buy an ebay store already set up for you - and they can be quite affordable, meaning you don’t even have to set them up yourself. The cute thing is, they’re for sale on ebay too!
What is the eBay Partner Network?
Started early in 2008, the eBay Partner Network is a way you can promote, show and sell items that are listed on ebay from your own website with very little effort. You are provided with simple tools, with phenomenal tracking and reporting features, that enable you to show live auction listings on your webpages. When your website visitors click on those adverts if they buy anything from eBay you get a %age of the listing fee. It’s reliable, trusted, simple and provides great access to an ever changing set of products that you can filter down to be EXACTLY what your website visitors could want! Previously the eBay affiliate programme was run by CJ and it was incredibly hard to get accepted and actually do this easily, now it’s a doddle.
Why Is This So Good Then?
Using eBay as your stockroom and either phpBay, BANS or EasyNicheStore as your shopfront, you could literally think of a great new item you wish you could sell - and have a whole site and shop up and running from scratch in just a couple of hours! THAT’S what’s so good! Imagine stumbling across a magazine article about some great product and thinking “I wish I could make money out of that… I wish I could sell that and work from home” - well now you can stop thinking because that is exactly what you can do!
What you need to do is: sign up for the eBay Partner Programme, choose to use either phpBay, BANS or EasyNicheStore and get started (you’ll need a domain name and hosting if you don’t have those already of course).
So, if you want an easy way to run an online shop and have it making you money virtually straight away, with payments coming directly into your bank/paypal then you really need to look at one of two products: phpBay, BANS or EasyNicheStore.
phpBay, BANS and EasyNicheStore all work with the eBay Partner Network, which means you’re really operating as an eBay partner, but you get to put a lovely and easy shopfront onto the auction listings - and to filter down to only display/sell the products YOU want to.
In my opinion (this is the one I chose!) phpBay is the easiest of the two. At its simplest it’s just an eBay Wordpress Plugin. So if you’re already using Wordpress - and I know thousands of you are - then it couldn’t be simpler!
If you’ve already got a blog phpBay is a great tool you can use it straight away. If you don’t have a blog, but have an idea, now’s a good time to try that idea out and use phpBay to generate your adverts on your blog. phpBay can be used alongside Google Adsense as it doesn’t break any T&Cs. Don’t forget though, you need to get traffic to your blog for people to see your online store!
What’s Good About phpBay
- Installation is exactly the same as every other Wordpress plugin, so it’s easy.
- There’s a good choice of options to help you select exactly the products you want to display.
- phpBay is good value for money, essential as you need to cover your costs quickly.
Customer support for phpBay is good. - phpBay does not require a mysql database, meaning you’re minimising your bandwidth and maximising the load time.
- As phpBay uses Wordpress, you can very quickly change themes and layouts.
- phpBay cloaks affiliate links and ebay images, so it doesn’t look like ebay listings from your site, although you will probably need the Pro version to do this.
What’s Not So Good with phpBay
- You can only show one set of ads at one time on a page - to show more adverts you have to use the “more” function.
- You can only use phpBay in posts, not in sidebar widgets.
- BANS is a stand alone programme, which can be installed on Linux/UNIX hosting with a MySQL database access.
- If you are a developer, the BANS code is open source, so you can make changes or integrate it with existing systems. If you aren’t a developer you can simply ignore this information. BANS is built with the complete novice in mind.
- BANS comes with a number of templates and it is possible to alter or create other templates to fit it if you wish, instructions to do this are included in the User Manual.
- BANS provides good product support and there is a large community of users.
- Once you’ve bought the BANS software, you can use it to create as many sites as you want for you own use; if you want to create sites for other people then you will need to buy a license for each one you sell.
- BANS gives you a full 60 day money back guarantee, so why not set yourself a challenge to get your store up and running and paying for itself within that 60 day timeframe?
- This is a cut down version of phpBay.
- EasyNicheStore is about half the price of phpBay, ideal for those with a low budget.
- There’s just one simple file to install and some straight forward setup variables,
- EasyNicheStore will enable you to show a single column of eBay listings that you pick to be displayed.
- EasyNicheStore works very fast, so you’re not keeping your website visitors waiting for the auction listings to appear.
- Contains a search function - which, strangely, phpBay doesn’t seem to offer at the moment.
- There is no need for a MySQL database on your server either.
- If you’re bothered about cloaking your affiliate links, then EasyNicheStore doesn’t (at the moment) provide this functionality.
- Listings appear on your site/in your shop, they appear as if they are actually ON your site, actually part of your site - this is great news if you want to rely on Google to send you tons of free traffic, because it’s SEO-friendly.
Prices:
phpBay - $79 (free version available)
BANS - £67
EasyNicheStore - $45 (free version available)
Conclusion
phpBay, BANS and EasyNicheStore all perform slightly different functions and it’s really difficult to choose between them. If I had to answer in one sentence which is the best to buy then I’d suggest that if you have, or plan to build, Wordpress blogs then phpBay might be the most logical route. If, on the other hand, you have your own website already or plan to build your own website to sell online, then BANS might be more flexible for your needs. If your budget is a consideration, then why not start with EasyNicheStore.
But don’t take my word for it - everybody’s got different needs and I’m sure already you know what you prefer! Both products are under constant development, bringing you more and more features on a regular basis, so check out the features and functionality for yourself.
Good luck with your new site!
