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Opening your own cyber store just got easier
By Martha McKay (Staff Writer)
NorthJersey.com
May 3, 2007
If you're itching to sell stuff but want to avoid the flea market called eBay, take a look at Shopster.com.
The company lets you set up your very own online store, avoiding many hassles along the way.
I've never been keen on shopping or selling, but I have to say Shopster intrigued me.
If I designed a good Web site, wrote zippy product descriptions and did a bit of marketing, people might actually buy stuff and I'd be able put some extra cash in my kid's college fund.
Here's how it works.
Shopster lets you set up your own e-Commerce shop with relative ease.
Instead of all the headaches that come with establishing a site on your own -- handling orders, distribution, credit card processing -- Shopster does it all for you.
You design your cyber storefront and Shopster does the rest. It hosts your site, provides live chat for customer service and takes care of all the shipping and handling.
There is one catch.
The stuff you sell is limited to what Shopster has in its warehouses. Now, that inventory list is long -- they have more than 700,000 items, from accordians to bonsai plants to fossil replicas.
Shopster advises people to go "niche" and design stores that carry similar products -- health-care products or electronics, for instance.
You can zip through Shopster's inventory, choose your products and set your own prices. Some comments on the Shopster user forums posted by Shopster store "owners" indicate some dissatisfaction over wholesale prices being too high. I happen to think you can seduce buyers with a well-designed store -- online or bricks and mortar -- and good ad copy. How seductive (and pricey) are catalogs and stores like Crate & Barrel?
There is one thing to note about Shopster online stores -- though they give you the chance to have live chat on your site so customers can get information about orders, they don't recommend putting your own phone number on the site. That's because most questions would be about orders and store owners don't handle any of that -- Shopster does. I tend to put my faith (perhaps naively) in a Web commerce site that has a person's name, address and phone number. But I know there are many e-Commerce sites out there without phone contact information.
There is no doubt that Shopster's business model benefits Shopster. Having armies of independent sellers hawking stuff from the Shopster inventory warehouse is the brainchild of three Canadian businesspeople. They began Shopster last year and say they are now "powering" more than 1,500 e-stores across North America and run the largest virtual drop-shipping warehouse in the world.
It's not clear if Shopster has long-term potential, but the risk seems pretty low for someone looking to test the e-Commerce waters without a big cash or time commitment. Shopster charges a set-up fee of $100 and then $30 per month after that.
If buyers find your site and make a purchase, you get the profits. Even for an anti-shopper like me, the concept is vaguely exciting. If sales is in your blood and you've wanted to hang out a cyber shingle but haven't figured out how, you might get truly intrigued by the small-business opportunity that Shopster is hawking.