Try the Ebay Affiliate Program for niche stores
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008A few weeks ago I purchased this script called BANS - Build A Niche Store. I set it up on a domain name that I wasn’t using, you can see it here www.moziface.com. My goals were simple. I wanted to build an Ebay affiliate store around a fairly popular niche, Ipods and MP3 players. I predominately use Wordpress to power my sites, so I was actually tempted to try to accomplish the same thing in Wordpress that BANS does. But I decided, rather than write my own code (which I’m always tempted to do), I’d give it a shot. It couldn’t hurt, although it was a bit expensive ($97), and there are alternatives, I find that BANS is the most supported, and easily setup of the ones I’ve looked at (phpBay is another). There are a lot of things in BANS that I don’t use but are great for additional revenue. For example, you can promote the BANS script on your sites through your clickbank account, and earn a really good commission, like $45 ! Also, you can easily insert your adsense or other ads (a word of warning later).
The idea behind BANS is to be a middleman in the Ebay transaction. Here’s a graphic to describe it:
You attract shoppers to your website, and they browse products via categories. When they click a product link, they are taken to Ebay to view the product. This could be a problem, because if someone doesn’t know you’re an Ebay affiliate store, they may be surprised by the jump to ebay. So anyway, if they make a purchase, you get paid a portion of the Seller’s Listing Fees. If they register for an account, you get paid. The specifics are on Ebay’s site, but this lays the groundwork for how things flow.
So I setup the script, the install was easy, but you may need the help of a techie if you’re intimidated by things like that. You can get help from their forums (Forum signup instructions are included in the download ZIP file). The BANS templates are intentionally bland. They are very, very close to what I see in Wordpress templates and that is a nice touch. So, I surfed my favorite wordpress theme site and found a theme i liked. I used the header image and the CSS (more techie stuff) from the Wordpress theme and put it into the BANS template. I fetched my Ebay campaign ID, and grabbed the Category i wanted to promote. The rest was simple. Default settings were fine, so I didnt need to tweak much. I could easily add lots of static pages, like about us, policies, etc to make it a full fledged website. The image below shows the Template Selection screen:
You can control all aspects of your site, from layout, text, ads, keywords and meta information. Here’s a screen shot of setting up some keyword information:
One of the gripes I have, and I’ve been meaning to ask the author, but its not a show stopper. The manual says I can enter multiple category IDs separated by a comma. This isn’t true. It will only accept one category ID. This script can be used on as many domains as you want. But here’s a tip. If you create a cool domain name like “kctechmall.com” (nice name, I might buy that one!), you can use subdomains like ipod.kctechmall.com or digitalcameras.kctechmall.com instead of spending lots of money on separate domains. The cool thing about this is, you use the main domain, kctechmall.com as an entry point into all your other “stores” which are ebay stores based on a niche ebay category.
Then, you can spend all your time marketing the kctechmall.com site (instead of the individual store sites). For marketing your site, I would use free marketing methods, like article marketing, blog marketing, forums, friends, local classifieds, etc.
A word about going local. Face it. The internet is just too huge for us small town folks to think about being a global player. There’s a ton of money to be made from local markets. In the example above, kctechmall.com could be a Kansas City, Missouri locality based thing, but the produts don’t have to be. You use the local aspect to attract local users through traditional advertising methods (Thrifty Nickel ads, Classifieds, etc).
Also, you could use Adwords but I caution you on this. You can easily outspend yourself on this. I kicked myself in the rear a few times for not paying attention to my adwords budget, and thus blowing all my profit for the week on ads. Not good. Try to get as much as you can out of the free, traditional marketing, it will help you in the long run with search engine results, if you market your self in blogs, forums, other sites, friends sites, etc.
Overall, BANS is definately a good product. I’d like to hear your feedback on your bans sites if you have them setup. What kind of return are you getting? What product categories work best in Ebay?
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(Price: $97 - Mail-In Rebate: $22)
Price After Mail-In Rebate: $75.00
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Return policy: This product is sold through Clickbank.com. Clickbank will, at its discretion, allow for the return or replacement of any defective product within 60 days from the date of purchase. For recurring billing products, returns for more than one payment may be provided if requested within the standard 60 day return period. After 60 days all sales are final."
