The Bottom Line
If you've toyed with the right way to go about setting up your own store, but have been hesitant and confused, ProStores is probably worth trying out and a good way to test the waters.
As with any product eBay offers, extensive research has gone into putting the ProStore program together and they've probably thought of just about everything. But I would certainly check out other options to see what is offered before committing to one of the higher priced tiers.
Pros
- Listings can easily go from ProStore to eBay and back
- Shopping cart is included
- Tools to design your store
- Business tier and above, you can submit your store to shopping search engines, such as Shopping.com
Cons
- Express tier only allows ten listings at a time and two pages
- Numerous extras are costly
- Transaction fee on top of monthly fee, paypal or credit card fee can really add up
Description
- Tiers: Express $6.95; Business $29.95; Advanced $74.95; Enterprise $249.95 (30% off for eBay stores)
- Successful transaction fees range from 1.5% (for Express) to 0.5% for the other program tiers.
- Own domain name can be used, except for Express tier
- Open store before October 3, 2005 and successful transaction fees are waived until January 1, 2006.
- No contract to sign
Guide Review - ProStores -- Open Your Own Shop
Billed as another way to help you sell online, ProStores, a new eBay company could be useful
for certain types of sellers. It's an easy way to set up a shop-front for the novice, who is not
sure how to go about building an online store, but wants to get online. I can also see it being good for the seller with an extensive inventory that is not getting shoppers attention. The features in the higher priced tiers can be a major help to the big time seller who really needs to get a handle on their business, inventory and suppliers.
Although I haven't compared other like store options, I feel the fees are on the high side. But then again using the Express tier, if you were only putting ten items a month on eBay, this could be a cheaper way to go depending on the initial listing prices and how folks find about your listings.
