Some may remember my post about Content Over eCommerce. In that post I explained why running a content site is better than running an eCommerce site. Well, a new service call Shopster promises to give you all the advantage of a content site with the profit potential of an eCommerce store. If you’ve always want to get into eCommerce, but don’t want to actually do any work, then Shopster maybe for you.
Shopster lets you own an eCommerce store without any of the headaches like stocking inventory, shipping, processing credit cards, dealing with pissed off customer and all the other bad things that goes with running a store. The only thing you need to do is name your store and select items from Shopster’s inventory of 700,000 products. You set your own prices for the products. When you make a sale, Shopster ship the order directly to your customers anywhere in North America and you make the difference between the price you sold the product for and the wholesale price in the Shopster warehouse.
Shopster gives you a fair bit of flexibility when designing your store. You can write your own product descriptions, create different product categories and even create coupons. You can use any of the pre-made store templates or put your web design skill to work and create your own.
While Shopster looks like a nice service, I would not call it true eCommerce. You can only sell what Shopster has in its warehouse, which is large, but you won’t be able to add that really cool product you discovered on your last trip to India. This makes Shopster more of an affiliate program. The main difference being you get a storefront and you set the prices.
Unlike Amazon’s aStore, Shopster is not a free service. There is a $99 set-up fee and $39 per month storefront fee. However, you can test out the service for a week at no charge. I checked out some of the sample stores and noticed that i4u is using them. I may have to look at the possibility of adding an online store to TTZ.