When David and I began AuctionBytes in 1999, the most common question people would ask us was, “How do I start selling on eBay?” Today, the most frequent question we receive is “How do I diversify?”
-Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes.com
As eBay becomes less and less of a marketplace in which small sellers can thrive, many merchants are left wondering what alternatives are out there. This article is the first of many that will examine eCrater.com for merchants looking for a different venue to sell their goods. This post provides an overview of the site while my future posts will discuss my experiences buying, setting up an account, setting up a store, creating a listing and selling.
eCrater was started in the Spring of 2004 by Ditimar Slavov as a marketplace of fixed priced products and hosting site for individual merchant stores. The site is free for buyers and sellers and, unlike most other free auction/market sites, does not feature advertising as a revenue model. eCrater depends on commissions from Google Checkout and fees paid by sellers for featured placement for monetization.
Emphasis on Sellers
I like the emphasis and attention eCrater places on the seller. According to their “About Us” page, the site “believes that a good foundation for a growing marketplace is a community of happy sellers.” This is a good sign for sellers disaffected by eBay corporate policy. Another positive indication is this quote found on the same page:
Cater to your sellers and buyers will come.
Friction Free Buying
There’s no registration required to purchase. This is a plus — keeping the buying process as friction-free as possible is important to a successful transaction. Prospective buyers simply add items to their shopping cart and checkout like virtually every other eCommerce site on the internet. While the site encourages Google Checkout, sellers can offer a myriad of other payment options, including PayPal.
Clean Website Design
I’m impressed with eCrater’s simple, clean website — it’s very reminiscent of Google. As I stated above, there are no ads to clutter up the page and lure prospective buyers from your listings. Dial up users will appreciate the speed in which the site loads over a analog connection.
Feedback System
The feedback system is simple and one-way. Buyers leave feedback for sellers — period. Recipricol and retalitory feedback is not a problem, because sellers don’t leave feedback for buyers. The buyer has the opportunity to leave feedback immediately if the purchase was made through an instant payment option and they are automatically sent a reminder three-weeks later if they have not taken the opportunity to evaluate the seller yet. Feedback is displayed as a simple percentage. For example, a seller’s feedback rating is 100.0 if they’ve received nothing but positive ratings and a seller that has received 3 positive and one negative feedbacks will display as 75.0. A detailed feedback page allows the visitor to read feedback comments and see the number of feedbacks received over the past year in a manner very similar to the classic eBay feedback page. There are no detailed seller ratings.
Listing Format
The listing format is fixed price only. The items are listed indefinitely (until sold) and the seller can offer multiple quantities. Every seller is provided a store with a short & simple URL. These stores include all of the merchant’s listings subdivided into categories defined by the seller. The owner can brand the store with their own logo and using the search function from inside the store will return only listings from that particular merchant’s store.
Restrictions and Terms of Service
There are significantly less restrictions than eBay users are accustomed to. In fact the site’s terms of service are only 899 words long! That’s less than some of the auction terms and conditions I’ve seen included by some sellers on eBay. The restrictions and terms are pretty straight forward. As of the time of this writing the site prohibits the listing of:
- Body parts & organs
- Pirated materials and products
- Copyrighted Materials (images & texts)
- Counterfeit Designer Items (replicas or imitation of designer products)
- Fake Documents
- Illegal Goods and Services
- Personal Information about another individual
- Prescription Drugs
- Prostitution
- Currency Exchanges
- The same or very similar content several times (even in different categories)
- Miscategorization
- Meaningless title & description
- Test items unless your store is put on-hold
- Free items and items with prices that are not “real”
- Items that are not for sale
- Pre-order items
- Firearms & ammunition
- Tobacco and cigars for smoking
- Live animals
- Mod chips or mod chips accessories
Community
eCrater boasts an active, friendly community. The lively bulletin board is reminisent of eBay’s in its early years.
Seller Tools
Besides the free store, eCrater offers an excel based bulk listing tool and offers free picture hosting. Each listing includes a gallery photo and the site boasts a shopping cart for visitors to your store. A widget and RSS feeds are available to promote your listings on your website, blog or Squidoo Lens. eCrater automatically submits a feed of active listings to Google Products Search (formally known as Froogle) and the listings support inclusion of Google Product Search attribute tags.
Simple Registration Process
I’ll document the registration process in a future post, but suffice to say that it’s quick, simple, and doesn’t require a credit card or any other financial data. While that’s a boon for sellers who desire a quick start and are concerned about the security of their personal financial information, it does expose the buyer to some risk. If it’s easy for honest merchants to establish an account and start selling, it’s equally easy for a fraudster to do the same.
Therefore it’s important for a seller to establish credibility and trust on their own website, blog, newsletter and/or forum community before they send potential customers to their listings on eCrater. Which leads me to my next topic:
Where Are the Buyers?
Here’s the rub. eCrater is not a natural destination for online consumers. The site wasn’t designed to be. It was designed to attract traffic from potential buyers directly to listings and stores from Google and through active traffic generation tactics on behalf of the seller. What I’m talking about is attracting free search engine traffic via the seller’s active blog or website, active participation (posting – not lurking) in forums relevant to your niche and including a link to your eCrater store in your signature file, Google AdWords campaigns, etc.
Success as a seller on eCrater requires work on your part to promote your listings — plain and simple. You need to attract buyers, establish a level of credibility and trust and send them to your listings. That’s the cost of free listings on a free store. But, for many sellers — this works! The chart below is a comparison of the traffic between three eBay alternatives from Alexa.com. The graph compares the Alexa rankings of eCrater.com, eBid.net, and UpperBid.com. The stats are from a live feed, but as of this writing, eCrater has a healthy amount of traffic relative to the other eBay alternatives.
eCrater is reminiscent of eBay in the early days — before it became wickedly corporate. I started this eCrator review primarily because I needed something to write about. Now I’m genuinely excited about participating in the site and sharing my experiences with you.
Look for part II of my eCrater review: Buying on eCrater.
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13 Responses to “Review: eCrater.com – An eBay Alternative (Part 1)”
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I have had three stores on eCrater since 2006 and I am very pleased with the ease of listing and the buyer check-out process.
We promote our stores on our Squidoo Lenses, and, we have an active eCrater Store Owners Lens where we have active store promotions:
http://www.squidoo.com/ecraterstorespromotions
eCrater’s RSS feed of our products is easy to add anywhere that accepts RSS feeds. eCrater also allows a specific RSS feed for a searched item. So, a person looking for a specific item can search on eCrater and add the RSS feed to their computer for daily updates for that item! This is a great option to be offered by a free storefront.
In our eCrater stores, we generally have a few sales each week…not as much as eBay or our website…but steady. If our buyers don’t find us on our website, or eBay, they find us on eCrater!
I am migrating from eBay to eCrater and find your article spot on! I have been investigating several other sites and all of them had their plus points but eCrater has everything those other sites had and the design is very clean and bug free! I am pretty computer friendly but I want an evironment that is buyer friendly. The community truly is friendly and helpful. Going anywhere besides eBay you do have to face the challenge of marketing yourself, but it is worth the effort! http://rebshart.ecrater.com
eCrater isn’t a stand alone store BUT a multitude of stores. Some people seem to thing that eCrater is one store.
Here’s mine for exemple: http://chinesesilk.ecrater.com/
Silk dedicated store: clothing accessories, home decoration, etc…
Prices include shipping to the usa,canada, australia and a few other countries.
Google Checkout and Paypal are integrated to make shopping easier. It’s also a good site for shoppers because we have no fees to pay so we can lower our prices (at least it’s the case for me) (unlike the other site where they’re waiting for you at each corner to make you spit your money)
Terrible, beware of scam. I bought a pair of Oakleys Canteens and recieved a fake set of Oakleys that looked nothing like what I purchased that was in the picture! Then when I tried to leave a sellers review…the seller was gone. Be Afraid, be very afraid. Buyer beware.
Thanks for the review. We are always looking for new outlets and the last time I visited the eBay alternatives, they seemed to be a waste of time. We may just give eCrater a try and put up a few products to see how it goes.
I love eCrater. I have made some good cash with eCrater. Remember if you have trouble with products being shipped or whatever it is, please don’t take it out on eCrater. Its the stores fault, not eCrater.
I love ecrater as an ebay alternative. I still sell on ebay and am trying to grow my ectater sales.
I promote my store through a variety of ways including a squidoo lense http://www.squidoo.com/CurlyShoelaces
My ecrater store is http://www.shoelaces.ecrater.com You can guess what I sell from the name, yes its shoelaces!
I like ecrater, it is easy to set up and list and you can make sales here, I hope it even gets better in the future, I have a few things up on my site now.
I originally opened an ecrater store about three years ago for collectibles that did not sell on ebay – it was stupid to keep spending money relisting them. I now have six ecrater stores – four focused on different types of collectibles, one for books, one for sewing and needlework craft supplies.
Having sold on ebay since 2000 – I closed my ebay store in early 2008. For 2008 and 2009 my profits were up slightly although gross sales were down. So far in 2010 my sales are stronger than my best ebay only days for Jan/Feb. I still list a few things on ebay, but limit my monthly ebay listing fees to $3.00.
I spend so much less time and effort on my ecrater listings. The only problem has been that buyers don’t seem to realize how easy it is to use – they are used to ebay not having a shopping cart and fail to use ecrater’s.
Thank you everyone for your advice. I was about to open an ECrater store and was very nervous…where were the fees and fine print? I appreciate everyone’s feedback, so I know to open my store. Stop on by if you get bored!
http://arts-couture.ecrater.com
And to AJ Shaw: I think that’s more of a problem with the seller, less with ECrater. Unfortunately, internet selling does not offer the ability to bludgeon dishonest sellers OR buyers! Wishing you better luck in the future.
You know, not for nothing, but I have just recently started selling a small media inventory online and I find ebay to be EXTREMELY frustrating for the small operator! I spent an hour the other day creating a listing for one item, thought I had completed it but it disappeared! Meantime, Amazon is a clean 1-2-3 process. I have already listed over 100 items there and sold about 50 in less than a month. If the item already exists on Amazon you just click “sell yours here”. Obvioiusly Amazon does have some draw backs but again I don’t see where the population of ebay is coming from unless you are a big-time seller. I’m glad to see places like ecrater. It will help alot (I believe as I have joined already) to make buyers understand the best way to get the best price on an item is to do a Google Products search which is obviously beneficial to ecrater sellers. Thanks.
I have been selling hand dyed wool on eCrater for 1 1/2 years, and I am thrilled. My sales have tripled this year and I know will increase again next year, as I add products and market myself. But although the site is free, this doesn’t mean I (or anyone) can simply hang out a shingle and expect sales to come. It takes work, and some time spent doing SEO. It’s a jungle out there on the web, as every other person wants to sell online. I spent about six weeks devoting myself to SEO for my eCrater site, and now I appear on page one of a Google search for ‘hand dyed wool’, which is my main search term. And all I pay is the Paypal fee for each transaction. No domain host, no monthly upkeep, no listing fees. It’s wonderful! I will eventually have my own site, but in the meantime, I have gotten great exposure at eCrater and I can maintain my listings there even after I open my other site. Why not? It’s free!
I am glad to find all these reviews of the ecrater store. I actually put a few things up in 2008, but only made one sale. I never did any SEO, so I guess that is why I didn’t get more business. I actually forgot I had a store! I was recently listening to a pod cast where they mentioned Ecrater and it reminded me that I had an account there. I couldn’t remember if there were any Final Value Fees, so I am glad to hear it’s still free. I am importing all my items from Ebay and waiting on them to be downloaded. I have some listings that have pictures of my EBay store in the background of the picture. Can anyone tell me if I need to replace those photos with clean photos? I hope to refer my Ebay customers back to my ecrater store with a discount. Thanks for all the input!
http://www.lighthouselotionsandcollectibles.ecrater.com