Aug
6
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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One Response 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!