phpBay or BANS ?

oooh im interested sully.. do u need any beta testers?

 

Actually I will need a couple testers. I suppose you can be one of them given you provide a quality review. I will let you know when I need you, thanks, wiiman!

 

no probs sully. shoot me pm when ur ready.. i do have msn to if ur interested

 

Put me on the list also, if possible i would like to be a beta tester. I can test the script with many environments, since i own a hosting company with many servers with different configurations.

 

For those sitting on the fence about BANS, one of our members (Mark Hansen) has started a 15 part BANS success series on his blog.

His understanding of the whole Niche Store concept is exceptional and his writing detailed and explanatory:

http://www.thekidscollegefund.com/index.php/build-a-niche-store-step-by-step/

Enjoy!

Kelvin

 

I just purchased phpbay and I'm very happy with the plugin, except for one annoying detail. The plugin has the inability to monitor where there is more than one instance of itself on any page, which means that it will corrupt any RSS or page that it appears more than once on.

This requires that the owner place a <more> tag before placing the phpbay code, thus removing it from the index page. Hopefully a fix will be coming out soon for this. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

 

There's no such thing as too many options. I'll try all the options I have time to implement.

 

and you're free to do that whenever you want. it's like the cereals, many brands but all the same, only the flavours change.
In this case, the author said after this that the script have something different, so we're talking about different cereals now

 

What could you possibly do to better phpbay and/or BANS?

You better bring the heat, buddy, cause you are talking a whole lot.

 

I almost did this to be honest. I do know PHP (being a developer by trade), so the idea was technically very interesting and I might still consider it. For full site (non-wordpress) I am going with the buy it route for the moment. Speed of deployment and all that

 

I did buy BANS and had a site up pretty quickly, one of three that I'm going to put up in the coming weeks. There is one feature that doesn't make sense to me, but I'll get into that on the BANS forums when I get around to it.

I like the search engine friendly links and easy set up (nice instruction manual BTW). Most of my time spent putting up the site was spent in getting the right category numbers off of eBay and narrowing the search results to what I wanted. Luckily I figured out eBay's query syntax pretty quick which helped a lot. I also went into the DB and deleted the default stuff that was put in after I screwed something up when I tried to delete them from the UI. Nothing big however.

I would be interested to see how sully plans to make a site convert more. Maybe it is just me, but I think a properly targeted niche would convert quite nicely, assuming you can get the traffic and it is easy to use. Perhaps it will be 'prettier'? Then again, some CSS and Photoshop magic can make any BANS site nice and pretty.

I'll be blogging about it all fairly soon. In case anyone is interested, my first site is ABodyAuctions.com. I still need to fire up Photoshop and get to work, but I'm also adding in some content to help complement the auction portion and (hopefully) drive some Google love.

One thing I did do was build my own sitemap generator for Google. There was a guy on the bans forum selling one for $10, but I went ahead and built one in about 15 minutes without any trouble. I'll probably give it away for free, or maybe I should sell it for $9 and see if I get any takers.

 

is BANS working with german characters and products respecetively can it be easy translated to german?

 

lol exactly what i was thinking.

 

Conversion rates can always be increased. When people look at a BANS store they know its ebay. When a visitor looks at on of our stores they browse like its is a real online store and click on a much higher rate on multiple items. Cosmetics and appearance are a large factor in any business. Of course you can modify BANS so it looks better, but for 99% percent who don't have the knowledge/time/money, we have created a solution.

BANS stores come out of the box easy to set up, our stores come out of the box ready to convert. Once again, nothing against BANS, competition like this only benefits the buyers. Have a nice day.

 

That sounds fair enough, I look forward to see what you have.

 

I wasn't going to comment on this but as you keep using BANS as the yardstick for your coming product I thought I'd say a few words.

Conversion is based primarily on the targeted nature of the traffic a website receives (which is down to marketing).

It is then secondarily based on the accessibility of the products related to the particular visitor (which relates to site structure, layout and design).

A BANS store can go in any template:

http://www.getaracecar.com

Or the standard templates can be easily customized to match your target niche:

http://www.homegrownsushi.com/

As Gtech commented earlier - if you have not used and tested either of our products I do not know how you can say that yours converts better - you would need to carry out tests in the same niches with all three products making sure that all the variables (ie traffic sources) are the same for your statements to have any validity and not just be marketing language - ie your "angle" to capture the attention of potential customers.

As for the fact that when you are on a BANS store you know it is eBay - that is the whole point. It is the fact that the products are from eBay which makes the conversion so easy.

eBay is already exceptionally well branded and we're just helping internet browsers find the products that they are looking for. 9 times out of 10, eBay contains a greater selection than any other online destination and often at very competitive prices.

As you say - competition keeps us all on our toes - but there is a very real difference between marketing language and truths.

Kelvin

 

Well said Kelvin.

BTW, is HomeGrownSushi goldfish? just kidding... That is nice clean looking site.

 

Yeah, they know it's eBay, but don't you want them to? Or do you want your buyers to be blindsided with eBay when they click the link?

I do agree that BANS looks very dull out of the box, but css templates are pretty easy to adapt to work with BANS.

That said, I'd definitely be interested in having a look at your solution.

 

We are hoping to have some live demos up of different stores in less than a week, so you can see what this script is all about. Right now we are all set on beta testers, so please no more PMs regarding that. Thanks.