I signed up for Shopster.com last year around this time. Shopster is a site that will assist you in creating your very own ecommerce store. They have it all — from products that will be drop shipped to accepting payment to templates to create your site. All of this for the low yearly price of $329. It sounded like it might make a good muse. The part that interested me the most was the fact that they had lots of different products to choose from and it gave you the option to create many different kinds of stores.
The first site I created, Protect My Life, was all about protection — house protection, protection for yourself, your pets, your money, your house, you get the idea. The reason I chose this was because I found a similar site from the Shopster message boards and their site looked cool and interesting. Ah, I was so naive. That is about the stupidest reason to create a site. However, that didn’t stop me. I set it up, created a logo, and added products. As I was adding products, I realized that I had NO IDEA what most of the products were. I realized I was on the wrong path and I switched gears.
Next, I created Michael Jordan Mall. As you can probably guess, it sells Michael Jordan gear – autographed basketballs, photos, etc. I chose this site because there was a good product base and Michael Jordan rocks. I also did some research on Google AdWords to see if the market was too saturated and saw there were several keywords that didn’t have steep competition.
I spent about $100 on Google AdWords to advertise MichaelJordanMall.com and never made a sale. I stopped spending money at that point and I’ve pretty much ignored it since then. I’ve had one sale that made me a profit of $6.31. I feel like I haven’t really given it a chance so I am going to start focusing more of my attention and money on it.
Overall, I haven’t personally had great success with Shopster and MichaelJordanMall.com but right now I’m going to credit that to myself and lack of real effort put into the site. To be honest, I was looking for a quick and easy way to make some money and this wasn’t it.
I’ll add posts as I work more on MichaelJordanMall.com to keep you updated. In the mean time, let me tell you what I like and dislike about Shopster.
Shopster Pros:
1. Lots of products to choose from
2. Good templates
3. Can add custom pages
4. Helpful user community
5. Can set price margins easily
Shopster Cons:
1. Can’t set titles on feature pages – this is bad for SEO
2. Google Base won’t accept a feed from Shopster stores (Shopster has supposedly been working on fixing this the entire time I’ve been a customer)
3. Support turnaround time is slower than I’d like
Wanna check Shopster out for yourself? Here’s a pretty banner for you to click.
April 28, 2008 at 11:25 am
Monica,
I was averaging about $250-$300 a month in profit, but Shopster was keeping 3.5% of it even though they said there were no fees. I petitioned the BBB of Calgary and Shopster agreed to send me my refund check and agreed to change the wording of their Agreement to something slightly more honest than what they had.
They also marked up all of their items by 3.9%, and their suppliers are very inconsistent. They had very erratic on hand inventory numbers and even more erratic pricing which can wreak havoc on your profits.
The Shopster software is very SEO unfriendly because Shopster store pages will ALWAYS wind up being flagged as “affiliate” sites. That’s why Google Base rejects Shopster listings and why SEO isn’t effective.
If you were a former Shopster user and you want back your 3.5% profit that Shopster kept, just petition the BBB of Calgary.
April 28, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Congrats on getting your store to make you some money.
I agree with you about the erratic inventory numbers, they were always all over the place. Also, Shopster doesn’t remove products from your store if there is no inventory which is a bad user experience.
Google hasn’t been great, but I have had some luck with Yahoo sending traffic.
Thanks for the warning. I had no idea they were keeping 3.5% or that they marked up their items by 3.9%.
April 29, 2008 at 11:19 am
Monica,
Shopster doesn’t want you to know about their various fees until after they’ve collected your non-refundable payment. That was noted in my complaint to the BBB. In your agreement, I’m sure it said “NO fees will be taken out”, but they sure as heck did take them out, didn’t they? I called them on it and they fessed up and paid me my fair profit, but they won’t pay any of their other customers back, only people who complained. To me, that is dishonest behavior. Complain to them and get your profit back, Monica!
A support person also posted on their bulletin board that Shopster would be implementing a 3.75% check processing fee, but since my store is closed they won’t get another chance to siphon off my profits. Keep an eye out for that fee.
Anyway, since SEO optimization is very Shopster unfriendly I was using CPC services. Like you, I did pretty good using Yahoo, but I did best using Shopzilla. The problem with the CPC services is it the searches will get saturated with other Shopster stores and what happens is all of these Shopster users beat each other’s profits down trying to get the sale and the only one who winds up making a decent profit is Shopster. I got some high marks in reviews, but consistently horrible marks in shipping costs and options because of Shopster’s inability to offer anything other than a vague “Standard” and “Express”. I got alot of complaints about that. But, in Shopster’s defense, how are they supposed to give accurate shipping dates when Shopster does NOT own nor do they actually ship any of the items?? Despite not shipping anything, Shopster also admits that they “adjust” the shipping costs, my guess is they aren’t adjusted down for a loss, but adjusted up for a profit. If Shopster’s shipping costs seem inflated, there is a solid reason, they are.
I could go on but, for Shopster’s sake, I will digress. There are a few positive reasons to use Shopster, and those few positives were heavily outweighed by the negatives.