BANS stands for Build a Niche Store. Believe the hype and you'll think it's a quick route to easy money. But is it?

In a word, no. BANS is not a get-rich-quick scheme: it's a get-rich-slow scheme. Successful stores should generate a steady income over time. But you can't just sit back and wait for that to happen: your BANS stores won't generate any income unless you put serious effort into promoting them on an ongoing basis.

There's no doubt that people who were willing to put in that effort were making good money on BANS. But are they still, or has the bandwagon rolled on? And is it really "set and forget"?

A "Niche Store" is a store that displays products from eBay. They're not your products - you join eBay as an affiliate and display items from other sellers. Users come to your site, click on a listing they like, and find themselves on eBay. You then get commission for signing them up to eBay, and on anything they buy (whether it's that product or something else).

It's called "Niche" because you pick one specific product (for instance, luxury cars or Royal Doulton) to feature in your store. That gives you a point of difference, and a defined market to target.

The obvious question is - why would people come to your store instead of going straight to eBay? The official BANS answer: a lot of people out there don't know how to use eBay, and your store attracts them because it gives them an easy way to find what they want.

I can see one obvious problem with this. Having attracted your customer and introduced him to eBay, what's he going to do in six months, when he needs another blue widget? Remember that though he found the product in your store, he conducted his business with the eBay seller, not you. He's now registered on eBay and knows how to buy there. Chances are he has bought other things on eBay in the meantime and now knows how to search - so he doesn't need your help any more! He's more likely to go to eBay direct than come back to your site.

Of course, there are millions of potential buyers out there, so you can still make money even if they all only visit once - but it does mean you have to be constantly marketing to attract new customers.

Ah, you say, but I'm not just going to create a shop full of products and rely on one-off customers. I'm going to make my site so interesting to blue-widget lovers that they'll keep coming back to buy through me.

That's what you think - but it's not so easy! BANS is designed to let you set up stores fast - many users set up tens or hundreds of them. It assumes you want to build a site where the shopfront takes priority, adding just enough content to keep the search engines happy. Yes, you can add Content pages, but they're clunky to set up. If you try to create more than a handful, you'll find your site navigation quickly gets out of control.

I daresay a programmer could modify the software to change that, but I'm not a programmer. The whole point of BANS is that it allows you to create a site without programming knowledge.

In the end, having spent hours on the BANS forums and talking to other BANS users, I had to admit defeat. If I wanted to use BANS, the only sensible thing was to follow everyone's advice - create a store with a thin veneer of content, then promote it like mad.

I felt uncomfortable with that. Aside from the ethics of advertising something I knew was cr*p, I knew that search engines don't like "thin affiliate" sites. I was concerned that eventually, Google would wake up and ban them.

In fact, that's what happened in 2008 - Google suddenly deindexed large numbers of BANS sites.

That didn't affect me, because thanks to embitca's Hub about eBaying, I discovered phpBay and built my sites using that instead of BANS. They may not make me as much "easy money", but they've been a joy to put together - and I feel better about it, because I'm giving my customers something of value, instead of just pretending to.

I now have three phpBay sites - a belly dance shop, a flamenco shop and a ballet shop. They're not making my fortune, because I didn't follow the advice to find a good "niche". True, there isn't much competition for belly dance and flamenco products - but then there aren't all that many bellydancers or flamenco dancers in the world to buy them, either! Even so, I've made a few hundred dollars this year already.

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All text copyright Marisa Wright. Photo courtesy of Kokogiak on Flickr

Here's an exchange from the BANS forum which illustrates the two points of view about BANS:

Seller # 1: "I put up BANS sites...but in the end I have ... an optimized "thin affiliate" site. Sure I can add content to thicken it up, but with BANS, adding and managing content feels like an afterthought

Because it's hard to add/manage content in BANS, I end up just adding enough content to appease Google...I'm not going to get judgemental about that... So let's just say that for me personally, I prefer to make money by helping people and having great customer relations.

I want to dive into a niche--or at least a narrow aspect of a niche--and have visitors come to my site find more than a cloak-linked duplication of eBay's data feed sprinkled with some keywords and SEO purposed content."

to which another seller replied:

"Frankly, if I could still get a way with creating sites the way we used to, i.e. very thin stuff with only one purpose - to sell, I would. But, alas, we have to act as though we're making the web and the world a better place, when what we really are aiming for is as much revenue as we can generate."

I'm like seller #1 - for me, job satisfaction is as important as money. I have to feel satisfied with what I've created. Seller #2 just wants to create something basic that works. Seller #2 is delighted with BANS - Seller #1 has been using it for several months, but probably never will feel happy with it.