BANS - EBay Store The Easy Way
87What is BANS (Build a Niche Store)?
BANS (Build a Niche Store) is a script than allows the non-programmer to easily develop an EBay Store on their website. An EBay store is just a website which features the EBay categories which you specify. You can add content pages and other content but essentially BANS allows a non-programmer to create a website which encourages your visitors to buy from Ebay .
Is BANS Legit?
BANS is a script which you buy for a once only cost, and then you can go ahead and build as many stores as you want.BANS is a way to diversify your on-line income. If most of your on-line income is from Adsense then if Google changes their policies you may be badly affected.
With BANS you are paid by EBay one of the US's largest corporations. Will you get paid? Is EBay reliable? Well EBay is a very large corporation, doing very nicely as the world's leading on-line auction house. They provide a full range of reporting and tools and pay affiliates monthly, with a US$5 minimum.
Its hard to find what is legit and what is not on the Internet. If you don't already know my views on this see the links at the bottom of this article. Is BANS ethical and honest. I think so. You put up a website, your BANS store, that drives buyers to EBay: if they buy you get a percentage of Ebay's commission, because you "introduced" the customer to EBay: the customer is happy they bought what they wanted, EBay is happy they got their commission: I like a win-win situation.
Vic Franqui: Why BANS works
Is BANS for you?
BANS is good for the Beginner. Vic over at bloggerunleashed strongly suggests that beginners at making money online start with BANS. Why?
- Because its low cost If you get it wrong the worst that can happen is that you won't make any money! You can even get your money back on BANS software within 60 days of purchase so your total loss will be the domain name purchase and hosting - low risk really.
- If you get it wrong you won't get banned from EBAy and the chance of future earnings. OK you will if you commit fraud but because Ebay doesn't pay you unless your prospect buys something you won't be banned from them if you are unsuccessful.
- The potential for finding a niche is unlimited: you can buy anything from cars to collectables to property to books on Ebay in most major countries in the world.
- Keyword selection is difficult but at EBay you can pick a niche based on the number of successful auctions for that type of items.
BANS is Passive Income
Once you put in the initial work on a site you can pretty much set and forget, unlike a blog which always needs a new post. BANS stores are great for passive income. Site that have new content regularly get better ratings in Google because they are "fresh" or "newsworthy". BANS sites are automatically updated as the auctions you feature change (Hint sort the displayed auctions to "closing soonest" appears at the top of your page).
Using a FTP Program
Vic Franqui: BANS Tutorial and Review
What skills do you need?
Technical Skills:
What technical skills do you need to set up a BANS site. Do you know how to upload a WordPress theme? If so you almost certainly have the technical skills to be confident with BANS. You will need to upload files using a FTP program. BANS documentation suggest cuteFTP which costs after a free trial:I use Filezilla which is free and easy to use. Check out the Video
The documentation you get with BANS is excellent and takes you through step by step: assuming you have webhosting with Hostgator. You don't HAVE to use Hostgator - I use dreamhost at it works fine - but the step by step will be slightly different. So if you are not confident use Hostgator. There is also an active forum where you can get support.
Writing Skills:
You need very few writing skills: certainly less than it took to write this article! Watch Vic's "how to" video to see that the only content that is important on the site are the EBay ads.
Getting Started with Ebay and BANS
Apply to Ebay as an affiliate.
DO THIS FIRST! Do not buy BANS until you have been accepted as an EBay affiliate. Not everyone is accepted but its unclear what the rules are. It appears though to do with your country and your existing websites. You can't do much about your location but apply via HubPages if you don't have an existing developed website.
If you already have an EBay affiliate ID for HubPages then you are OK - you only need 1 Ebay affiliate ID - you use it on every website and BANS store you own. If you haven't already got an Ebay ID - apply via HubPages - use your HubPages profile page as your website. Hint: make sure you have actually filled in the profile and published some hubs.
Hosting:
If currently don't have any hosting: buy it before you buy a domain. Why? You can often get your first domain free with the hosting package! Just make sure its a host that is not going to charge you extra for each domain, as my first one did! Hosting should cost $6-$10/month but to get the cheaper prices you need to pay in advance.
Domain name for your BANS store.
A .info domain can cost as little as 0.99c, a .com you should be able to get for less that $10; that's for a year. Most people recommend godaddy for buying domain names but not for hosting. Note that getting .info domain indexed will probably take longer than with other extensions.
Now Buy BANS
BANS costs US$97. That's a one time cost, there are no on-going charges, no charges for upgrades or support. You can make as many stores as you want, there is no limit.
Disclaimer
I am an affiliate of BANS and if you use the BANS links in this article to buy the product I will receive a commission. It won't cost you any more so if you found this article useful I'd love to get paid! If you try it and find its not for you - you can always get your money back from Clickbank within 60 days of purchase - no questions asked.
I do own BANS myself and am currently setting up stores. I have yet to make significant income from BANS myself.
Need to Add Content to Your BANS Store?
- NIche Store Writer: A Great BANS Tool
Niche Store Writer is a cool piece of software which allows you to develop content using templates and keyword tags. The product was designed to be used with EBay BANS (Build a Niche Store) Stores but in fact...
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Comments
thanx for share this information
This seems like a great and definitely interesting hub. You sure have a go at everything. Good on you. I sell on ebay and am an affiliate now BUT. I will have to think about this one. Thanks for sharing all that work.
@ Hovalis I have seen that blog in passing After months of months of bouncing all over the place I am following Vics approach only for the next 4 months or so - he seems to have genuine expertise in this and I like his teaching style- and he's not charging for his teaching! Remember to use the links in this hub if you decide to buy BANS :-)
@Eileen: interesting - can you promote your own store and therefore get 50% of the EBay commission on your sales back? Im not in that situation - don't make any actual products: but that might be worth investigating - after all who better to promote your products than you. You can set BANS store up to select by a seller ID.
oh do keep us updated on how bans works for you
Yes I Lady L I will update the disclaimer as I progress :-)
Lissie,
Looking forward to your reports of success. I followed your Hub talking about Vic and SEO Elite and Keyword Elite and BANS. Very good information about BANS.
For more Online Business info, visit http://hubpages.com/hub/Online-Business-Bible
Loopster
Very imformative hub! Excellent job. I know of someone who began with BANS in Sept 2007. He posted his progress in a forum regularly up to the present time. Since then there has been 13218 views and 351 replies. He is now making a very comfortable income and is considering quitting his job soon. Because he has had many how to make money with BANS requests he offers BANS training so others can duplicate his success. I would leave the url but unfortunately this is a paid site. I did find out he has a very popular lens at Squidoo. http://www.squidoo.com/Build_A_Niche_Store_Review
@Loopster I nearly denied your link - its not quite spam but a lot of very very eneral info with no real detailed information on the actual why some things work and some dont.
@stevemark: yes I found that squidoo and figured it was a teaser for something that I'd have to pay for - that's what I like about Vic @ Bloggerunleashed he doesn't ask me to pay for his knowledge, oddly enough though I had no problem giving him the commission on software I have bought :-)
Good Point! I find I am the same way. I always get all my information from those that offer it free. Then if I benefit many times they will too.
Look forward to your results, I too have been thinking about it for a while. It's the whole uploading files and such that scare me. I am just not a techie at all, I like site builders.
chantelg4 I added in a video and comment about using a FTP program to upload files: so you can see how easy it is :-)
Yeah steve - Vic uses a cute American experssion "pay it forward"
Lissie, this is a great article. Once I have the $97 I'm pretty sure I'm going to sign up and give it a try. I'll be sure to go to the BANS page from your article.
I'm also looking forward to hearing about your progress.
Thanks Cheryl - Of course like all these things the site is the easy bit: the promoting bit is where the work is. However only need a $1/day/site x 100 and I would be very happy!
very useful content
Bans looks like an interesting piece of software. Thanks for the honest review. I too would like to know if you make money with it.
Nice hubpage. BANS is a good program but, and I speak the obvious here, you will get nowhere with it if you can't figure out how to drive traffic to the site. You also must be willing to spend a bunch of time with keyword/phrase research and getting links. The chances of making money simply dropping a BANS site on the web is virtually nil.
Thanks for visiting cavyl - yes it looks like Im comitted to updating this hub with progress now :-) Won't be for at least 1 month though - I am trying to become un-addicted to my stats :-)
splork - welcome - I saw your blog via grizz - people if you want to see honesty about making money online check out some of splork's hubs!
Also splork is completely correct - getting the store up is the easy bit: getting traffic to your site is the key. I would like to write about this more but I haven't had any success doing this yet so I am not going to - it feels like the holy grail - if you can get traffic to 1 site you can rinse and repeat to any type of site
Great hub. The power of eBay is well known. I got on the wagon almost 10 years ago and have made decent $ for what I've sold. I've been thinking lately about expanding my eBay role; probably dropshipping. This option intrigues me. Thanks for the research. Drop us hub after your results start coming in.
EBAy is not big in New Zealand - but i have sold lots of stuff on our equivalent trademe. Dropshipping is all about your supply chain I should think. Can you tell me whether its against the EBay TOS to set up a website to promote your own items? Not an EBAy store but a BANS store? This would get you back 50% of the commission you pay - which is why I suspect it might not be allowed :-)
Thanks for the info!
Very Interesting. Now that I've been writing on hubpages for a while, I've been learning about some other great ways to make money on the internet. This sounds viable, I'll check it out. Thanks.
I have heard about BANS, but I have also put looking into on the backburner. Thanks for the hub. I'll be interested to read about your progress.
Lissie, you asked such a good question when you said: Can you tell me whether its against the EBay TOS to set up a website to promote your own items?
Off and on today, I've been researching that question through eBay forums, because I sell on eBay and I've been curious about BANS. Let me say right off the bat, I don't have an answer.
What I can tell you is this...eBay has no issue with promoting your own listings from your own website, so long as you do it outside their affiliate program. When you do that, your reward is 75% off the final value fee (for example, if you have a website, you can add a code to the link to the item you promote or the link to eBay, and if anyone purchases that item through your coded link from your website, you get that 75% off; it's not quite that simple, but I did my best to summarize). eBay also encourages you to "share" your items through FaceBook (in that case, I'm not sure if you get anything for your trouble...haven't got that far in my research). But both of these approaches are outside of an affiliate relationship.
I started a thread in the eBay forum "eBay Partner Network" about this question. You can follow the comments here, although you will need an eBay account to participate in the discussion:
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=20
I hope one of your readers here can shed more light on this question, because neither eBay nor the contributors to its forums are offering clear answers to your question.
Best regards, Sally.
Wow Sally - Ihad no idea it was going to so obscure! I have asked the same question on the BANS forum so hopefully someone will come up with an answer!
Yeah, Lissie. Who woulda' thought? :)
Glad you asked on BANS. Won't it be cool if HubPages is the venue for the answer?
I use bans on about 100 websites and it rocks, easy money.
redgsr its not easy money: setting up the store is easy - getting the traffic is another issue. Its certainly possible to make good money - but easy no. And your hub is out of date; EBay no longer permits EBooks to be sold
As you know, I'm an existing BANS user, but you have given me some ideas (from Vic) and I shall be looking at making some small changes
IS there any open source alternative to BANS ?
Im sure there is Neo but I am not aware of it: or how good it is. There is a plugin for WordPress blogs too: google EBay wordpress plugin !
Hi Lissie,
What else can BANS do other than building ebay affiliates store.
Looks interesting too.
What a useful hub! Last year I had two "My Affiliate Stores", (which is now called Traffic Genesis) they are a software based, data feed store which allows owners to select from a variety of affiliate networks (Commission Junction, for example)to virtually stock and organize affiliate stores. The stores were quite seo friendly. Unfortunately, despite doing my best to follow instructions, the stores still did a horrible job of conversions! And according to posts in their forum, virtually no store owners made any money. VERY disappointing. BANS sounds quite interesting and reasonably priced.
@kenbiz: as far as I know BANS only creates EBay affiliate stores; you can add extra pages without EBay listings if you wish. YOU can also show other ads including Adsense, but essentially its an EBay store creation script as the name suggests :-) And it does support all (except HK) EBay countries: ie Australia UK , France Italy, etc etc
@Passionatepurpose I haven't heard of that product. BANS definitly makes people money - the trick of course is to be keyword focuussed, build backlinks to ensure targetted organic traffic. It sounds like it wouldn't take much for you to try out BANS and you have aged domains which is always a good start. BANS has a 60 day money back too if you don't like the results
A very informative Hub! Thanks for the inputs.
Lissie, we have the answer to your question about promoting your own eBay items through BANS. Officially from eBay through the forum thread I started comes this:
If you are a seller, in the US and UK programs you can absolutely send traffic to your listings on eBay. In fact, we think this is a great way to both drive traffic to your listings to increase your conversion rates as well as get extra money even if the traffic you send to eBay ends up buying from another seller. Look out for a new blog post on this soon. As rekupnet [another eBayer posting to the thread] correctly points out, this is not allowed in France, so please check each country's terms and conditions (we hope to be able to streamline all the policies across most countries on sellers as affiliates sometime later this year).
Thanks for doing the research on this one Sally -and for the link in ebay too - those forums are hard to find - I couldnt only find them by following your link :-) We aer OK with US and UK - that's great news!
Excellent hub, Lissie. BANS sounds like it's worth a go, but I'll need to set aside a fair bit of time to get to grips with it! When I do, I'd be happy to buy through your links - I value your honest opinions. I wish you'd set up a blog to update us on how you are getting on!
Thanks Caspar. OK OK I am seriously thinking about the blog! I just don't want to be yet another - instant expert on a subject that I haven't cracked yet!
I don't think you need to sell yourself as an instant expert, more as a relative newbie who's working jolly hard to find out what works after lots of serious research. Maybe I'm just lazy - I like to read about other people's efforts and how successful they've been or not (peope I trust), rather than doing the research and putting in the effort myself! I spend far too much time checking stats, which doesn't get me anywhere.
OK Caspar and others you asked for it and I have spent several days writing it! Here is the blog of my journey to 100 sites: http://100sites-lissie.blogspot.com/
I'm still struggling to see why people would be drawn to a BANS site when they can go straight to eBay. I've never used a BANS site (mainly because I've yet to stumble across one) - if I want to buy something, I type in ebay.com.au and off I go!
It sounds like it's working for some people, though. Do you think it has legs, or is this one of those ideas that will work for a while then get flooded with too many players?
Finally, are you saying that a BANS site SHOULDN'T have a lot of other content? I have an idea for a blog - I have lots of content, but I was thinking combining it with a store could work well.
BANS is just a script which won't necessarily build you a profitable website in the same way that installing WordPress won't make you the next hot blogger if you can't write. Vic's approach with BANS is to "encourage" the punter to click thru to EBay as soon as possible so you don't distract them with content or other ads like Adsense. You of cuorse have to add content otherwise Google will discount the page as having no unique content: but having the content at the bottom seems to be OK with Google.
Yes I too am strugging with the concept that people will not just go to eBay and search for what they want. Apparently a lot of people don't and if someone ends up registering on eBay who was referred by you you a $25 sign up fee on top of any commission. Let's face it they are probably the same people who go to Yahoo answers and ask "where can I buy a cheap blue widget"! Those of us who are internet savvy forget that a huge proportion of the populatoin is not. Think of some of your older friends: how many of them actually turn first to google for an answer?
I think BANS will be around for a while: yes there are lots and lots of stores but I rather lot of them are around ipods and laptops - find a specific niche using keywords and then check out the % of sold items (using the completed sales option on eBay) for the relevant categories
Thanks for the response Lissie. I see Vic's point about keeping the content low so people aren't distracted from buying. A bit like the advice I saw recently, that your blog shouldn't have a beautiful theme, because you actually want people to be somewhat bored and click on an ad to get away from it. Interesting idea!
Marisa If you want the ultimate in boring themes check out Grizz at http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/ - it looks incredibly amateurish- and it is absolutely anything but!
Thanks Lissie, I'll check it out! I've been off work with flu so decided to take the plunge and buy BANS. My experience is almost worth a Hub in itself - bottom line is, there is nothing wrong with BANS, but I'm not sure it's something I want to do.
I'm now trying to decide whether to try claiming a refund or not - looking at BANS site and Clickbank, they say they only refund for defective products, so I'm not sure your statement about being able to get your money back is true - will let you know!
Oh I am intrigued about the experience! I want to see the hub or drop a comment on my blog http://100sites-lissie.blogspot.com/ I think they've changed the wording on requesting a refund - but I just claimed back on a (different) product and got it back no probs - they only work (US) M-F so sometimes takes a couple of days
Got the email this morning from Clickbank to say they're refunding the money. Of course I'm going to lose some on the exchange rate but it was worth it for the learning experience. Sometimes you have to head down the wrong track, to work out what you want to do!
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Hovalis says:
3 months ago
Hi Lissie,
BANS is something I've been procrastinating about getting for a while now. It's one of those programs I've heard good things about, and have wondered if the hype is real. I mean, you know that a good dose of cynicism is required for anything offered on the net for making money.
I've been slogging my way through this blog for a while now and it seems to have some good information and realistic estimates on how long it takes to make money with BANS and how better to research and optimise your site. You might find it interesting. Mind you, I don't know how easy it is to put into practise since I don't have the software myself (yet)
http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com/the-foundation