eCrater - Selling On The "Moon"

In the spring of 2007, we were looking for an eBay alternative to help push our sales. This was no easy task because when you do a Google search, tons of venues come up.

We decided to snoop around several sites, lurk the forums and search products to see if there were large amounts of counterfeit items. We knew that we wanted a site to have helpful forums, as few counterfeits as possible and of course, sales.

It was a daunting task but after several days, we decided to try eCrater.com.

We decided to keep our ID from other venues, Dakota Exchange, and began to create our store. We found that can we could create our online store for free. Uploading our photos and descriptions of the things you want to sell was a snap. We were able to customize the look of your store with different color templates and fonts. There's also a feature to allow sellers who list on other venues to import listings to eCrater.com. eCrater also feeds your products to Google Base so each seller does not have to do it themeselves (that's a big headache and time saver!). Listing is free and you don't pay any fees. You are allowed to offer most payment services including Google CheckOut, checks and money orders.

We were pumped and listed several hundred items. Sales were slow at first. At one point, we thought about deleting the store but all of the sudden, we had fairly regular sales. We checked our standing in Google searches and were pleased that we were either the highest or second in most searches.

We did add our eCrater store URL to most search engines and a few places that allowed links without exchange. We didn't invest a lot of time on this but it seemed to help our sales.

eCrater is not for those that expect it to be like eBay. It is nothing like eBay. You are responsible for your own store promotion outside of Google Base. It is very much like having your own website. In fact, some sellers use eCrater as a shopping cart for their stand alone websites. If you are not in it for the long haul, then eCrater may not be right for you.

Today, we sell about half as much or maybe a little more on eCrater as we do on eBay. We have found that most of the eCrater shoppers come to the site via Google. The interesting part is that most of our higher end items sell on eCrater (and that tickles us pink because there are no fees but for the cost of the payment service) but on eBay, these same items rarely, if ever, sell.

We are glad that we chose to sell on eCrater. Starting with top notch customer service from the eCrater Team down to the ease of listing our products, eCrater provides a viable addition to our online sales efforts.

About eCrater

Dimitar is the founder and the creator of eCRATER.com, a free online store builder and marketplace.

The development of the eCRATER began in the early spring of 2004. After many hours of hard work, eCRATER.com finally went live in its beta version in the early fall of 2004. Since then, Dimitar has constantly been adding new features while also trying to keep the original "clean and simple" look.

"Cater to your sellers and buyers will come"

Dimitar believes that a good foundation for a growing marketplace is a community of happy sellers. Thus the idea of providing the stores for free.

According to Site Analytics, eCrater's search rank is 1137.

Further Site Statistics From Site Analytics:
(Click the graphics to enlarge them.)


Comparing Bonanzle, eCrater and Atomic Mall
Comparing Bonanzle, eCrater and Atomic Mall