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Shopster Review

Shopster is one of the fairly modern brand of sites that allows users to create an E-commerce website the easy way.

Author: Matthew Jones

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It does the HTML coding and business arrangements (e.g. stocking inventory, shipping, processing credit cards, dealing with customers), leaving you with the easiest and profitable part. However, as with most online ventures this does not mean instant riches.

Before I get into the grit about Shopster I should address the obvious comparison with the Amazon eStore. Shopster is distinctively different to this because the major issue of domain names is fixed. You can run your storefront on your own domain or a sub-domain of your Website or blog if you wish. The URL can now be search engine friendly. When you join Shopster you are given a Shopster subdomain which can be easily ‘re aligned’ to a site of your choice.

"rather than have "example.secure2u.com" as your RShop address, you can set it to "http://www.example.com" (or ".org" or ".net" or ".eu" or ".ca" or any other extension available to you)".

I would not be reviewing Shopster if it didn't have an affiliate program. Keep reading to find about about it, although Shopster in itself is a form affiliate program.

Shopster currently has 700,000 products in its inventory. You choose which products you want to sell on your site. Signing up to shopster is not free but they have calculated how much (on average) it would cost for you to startup an E-Commerce like Shopster.

This is the table of their calculations:

The accuracy is debateable, for example the telephone could surely be cheaper; couldn't Skype be used for free? Also note that the customer transactions are 'labour only' estimates and cheaper ways could probably be found. However, there is no doubt that it is several thousand USD cheaper to set up an E-commerce site with Shopster than from scratch in the traditional way. This is still not the real issue though. The real issue is Shopster better than its competitors. This will be answered in my future reviews.

Is Shopster complicated?
No. I got to grips with Shopster in a matter of an hour or so. They have a section that teaches you step by step how to use Shopster. They are very easy to follow. Below is an example of the first 'Course'.

If you do find yourself with a question there is a vibrant forum. I looked for people talking about the money they earned and their number of sales. As usual there is a very wide range of marketers. Some boasted $10,000 of sales in a month, others had much less, but it did seem like customers were finding their stores and making purchases.

What features does Shopster have?
You can make a simple logo for your Shopster site. The customisation tools for the logo are limited but just about do the job. Below is what I came up with:

The main limitation of the logo maker is that you can't change colour of the background. If that were possible could perhaps I would have made one there and used it for this site...

Coupons
You can create an infinite number of discount coupons for the products on your site. (in addiction to being able to manually choose the products price). Coupons are codes entered by your customers during the checkout process that give them a percentage off of their purchase. Before you ask, you lose a percentage too or everyone would price everything free!

Below is a screen of the product pricing options:

There are 17 different templates to chose from, 8 from the '1.0 selection' and 9 very similar looking themes from the '2.0 selection'. The 2.0 all have basically the same layout as each other but different colours (and you can change the colours anyway!).

This relatively small number of themes isn't all as bad as it may seem. Remember these are not blog themes and so in most cases the majority of readers will be not be particularly 'web savvy'. Of-course a unique looking site is important in any niche but given the customisation options available I would not say their template selection is a bad feature.

Additional Features
- There is a 'staging area' where you can test new layouts, themes and colour schemes which is invisible to your customer base

- You can send out a newsletter to subscribers.

- You can add products in batches of up to fifty at a time. This is a great little feature that helps you build up a sizeable site quickly.

This Digital Point forum thread is from back when Shopster was still in BETA has some interesting details. For example:

"Shopster is a hybrid of drop shipping and affiliate marketing"...
"You can request a data feed be made from the products that you have added to your store and submit it to Froogle..."

Submitting to Froogle is an important feature (I have no experience of this) but I can presume it would ensure a healthy supply of traffic that has money in its pockets.

You can track how well your Shopster site is doing with Shopster's tracking tools. They are divided up so you can view your stats the following ways:

Reports for last 7 days:
Unique Visitors and Page Views
100 Most Popular Pages
Top 10 Referrer Domains
Top 50 Referrer URLs
Product Statistics
Search Statistics
RShop Products Out-of-Stock

Shopster’s Affiliate Program

When you refer a new retailer to Shopster they pay you a $60 commission. The customer you refer to us does not have to buy right away (because Shopster have a lifetime cookie).

Shopster also pay you for referring other affiliates but what they pay you for exactly is a little confusing:

“If the affiliates you refer to Shopster make a sale we will pay you $12. Instead of competing against others affiliates selling the same product, you can recruit them first as your sub-affiliates and then earn an “override” commission on their efforts!”

Shopster’s affiliate program is run through Shareasale – one of the leading networks in performance based marketing. You will need to apply for an account with Shareasale in order to promote Shopster. “

(I found the first paragraph to be the confusing part). Nevertheless I’d say a flat rate of $60 is a good commission because you don’t have to keep waiting to refer that elusive super affiliate.

A final good thing about Shopster is that they have A very good marketing guide. I would strongly recommend you read it because it is applicable to blogging and general affiliate marketing on the internet.

It’s not all sunshine and lollypops
You cannot change your sites Meta description. It is also not possible to change the title in the description when you edit the product description because it would change the title of the page.

Conclusion

Shopster is defiantly not a scam. I have no doubt in my mind that they pay out and are a legitimate business. Because it is my first review of a program of their type I have not compared them to the competition yet. For this reason Shopster has not made it into my recommended affiliate programs section. However, I think highly of them and if any of you have used Shopster I would be very interested to hear about your experiences with them.

About Author

For the original article with the images included visit http://affiliatescamguide.com - A Guide to Affiliate Program Scams. Scam or Not? Want to know if something is a scam? Just ask! I will research it and post my conclusion within 48 hours!

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