Three Wise Storefronts Offer Free Services The Wonderful World of Free E-Commerce Services Wayne Kawamoto
Ready to start selling online but not quite sure how much you're willing to spend to set up shop? Three solutions now available tout the very lowest possible price, free.
The three services — Shopit.com, FastCommerce.com and KonaKart — offer drastically different e-commerce approaches and equally diverse business models. It's the pricing – or lack thereof – that ties them together here.
Mob Mentality: Shopit combines social networking with e-commerce, for free, and also offers a widget. It even has celebrity cachet, with musicians such as Mobb Deep opening up shop.
Let's take a closer look at each of the e-commerce services, starting with Shopit.com.
Shopit.com
Peer-to-peer has long worked for sharing files and Shopit applies the approach to e-commerce by offering something that's a blend of an online store and a social networking service. The free service lets you build personalized mini-stores that display your items for sale or trade. And you can list, sell, and trade items without incurring fees.
To start, you can create a "Profile Store," which becomes your online store within the Shopit community. Create such a store and you'll be one of many on the Shopit sites that sells just about anything and everything, and there are even celebrities retailing through the community. At press time, there were some 4,640,996 products that were listed for sale.
The service provides a template that may be customized to your liking with backgrounds and fonts. If you like, you can add pictures, slideshows, and videos. If you have a Yahoo! or eBay store, you can import products into your "Profile Store." The service provides a wizard that walks you through the process of adding product images and descriptions.
You can also create a "Portable Store," a customizable store widget that can be posted on social networks such as MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook, as well as on blogs and distributed through e-mails.
In short, Shopit offers an e-commerce service that's free and easy to use. If you're just starting out, it's definitely worth considering.
FastCommerce.com
The most traditional e-commerce service of the three, FastCommerce.com is a complete system that offers a free subscription with no setup, hosting, or transaction fees. In a sense, the free portion of the service is based on the old shareware concept. Try the program out for free and if you like it, you may eventually sign on and pay for more sophisticated features.
Go Speed Racer: If you're selling less than 50 products, FastCommerce can get you up and running an online store for free.
The service includes a product catalog, shopping cart, shipping calculator, and automatic e-mail responder. It also supports inventory and comes with order and contact management features. For no cost you're limited to 50 products and no tech support. But if you can live within these constraints, FastCommerce.com is a bargain.
FastCommerce serves a first-rate shopping experience to customers who can browse and add products to carts and register before they complete their purchases. After entering a zip code, the cart generates shipping rates for UPS and FedEx, and after the sale, customers receive confirmation e-mails. For now, the company only offers a single template with three color themes but promises more templates and color variations in the future.
There's support for all major credit cards in FastCommerce.com, but you'll need a payment gateway and merchant account. You can purchase an optional SSL certificate to secure your Web store at $199 per year. A downside, FastCommerce currently lacks support for PayPal and Google Checkout, but the company promises these are coming soon.
The entry-level service is truly free. You only pay when you upgrade to the company's Growing or Enterprise plans, which offer the ability to list more products — "Growing" up to 2,000 products at $29.95 per month and "Enterprising" up to 10,000 products at $99.95 per month. With these pay plans you also get support via e-mail, instant messaging, and actual humans. If you want support for the free Startup Plan, it's priced at $200 year.
To encourage you to sign up, the company says that its offer of free e-commerce service is for a limited time. But once you sign up, the company promises that it will be free as long as your usage stays within the quota. If you're selling less than 50 products, FastCommerce may be worth the look.
