Last week I reviewed major storefront offerings. These are services that sellers can use to sell fixed price items online. http://www.auctionbytes.com/Email_Newsletter/41/42/42.html#stores. This week, I am following up with information about another service - AuctionWorks.
AuctionWorks established Storefronts in September 2000, and was the first auction management service to offer fixed-price stores for members. AuctionWorks offers a full suite of services to online auction sellers: Inventory Management, Auction Launching, Transaction Management, Automated Checkout, Customer Data Management and Report Generation services, as well as Storefronts.
AuctionWorks charges a minimum fee of $14.95/month that covers all features on the site. There is no additional charge to open and maintain an AuctionWorks Storefront. There are no listing fees for the storefront, and sellers pay a transaction fee of 2% of the selling price.
AuctionWorks says its members are serious eBay sellers, from those who list a few items a week as a sideline, to larger professional sellers who launch thousands weekly.
"Individuals and small businesses operate most StoreFronts," according to David Levy of AuctionWorks. "Our larger corporate members usually have their own websites that are tied in to Auctionworks' back end systems. Members do not have to launch auctions or use other Auctionworks services to successfully use an Auctionworks StoreFront."
Go to http://www.auctionbytes.com/stores/stores.html for a comparison chart of some major Storefront offerings. Please note that I tried to present the most basic option in the pricing column. Most vendors have many other pricing options and additional features.
I will be covering the topic of Storefronts in future issues as warranted. If you have experience using storefronts, email me or post a message in the forums at http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/index.php.
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
