How many storefronts do you have? If you're like many eBay sellers, you have an eBay Store. Then you have your own website. To enable ecommerce on your site, you might sign up with a shopping cart service and possibly a payment service. Plus you probably have a blog,...get the picture?

Online marketplace Silkfair is now making all of this functionality available in one place. Through the Custom Shops option announced June 16, owners of small to medium sized businesses can:

• Sell handcrafted, vintage, or consumer items through the Silkfair Market Shop (Listings on a Silkfair Market Shop are free, and the fee on each item sold is a flat 3 percent);
• Open a standard Market Shop storefront for free;
• Upgrade to the $24.99 Custom Shop storefront option, which includes Website templates and a Web editor; (new storefront sellers can choose between an introductory offer of $14.99 per month for the first six months, or the first month absolutely free.) There are no commission for Silkfair Custom Shops.
• Create their own blogs and discussion forums;
• Send their listings to Google Base;
• Take advantage of Silkfair's Search Engine Optimization features;
• Use the site's shopping cart and payment systems.

This interviewer couldn't help bringing up a comparison between Silkfair and eBay or Etsy, but my question was turned totally around by founder and CEO Albert Wu. "How can anybody else really compete with us?" he asked in return. "eBay and Etsy don't really have a custom store option, and online store tools don't give you a marketplace. We are a new breed."

Although only in his early 40s, Wu has been a businessperson on the forefront of technology ever since his teenage years. In fact, he ran a desktop printing business before "desktop publishing" was a buzzword. He first conceived of Silkfair when trying to sell electronics to U.S. retail stores. "Going through U.S. market channels is really tough," he says. "We considered selling direct to the public as an alternative to going through retail chains. We realized there is quite a bit involved. We checked with our colleagues and realized that it's a barrier even for an established small or medium sized company."

Wu and his investors decided to reduce that barrier, and the site went online in March 2008. Wu, who now lives in New Jersey, selected the name Silkfair based on the Silk Road. It was the trading route in the Far East that provided a marketplace that was "fair and open," in Wu's words.

Phase One of Silkfair's development was the creation of a marketplace consisting of multiple sub-sites, one for each general category of merchandise sold there. Handicrafts are sold through the Handmade section of the site (handmade.silkfair.com), for instance. Phase Two is the recently announced release of the Custom Store option. Wu won't fully explain what he has in mind for Phase Three, except to say that it is "a unique model for getting products before shoppers' eyes, that doesn't have anything to do with search."

Silkfair has gradually built up its level of functionality, gaining about 4500 registered users as well as 1300 to 1400 shops. Giving store owners the option to design their own storefront, either by adopting "point and click" page templates or by editing the HTML code themselves, gives them more incentive to grow. "If you don't feel you really own your business and it's not yours, you have a lack of incentive. Why bother marketing it?"

Feedback from users has been critical to the development of Silkfair, but Wu admits that people don't always voice their concerns clearly. "We used to offer templates so sellers could specify shipping costs and attributes of products, such as the size of shirts. We used to call these profiles. But we kept getting asked by confused users what was in a profile. When we finally looked at the questions closely, we realized we had to change the word profile to template. That stopped all the questions."

What keeps Wu going is his belief that his marketplace is meeting a real need. "I went through business difficulties before, and I do know how hard it is out there," he says. "It can be a real challenge to crack through barriers. I hope Silkfair can help other people who are sitting around the dining room table saying, "If only I could get this business started." I've been there."

Information about selling on Silkfair is available here.