buyitsellit & Sell Online!

From a BuyItSellIt Store Owner

I've been on buyitsellit since 9/16/08. I really like it, because it allows me to have my own store with layout and images for less than $10 a month.

I had looked into creating my own site, but the cart cost alone was pricey not to mention I'd have to start from scratch. I tried another site that was mostly Zen Cart based, but that was a bit over my head. With buyitsellit, it's so simple. The free stores don't require any maintenance as far as design, and with a nice logo, they look really professional.

I must admit, it does get a little tricky once someone upgrades. If they want to stay with a stock template, they don't have to worry about CSS or any of that. It basically consists of a copy and paste, and they are good to go. There are a lot of other buyitsellit sellers like myself that are happy to help anyone that has upgraded.

For custom templates, it does get a bit tricky. There are designers that offer affordable stock templates and general template colorization. If a seller is not familiar with HTML or CSS it's better to do the above rather than take hours trying to figure it out.

That really is the only hurdle to upgrading. Once you figure that out, the rest is pretty basic.

There are a great deal of options for buyitsellit store owners. You can accept Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, Authorize.net, Propay, PayPal, PayPal Pro, COD, Check and Money Order. You can ship through USPS, UPS and FedEx. You can choose either flat rate shipping or calculated shipping based on weight. Then, just modify/adjust shipping for handling fees.

Sellers can set automated order notifications and email customers directly through buyitsellit. This is a great feature as I can enter the tracking number in once, email it to my customer, and have access to check on the status of the package through BISI. I just go to the order details and click on the tracking number. A little box pops up with the delivery status.

For international sales, store owners can specify specific countries they'll sell to as well as setup tax rates for each region or state. International sellers can even choose which currency their store uses.

Buyitsellit can even be used to host your site. If a seller has their own domain name, they can set it to show when customers view their site.

Everything is all integrated. The buyitsellit stores connect directly to Google Analytics, Google Base, and even to eBay stores. Even some of the payment methods, such as Propay or Authorize.net, are fully integrated.

There have also been a lot of additional features added recently. Store owners can allow customers to create accounts, which keep previous order and customer detail. If we have a Mad Mimi account, customers can sign up through our stores. There's also more flexibility for those that offer coupons as now coupons are allowed for certain categories or even certain items.

Another recent change was the addition of Multi Option Variants. For example, offering a golf shirt with choice of size and color. With that change, the upload format did switch to XML. Therefore, sellers with text files (such as CSV or tab delimited) will need to switch their data over to XML. It's easily done for anyone with Excel 2007 or later as a seller can copy and paste data from the CSV sheet into the XML sheet. For those without Excel, services are offered to switch over the data for new store owners.

The sales are there for sure, so it's definitely something to look into. Plus, store owners can sell a lot of items and still pay less than $10 a month.

Christi
Little Online Store Feb., 2009