When eBay announced the acquisition of e-commerce hosting provider Kurant in January of 2005, many users were skeptical of the auction giant's motive. At the time, eBay Store owners were up in arms over a variety of recent fee increases and many thought this was another move to take away an alternative option that many small businesses relied on without eBay taking another pound of flesh. While there is little doubt eBay does what it can to protect its revenue streams and develop more of them, it had another plan up its sleeve: to offer a viable selling platform for small businesses away from eBay's auction site.

eBay's new e-commerce baby was finally born in June at the annual eBay Live! conference in San Jose, Calif. The new selling solution was dubbed ProStores and offered entrepreneurs four options — ranging in cost from $6.95 per month to $249.95 per month — through which they could join the e-commerce revolution. ECommerce-Guide spent time building its own ProStores store during the past few weeks to see if this new solution is worth the investment.

For demo purposes, we signed up for the basic package, which allows you to try the service for 30 days at no charge. The basic service limits you to selling a maximum of 10 items on a single page.

Setup Is Easy, But Results Bland
Getting started with ProStores is simple. After deciding which package you want, you're presented with three methods of naming your store: selecting a shared domain name (i.e. http://store.prostores.com/mywebsite), searching for new domain or transfering an existing one.

Sign up isn't instant, however. You have to wait for a verification e-mail from ProStores before you can login and build your store. In our case, we waited 20 minutes before receiving the e-mail.

ProStores' design templates aren't exciting, but they do the job.

ProStores provides a Store Setup Wizard to build your store. The first order of business is selecting a design. The basic plan is limited to 26 design templates, and you can't upload your own design. You can, however, upload a customized logo.

We found the templates a bit bland and felt ProStores could have done a better job offering more than the usual run-of-the-mill templates we've seen with other hosts. By signing up for one of the more advanced packages, you have the ability to design your own site or to hire ProStores' design team to do it for you for approximately $650. Although, keep in mind that each update will cost you $50 thereafter, so it's best to learn how to update the site on your own.

Besides the single home page, you can also opt to have an "About Us" page featuring your store policies and customer service information. After selecting your pages, you can customize all of your written content, which includes your home page, customer service and "about" text as well as your invoice/checkout messages.

Setting up your store's payment method is straightforward, as you get only one choice in the basic package: PayPal. If you have a PayPal account, you simply enter your e-mail ID.

You can launch your store to the world after completing the setup wizard. However, there are many more options you should consider before doing so. By going back into the Store Administration page, you can configure your billing information, sales tax, shipping charges and a host of other selling necessities.

The store administration page offers a handful of useful features. The Quick Stats show you how many shoppers put items in a shopping cart in the current day and also displays how many carts were abandoned. While there is no insight into where or why shoppers may have bailed, it tells you that there may be something wrong with the way you are promoting your products or configuring your store.

Adding products to your store in ProStores is simple.

The rest of the admin page is dedicated to showing how many pending orders you have, how many of them are ready for shipping and how many orders shipped. The page also displays customer information and how many new customers you have.

Rather than constantly checking for new orders, you can set your ProStores account to automatically send order confirmations to you or to a staff member, as well as sending an e-mail to the customer.

Sales tax can also be automatically added at Checkout based on a predetermined list or by the shipping address. This is a quick setup that takes only a few moments unless you choose to create your own tax chart.

You can base shipping charges on total order amount, total weight or by the number of items. Standard, two-day and next-day are the options you can present to your customers using the Basic package. One interesting feature we've never seen before is the option to add a shipping fee markup. With this enabled, you can add to your profit margin by either a percentage of the purchase cost or by a flat fee. We're not sure this would go over too well with your customers, so sellers beware. This tactic is scorned by buyers — and many sellers — on eBay.

Even if you choose to go with the cheapest ProStores package, that doesn't mean you can only sell a few items. If you happen sell on eBay, you can list items and checkout customers through your store using the eBay Manager setup. You first have to login to your eBay account and authorize the platform sharing. But once that's enabled, you can create auction or fixed-price listings, direct winning bidders to check out via your store interface (instead of on eBay itself) and even display your eBay auction listings automatically on your site. This feature not only broadens your product offerings but also gives you two streams of potential revenue. Having shoppers check out on your site provides a nice opportunity to up-sell to them as well.

ProStores allows you to monitor your monthly bandwidth so you aren't surprised by extra fees.

ProStores' Basic package is missing a lot of features that people with full-fledged businesses will need, however. Among those features is the ability to export data into Quickbooks, real-time shipping integration with FedEx and UPS, the capability to offer downloadable electronic products, storewide sales, discounts and promotional codes, non-PayPal payment options and mail hosting.

By signing up for the Basic store, you are also limited to selling ten items, as opposed to unlimited items with the other packages. So choose your hosting package wisely. The good news is, however, you can upgrade your site to the next level with a few mouse clicks.

During the setup and testing of our site, we encountered very few problems. Our biggest gripe is that the ProStores stats server refused all of our attempted connections. We are willing to give ProStores the benefit of a doubt because this could very well be a problem on our end.

We also feel the setup wizard could be much better. Instead of hiding the multiple options like sales tax and shipping in the administrative control panel, these options should be included in the initial setup. Again, we weren't thrilled with the design templates.

Something for All Sellers
EBay's ProStores appears to be a viable e-commerce contender for either novice or experienced entrepreneurs. Whether you're just starting out and want to experiment with selling online for the 30-day free trial or have a full-blown business you want to move from another host, ProStores has options for you. The added benefit is that you can also tap into the worldwide auction marketplace on eBay with your store. Thus, the opportunity is there to succeed in two places at once.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.