Ready to start selling online but aren't sure about how much you're willing to spend to set up shop? Three solutions: Shopit.com, FastCommerce.com and KonaKart tout the very lowest possible price, free. The three services offer drastically different e-commerce approaches and equally diverse business models. It's the pricing that ties them together here.
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.
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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.
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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.
Shopit offers an e-commerce service that's free and easy to use. If you're just starting out, it's worth considering.
(Continue to Page 2 for FastCommerce Review Details)
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