eBay's ProStores division released version 6.1 of its e-commerce hosting on Monday. New features include an enhanced setup wizard, a Dreamweaver design extension and better eBay Store integration. The update is part of a quarterly upgrade schedule that, the company says, is designed to provide incremental improvements to its customers. "This release is focused on ease-of-use," Chris Tsakalakis, senior director of advanced solutions for eBay Inc., told ECommerce-Guide.com.
eBay acquired Kurant Corp. and its popular flagship product StoreSense in January 2005. StoreSense became ProStores in June 2005.
"We are committed to providing online business owners with the tools they need to succeed," said Tsakalakis. "ProStores 6.1 makes it easier for sellers to start and design a professional and successful online storefront."
New users of ProStores' business tier and above will now find it easier to set up their ProStores Web store. Sellers will be provided with a getting started checklist accompanied by process indicators to show when tasks have been completed. To help sellers prioritize, tasks are now labeled as being either required, recommended and optional. In addition, a preview store function is available during the design process to reveal how the store would appear on the Web.
To assist sellers with designing their storefront, ProStores 6.1 includes an enhanced Design Guide, a design wizard and design checklist. For Dreamweaver users, design capabilities have also been extended through a Dreamweaver extension, which allows ProStores users to easily modify ProStores templates and add store design tags. ProStores now supports Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
ProStores offers four tiers of e-commerce tiers, from the basic ProStores Express to ProStores Business, ProStores Advanced and ProStores Enterprise. The tiers are designed to enable merchants to set up a complete e-commerce store with the same features and sophistication found on the Web sites of larger retailers, including full shopping-cart capability with online checkout and integration with major payment gateways and shippers.
Subscription fees for ProStores sites starts at $6.95 per month for the Express tier, with a 1.5 percent successful transaction fee. The Business tier costs $29.95 per month, the Advanced is $74.95 and the Enterprise $249.95, each with a 0.5 percent transaction fee. Each progressive tier offers sellers advanced functionality and design options.
Focused on Ease-of-Use
Tsakalkis told ECommerce Guide the key audience for ProStores are small businesses with 20 employees or fewer with $200,000-$5 million in revenue. "The larger merchants tend to be satisfied with their current stores," he added.
Tsakalakis said the Business Tier is by far the most popular package used on ProStores. When eBay purchased Kurant, the company had approximately 9,000 merchants. While he declined to reveal how many users ProStores has now, Tsakalakis said the venture has been "very successful" and subscriber numbers are still "in the thousands."
Citing the 6.1 update as an "ease-of-use upgrade," Tsakalakis said, "One of the things we found is that eBayers are used to very easy-to-use products. For some of them, moving over (to a hosted e-commerce solution) can be daunting. That's addressed in this release."
Looking ahead, he said future ProStores upgrades would continue to focus on improving ease-of-use, better eBay integration (a "majority" of ProStores users are also registered eBay users) and better third-party application integration.
Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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