Wigix Offers New Storefronts and Affiliate Plans
Wigix, an eBay alternative that provides a unique stock-market style method for buying and selling goods, today announced a new service for sellers. Called Storefronts, the service lets sellers build and brand their own customized online shops through the Wigix Web site.
The Storefronts selling platform lets you upload, track, promote and update mass quantities of products using the hosted service. Wigix makes it easy to do this by offering a fully automated wizard that sellers can use to set up their own Wigix Storefronts.
The wizard starts you off by helping you to define a store name and assign a department category that best describes the products you sell. You can choose your payment options (PayPal, Google Checkout, and the internal Wigix Payments), as well as set your shipping options and sales tax information, if required.
The next step involves customizing the look and feel of your store, by adding taglines, changing colors, uploading a store image and including 'About My Store' details. You can also create marketing banners from standard templates or you can upload flash or video marketing elements.
Once the store is created, sellers will be able to add inventory. Listing new items is easy. You simply enter in the type of item in the search box and choose the items you have from Wigix's catalog of 1.4 million products, add the specific details of your item, and add it to your inventory.
Sellers can also use an eBay Import Wizard. Here, those with an existing eBay account can copy their eBay listings to their Wigix Storefront. Once you provide your username Wigix compares the eBay items with their category listings.
In any instance where Wigix does not find a match, the item is flagged and sellers can submit the item to Wigix's catalog. When submitting a new item to the catalog, it is also another revenue-generating opportunity for the seller. When you submit a new item to a category you can also earn 5 percent of that item's revenues (both advertising and transaction fees).
Other features of the new Storefronts service are called "Shelves" and "Smart Shelves." Similar to a store category, shelves work like shelves in a retail store would, allowing sellers to quickly build their store inventory and categorize it.
For example, once your inventory has been added, shoppers can view products on different shelves, such as sale, brands, and so on.
Sellers can create custom shelves and add them to their shelves list or use the Smart Shelves function that lets you define criteria for a shelf so all items in your inventory that match appear on that shelf.
In creating a new Storefront on Wigix, sellers can choose to use their own custom domain name as the store Web address, or use the freely provided Wigix URL.
Other key features of Wigix Storefronts includes advanced access control for small business owners, easy tracking, shipping, payment and invoicing features, automated stock notifications, accounting reports and tracking of order history.
In regard to the buying experience, shoppers can add stores to their favorites list, and sellers are able to keep shoppers within their specific stores, as they won't see other similar merchandise from other Storefronts or the catalog until they are ready to leave that specific Wigix store.
Wigix Affiliate Program
In addition to the launch of its new Storefronts service, Wigix is also launching an Affiliate Program for those looking to generate revenue without selling products on the site. Here, Web site and blog publishers can earn affiliate revenue by referring new members to the Wigix site or by recommending products from Wigix customers on their Web spaces. Sellers can also take advantage of the Affiliate Program by referring buyers to their own stores. Every item listed on Wigix has an embeddable widget tied to it that makes linking to products related to your site content easy.
With the launch of the affiliate program, Wigix now offers three revenue generating methods:
- Category Expert: Submit and manage unique items from top to bottom in an entire category and get compensated by receiving 1 percent of that category's revenue (both advertising and transaction fees).
- Homesteaders: Submit a new item to a category and earn 5 percent of that item's revenues (both advertising and transaction fees).
- Referral: Use your network of contacts to bring a new Homesteader to Wigix and you can get compensated for first, second and third generation referrals, paying 4, 2 and 1 percent, respectively, of any revenue (both advertising and transaction fees) made by your referral's homestead items.
Vangie Beal is a seasoned online marketplace seller, frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com and avid online bargain hunter. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com.
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