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Freemerchant.com By Kevin Reichard November 23, 1999 Damned if we can find the catch. After spending some time setting up an online store using the freemerchant.com storefront builder, we had a tough time figuring out "the catch." Freemerchant.com offers basic site-building capabilities and a well-designed interface for merchants wanting to enter the brave new world of e-commerce for free. So where does freemerchant.com make money? From partners who pay a fee and selling ads on merchant pages, theoretically. When it comes to partners, online merchants are actually the target audience: For example, one partner is an office-supply chain that offers discounts to freemerchant.com online merchants. Running ads on their site is optional for freemerchant.com vendors. However, any vendor agreeing to host banner ads receives 50 percent of the revenue from the hosted ads. For vendors, this presents a mixed opportunity: Most business need to maximize their revenues in any way possible, but ads can detract from the main goal of an e-commerce site -- sales. Many of the freemerchant.com-hosted sites we reviewed were totally lacking in any banner ads, which isn''t good news for freemerchant.com. Similarly, freemerchant.com merchants can exchange banner ads with other reemerchant.com merchants. Set Up Setting up a site using Freemerchant.com was not the most intuitive process, but it wasn''t as bad as other competing products. You can either have a URL that''s part of the larger freemerchant.com network (such as ourstorename.safeshopper.com) or you can register your own domain name. Freemerchant.com gives you the ability to set up categories and subcategories. You can choose from 50 templates for the look and the feel of the stores, and by and large these are some of the most attractive templates we''ve seen offered in the storefront-builder field. The installation process is documented with an online tutorial. What''s most surprising about freemerchant.com is the wide range of back-end services not normally found in the free-storefront market. After you design your storefront''s categories and subcategories, you can upload an existing catalog or inventory list in Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, FoxPro, Paradox, or dBase formats. (Interestingly, Access is not directly supported.) You can upload a generous range of fields: product name, stock number, price, description (limited to 255 characters), menu options (which includes pull-down menus and custom fields), weight, taxable (yes or no), gross shipping cost, minimum order quantity, and the Category ID number.

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