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Creating eBay Niche Stores like BANS with Wordpress
By Alan | May 19, 2008
I’ve been busy working on my eBay niche stores the past few days. I blogged about how I had purchased BANS last week but I’ve actually been setting up my stores with WordPress!
Let me back up. I love the concept of BANS but I quickly realized that with the popularity of BANS there would be a lot of BANS stores using the same templates.
Plus you have several folks who are setting up hundreds of BANS sites. Many of those are thin sites meaning they don’t offer much if any quality content. Plus a lot are using the .info TLD which Google is watching. This could be a recipe for a Google slap down the road.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love the concept of BANS and the strategy of setting up hundreds of eBay niche stores makes sense to me.
This is nothing new. It’s a concept practiced by Super affiliates like Jeremy Palmer. He manages over 100 affiliate sites. But he is now focusing on sites with more quality content to them over setting up thin sites.
That’s why I like the idea of implementing both those business models–eBay niche stores that are thin (5 pages or so) and a few that are more long-term in nature.
If I can setup 100 eBay niche stores that although thin offer unique content which can provide me a more passive income stream while I nurture those that do best by continuing to add quality content.
100 sites making a few bucks per day adds up nicely at the end of the year. But I also want to work a few of those to make them into authority sites that will still be standing if Google comes down on thin BANS sites.
But to do this I really feel it’s better to separate myself from the other BANS folks who are setting up 100’s of cookie cutter sites. I’ll still use BANS for some sites but I found (via a YouTube comment on one of my videos) a WordPress plugin that allows me to setup a BANS like eBay niche store using WordPress, called phpBay.
Check out the difference between a tell-tell BANS site and a WordPress eBay niche store using phpBay…
BANS
VS.
phpBay
Not only is WordPress my preferred method of setting up my other affiliate sites but as you can see it stands apart from the tell-tell BANS layout. So, for me to be able to use WordPress for my eBay niche stores has me really stoked.
Plus phpBay is half the price of BANS. You also get access to a customer only forum which is very helpful. Wade the developer of phpBay is a great guy and extremely helpful.
My reasons for preferring phpBay over BANS are simple:
- Access to thousands of fantastic free WP themes to ensure niche stores don’t all look alike
- WordPress gets a lot of love from Google
- Very easy to use like most WP plugins
- I love WordPres
Here is my first niche store using phpBay vs this one using BANS.
It’s very thin (no pun intended) since it’s mostly for demo purposes. But you get the idea. It does not look like a BANS store
Only time will tell but I think I’m on the right track. I love researching keywords to find niches and running over to GoDaddy to look for a domain. The entire process of setting up these niche stores is pretty addictive. 
Go check out the phpBay plugin. Let me know what you think.
Stay tuned. A lot more to come as I set these stores up.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Hmmm.im gonna have to check this out..
May 20th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Your phpBay store does look a lot better than the BANS store - more mainstream and less eBay. I’ve been considering switching to phpBay, and I think this has convinced me!
May 20th, 2008 at 11:23 am
See you at the phpBay forum.
I’m really impressed with phpBay. You can covert any WordPress theme out there into an eBay niche store. That is cool.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:31 am
[...] Creating eBay Niche Stores like BANS with Wordpress [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 11:12 am
[...] been blogging about building eBay niche stores using WordPress with phpBay vs BANS and so far I’m blown away with the potential and the quick first sales [...]