BANS: A Great Way to Bring in Profits
Unfortunately, Google sort of turned on BANS due to so many thin sites….sites that had eBay stores, but little content.
Most people know the potential of selling products on eBay. However, there are lots of folks who have no desire to order products to sell, keep up with their inventory, ship packages, and manage all the email that goes along with it. What if you could make money off eBay without directly listing and selling anything? Build a Niche Store (BANS) is THE tool you can use to build an eBay affiliate website. As an eBay affiliate, eBay actually invites you to promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each sale you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer. If you aren’t familiar with what BANS is, let me introduce you to the concept.
A BANS website is similar to a content management system, but rather than being a blogging engine, etc, it generates eBay listings in a particular niche, based on ebay’s product categories. If you have a BANS site which generates sales, because you’re a member of eBay’s affiliate program, you receive commission from the sales generated on your website. Therefore, if I wanted a website that promotes cellphones, I could build this site with BANS, and have cellphone listings from eBay continually updated on my website.
Now the cool thing is the fact that I can build this kind of website around anything. Any type of product that you can imagine. You can create your own niche. Obviously, they aren’t all created equal. Some products sell better than others. That’s where doing market research comes in to play. I built a couple of these niche stores a few months ago, and had all but forgotten about them. I logged in the other day, and to my surprise, I had made a little money from both sites. Now what’s so exciting about a little money? What excites me about this, is the fact that I’ve done NOTHING to promote these sites. Not only that, I did absolutely NO research when I chose the niche for each one, and I’ve written no content around the products. So the fact that they’ve brought in any money at all, really surprised me. I built these sites around subjects that I like as opposed to what I thought would be the most profitable. Now, I’m in the planning stages of several more stores, which I should have up and running soon. I feel confident that through the proper market research, and taking time to develop informative content, these websites will be more than worth the time and money invested.
Why Would Someone Buy From Me?
A question that comes up, is why would someone buy eBay products off of your website, rather than just going straight to eBay? Here’s the thing, you can draw people to your website with the information that you provide about the products. Imagine this, you have a hobby building electronics. Now say, you search Google for information about how to wire something, or looking for a part. But you can’t find much information. What if you could provide that information that you can’t find. Do you think others are searching for the same information? You could probably find books on the subject pretty easily. Let’s say you write articles to go on your website that solve related problems, and provide details about what’s good and what’s not. Once your site is indexed by the search engines, there you are. People will find you through the information you provide, and there are all these products that relate to the info. Buying products that are listed through eBay provides credibility. Now I realize this is a simple way to break this down, but that’s the basic concept.
What Do I Need to Build a BANS Website?
To use BANS, you’ll need the Build a Niche Store software, a web hosting package that provides a MySQL database, and a good domain name. I know that most of my readers probably have their own blogs, so you probably have all you need on the hosting end. If not, feel free to click my shameless affiliate link and sign up with 1 and 1 hosting where I have mine hosted. BANS is installed very similar to Wordpress and most other CMS’s. The software is not free, but the one time purchase gives you the license to use the software on an unlimited number of websites, and you get all the updates for life. They have a nice selection of themes/layouts to choose from for your store(s), or if you’re like me, you can always customize to your hearts content.
In Conclusion
I hope this has given you a clear overview of what BANS is and how it works. If you decide that BANS is something you would like to explore further, I’d certainly appreciate you getting there through one of the links I’ve provided, as BANS will reward me for the referral. If you’ve had any experience with BANS, or any tips you would like to share, I would love to hear from you.
Here are a couple of examples of Niche Stores:
Race Car BANS site
Golf BANS site
I’ve actually been doing a lot of this lately, but not with BANS. I’ve actually been using a Wordpress plugin called PHPBay
and I’ve had some nice success with it.
I’ve heard alot of good things about BANS as well, but I really like being able to use this plugin with some custom Wordpress sites that I’ve put together. The thing that I like most is the fact that listings are always changing on your sites so you can bring in some really nice targeted long tail traffic that converts really well without a lot of effort. Also, the best part of Ebay is the fact that there are a huge supply of different niches for you to choose from.
I hope that your sites do well and I also really like the new look here on this site.
Interesting…..I wasn’t familiar with PHPBay, will check it out. I’ve read that you can also integrate BANS with Wordpress, but that’s something I haven’t done. The software itself is pretty good and easy to use.
I love the idea behind BANS, but I will never get to try it out. Being Malaysian, I can’t join CJ’s eBay program. However, word is that eBay will be launching their own in-house affiliate program.
Now back to the topic of online shop scripts, I have a similar implementation but using ShareASale.
The link to my shop is within that post. I don’t want to leave too many URLs here to be polite
Yes, it’s true. eBay has parted ways with CJ, and have their own program now. It was put in to effect yesterday(April 1st).
I’ve heard of ShareASale, but haven’t been familiar with any sites using it. Looks like you did a good job getting yours set up.
Hi Anthony,
I just clicked through and got BANS. So, thanks.
Also, can I ask a technical question about your Yellowjacket-10 theme?
What’s the line of code to change the header picture? Or can you point me to where I can find that?
Doug
Doug,
Thank you, I appreciate the support.
Changing the header image on the Yellowjacket theme is pretty easy. The easiest way is to create another image, name it header.jpg, and upload it to the theme images directory and replace the original.
Here is the code which is in the stylesheet……
#header{
float: left;
width: 755px;
padding: 50px 0 30px 20px;
background: url(images/header.jpg) no-repeat left bottom;
Thanks Anthony
[...] as my 1and1 plan limited me to 50 databases. Unlimited databases will allow me to continue building BANS sites, as well as any other type of database-driven sites I want to build in the [...]
Hi All,
I am Houston, also just joined BANS but sad to say, i haven’t got any sales yet after a month, cause I don’t know how to promote it, by the way, i will try the ways stated in here, wish me luck!
Houston
Houston – I’m still learning as I go, but have found tons of information about choosing keywords and how to work them in order to get your site ranked in Google and other search engines. I’m hesitant to link to the site I’m about to point you to, because this guy uses a lot of foul language(so be warned), but the guy at Blogger Unleashed is walking people through how to set these stores up and promote them. It would also be worth looking at Make Money Online for Beginners for more about working your way up in the search engine rankings.
More love for PhpBay. I am using it on several Wordpress websites, and am happy with the results. I have found, however that quantity is more important than quality during the start-up stages.
What an excellent blog, I’ve added your feed to my RSS reader.