As you may notice, I am advertising Build a Niche Store (BANS) in my sidebar. Now I have been using it long enough to earn some revenue and evaluate it’s performance.

First of all I would like to say that it is a top quality script, the best I have experienced in the way it works in the admin area. Also, it lends itself well to making highly keyword optimized web sites. Checking my visitor stats, I see that the long tail keywords are being found in the search engines.

So the script definitely gets the thumbs up from me.

How about the money-making potential?

With the script I created one new website, added the eBay feed to 2 of my existing content sites and created a fashion store to add to a classified Ads site.

I did most of this work this month so it is early days. And, I haven’t put much effort into building links to these sites. The overall stats are as follows:

Impressions: 2155 Clicks: 414 Earnings: 2.58 GBP (~$5 USD).

So the eCPM is about $2.32 in my case which is acceptable I think since people have to visit your site, click on an item, place a bid and win the auction before you get paid.

The CTR is high too (19.2%) which suggests highly-targetted visitors.

Also, it takes days for the auctions to end, so there is this lag to consider.

Conclusion: it works and could be a good complement to Adsense on your content sites.

To get higher revenue would involve generating more traffic to the sites and picking higher ticket price auction items. Also, there should be some peaks in the income if people register as new eBay users.

So, I look forward to implementing some more niche sites.

Update:
Soon after posting this I got a spike in earnings so I guess I should have more patience. Here is a graph of earnings (orange GBP {x2 for USD}) vs clicks to eBay:

The spike was mostly due to a new eBay user registering which nets a whopping $25!

Tags: bans, niche store

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 by Andy and is filed under Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.