Business Retail Software Online
by 10x Marketing
There are lots of ways to do retail. Over the years people have tried lots of things to make selling easier. One of the best innovations that have come recently is retail software. Retail software is not only software in the traditional sense of the word but also that is software installed on a server somewhere that allows people to advertise and sell their products without the overhead of a full time staff. Many companies have produced their take on the software here we will review a few of these efforts.
E-bay
E-bay is probably the most successful company to produce a piece of retail software. The notion of E-bay is appealing to entrepreneurs. E-bay allows sellers to be able auction their items off to the highest bidder. E-bay also has a lot of options for sellers. They have places to research what things have sold for in the past and what is currently selling for good prices. EBay allows customers to buy and sell new and used products. They even have their own payment gateway set up that is fast and affordable to use. Sellers can list their product for a flat fee and set up stores for multiple products.
Yahoo! Shopping
Yahoo shopping gets a lot of visitors as it is part of the Yahoo search engine. It also has a pretty clean interface for buyers. However, it is more of an advertising venue than a place to sell product. They have a per-click fee structure so the retailer pays a fee for everyone that clicks on their ads. They also have few tools for the seller to help them know how to sell their products. All in all, this site is more of a shopping directory than a piece of retail software.
Amazon
Amazon has one of the best retail software suites available. One of the advantages that it has over EBay is that it allows buyer to search by product then once the product is selected it lists the sellers for that product. Users can buy and sell new and used products and they have the option to sell for a fixed price or to sell in an auction. Amazon also gets a lot of traffic to the site giving the seller’s products more exposure. In fact Sellers can set up their own virtual stores (called z-stores) with products on the Amazon website to take advantage of their high traffic. About the only downfall to Amazon is that because the sellers are all listed together for a particular product there is a lot of competition on price.
UBid
UBid is mainly an auction site that allows sellers to auction their products. Most of the products are new products. Their nicest feature is a buy-it now feature that allows the seller to sell the product at a fixed price. The biggest downfall is that UBid buys products and sells them on their site along with most of the major manufacturers. Because they are so big it is hard for individual seller to compete and still be profitable.
Froogle
Froogle is more of a marketing program than a piece of retail software. Froogle allows customer to list their product for free. Think of Froogle more as a larger multi-store catalog. In Froogle you can set up feeds to list your product. This entails entering the descriptions of your product into a csv file and then uploading the file to their server. Froogle is definitely more technical than all of the rest however, it is free!
There are many more companies who have made retail software and had varying degrees of success. For those who rely on retail software to make money it is worth the time to try all the options and find the one that not only is the easiest to use but will get the greatest return on their investment. As time goes on there will be new innovations and new ideas that will continue to change the face of retail
Justin Grover – Client Account Specialist 10xMarketing – More Visiters – More Buyers – More Revenue. If you own a business please visit ComCash for wholesale software and Pos software.
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