Using Ecrater to Get Started in Ecommerce

Beginning ecommerce entrepreneurs have a vast choice of places to create their e-tail website. Since most new small business owners do not have a large amount of start up money, a free ecommerce choice may be very attractive to them. Ecrater.com is one of these free ecommerce solutions.

Free is Good. Or Is It?

Free, of course, is financially wonderful. Start-up ecommerce owners love free, and with good reason. It greatly decreases the risk of coming out of your ecommerce adventure at a loss. Free web hosting at Ecrater is also better than most other free hosts in that they do not plaster ugly advertisements all over your website.

Free, however, has a down side. Not paying for your own ecommerce hosting decreases your ability to design your website in the way you want it. It can also be less professional than purchased or private hosting. Ecrater also gives subdomain addresses to their ecommerce shop owners. While you can exchange it for a full domain name, many still reflect the lack of professionalism by using the free subdomain.

Product Listing Included. Sometimes.

Ecrater boasts that your items will be listed at Froogle, a popular online discount product listing service run by Google Corporation. While your products will appear there, it will usually not help you unless you know exactly how to utilize it.

Also, Ecrater itself has a vast product listing. If someone surfs to Ecrater.com, they can search for products from all the stores available. While this sounds like a very good thing, some products from certain wholesale distributors are not included.

Easy to Design. Or Graphically Boring?

For the beginning ecommerce website owner, Ecrater offers a very simple graphic look that is easy to deal with. Large blocks of your choice of five or six colors dominate the front page. All you have to do is change the title graphic and write one paragraph for the front page. Categories and products are displayed in the same place on every Ecrater site.

Easy, but boring. Also, it becomes more difficult to stand out from the hundreds of other ecommerce shops that are hosted there. It also drastically reduced the options of a more experienced website designer. You cannot use HTML or CSS on your ecommerce store. Nor can you insert extra images or change the layout in any way.

Using Ecrater.com to get started in ecommerce can be a very good decision for your business. However, you must be careful to insure that you are getting exactly what you want for your business. The packaged ecommerce store at Ecrater is free, easy to use, and part of a pleasant community. If you intend to grow into a large professional ecommerce company, it might not be the cho