Business Advice for Embattled eBay ‘Stores’ Vendors

BRIDGEPORT, CT, — August 26, 2006 – GoECart.com, a leader in on-demand e-commerce applications and services, is reaching out to eBay ‘Stores’ merchants who have yet again fallen victim to dramatic fee hikes.

eBay recently announced fee increases for web merchants who sell products through the company’s fixed-price Stores service. After many years of offering Stores to their users, eBay decided that their core auction business should once again become their main focus. As a result, the company has raised fees for eBay Stores to encourage sellers to sell their products through auctions instead. This is opposite of eBay’s prior policy to heavily promote eBay Stores and contrary to the promise of no fee increase in 2006 made at the eBay Live! 2006 conference in June.

Multiple Fee Increases
The company’s announcement about the increases suggested that, "A typical eBay Stores seller who uses Store Inventory format will experience an overall fee increase of less than six percent." However, when you examine the rate increase, the reality is much different.
The following Store Inventory format Insertion Fees went into effect Aug. 22, 2006:
Starting Price New Insertion Fee Current Fee
$0.01 – 24.99 5¢ 2¢
$25.00 – and higher 10¢ 2¢

Some Store Inventory format Final Value Fees has also increased, effective Aug. 22, 2006:
Selling Price New Final Value Fee Current Fee
$0.01 – 25.00 10% 8%
$25.01 – 100.00 7% 5%
Prior to the increases, an eBay Store with 1000 items listed paid $20.00 a month in listing fees. This has now been increased to $100.00 a month—an increase of over 500%! In addition, the final value fee has been raised from 8% to 10% per sale for products $0.01-25.00, and from 5% to 7% for items from $25.01-100.00, not counting fees paid to PayPal® for payment processing. This means that if the above store owner were to process $10,000 in one month of sales and his average ticket price was $100 it would now cost him $800 just to sell his products.
This fee increase comes not long after a separate fee increase that occurred in January. In response to these fee increases the eBay Stores Discussion forum has seen a lot of activity by way of complaints from eBay store owners. One former Stores customer summed up his frustration about the rate hikes in writing, ”Moving away from eBay will set you free.”


Easing the Pain
Now in version 6.0, GoECart™ offers merchants an affordable alternative to eBay stores. A fully managed solution, GoECart provides a feature-packed, robust, scalable, and highly intuitive, ecommerce solution with all of the technology and infrastructure needed to rapidly and cost effectively set up, manage and grow an online store.

“We welcome eBay Store vendors to GoECart with open arms,” said Manish Chowdhary, GoECart.com CEO. “While we understand that these ongoing increases have been painful for eBay merchants, we look forward to demonstrating the multitude of extra benefits offered by GoECart.”

In addition to its feature packed online store solution, GoECart.com will also provide turn-key professional services to former eBay Store merchants to ensure a smooth and seamless transition to GoECart. This includes product database and image migration, hands-on training and education, graphic design and web services, and more.

The GoECart storefront is search-engine-friendly, which helps online stores achieve higher rankings in the major search engines and best of all, GoECart does not charge any listing or transaction fees and a merchant can open a store for as little as $79.95 a month. Interested merchants can view a free demo and receive a free 30-day trial of the GoECart storefront software at http://www.goecart.com/.

About GoECart
GoECart is a feature-packed, robust, scalable, and mature ecommerce solution that provides merchants with all of the technology and infrastructure needed to rapidly and cost effectively set up, manage and grow an online store. GoECart.com solutions are designed to maximize ecommerce success for merchants irrespective of industry and size. GoECart.com serves a diverse and global customer base ranging from single-person operations to Fortune 500 companies. Visit our website http://www.goecart.com/ or call 877-243-3612 toll free for more information.

Contact:
Manish Chowdhary
CEO
GoECart.com
877-243-3612
Sales@GoECart.com
www.GoECart.com
www.MachInteractive.com