I’m sick of Adsense. I want more affiliate sales. So I bought StoreStacker (affiliate link). I’m guessing many of you have seen the emails from your favorite guberu talking this product up. Like most of the offerings from HalfAgain, it’s good stuff. It’s why I chose StoreStacker over BANS.
I was about this close to pulling the trigger on BANS. I respect Vic over at BloggerUnleashed and he has been pounding the table on BANS for awhile now. He thinks it should be part of your online portfolio. What he said made sense. But then I got the email from Scott pimping his new StoreStacker. It seems similar to BANS in regards to eBay but it also does Amazon, Clickbank and they promise more plugins from other sources like Shareasale, Linkshare, etc. So I went my own way. I suspect Vic would not be amused. But it is what it is.
The cool thing is you can “stack” products from Amazon right there on your product page with Clickbank and/or eBay products. The software builds typical catalog pages easily. You can put as many products on the pages as you want. Any categories. Any search terms. You can delete products from the feed. You can add your own product. You can limit the number. You can add up to 4,000 total products into your store. Each category has separate meta tags and descriptions. You can add static pages. You can add text before the products. After the products. You can add text to the side. You can add advertisements to the side. You can put Adsense in the bloody thing. You can set how long to make the product description. You can set the size of the thumbnail photo. You can build it on a domain or subdomain. I dropped my first store on a domain folder. And each page has its own RSS feed. That rocks. I think that is huge.
It took me about an hour to go through the videos, install (super easy), play with the settings, add some products and tweak the template. It’s solid. A couple of the dudes in the forum have had some problems but nothing support hasn’t solved apparently. And they have already released a new version to add some changes that were suggested and needed.
The downside? It uses Smarty. I have no idea about this platform. They provide 3 templates. I took one and modified a few things like adding my site banner and reworking a few headlines and such. But you better know programming if you want to go someplace like OSWD and use the open source web templates. You can’t just drop tokens in a HTML template and use it. It’s just not to be. That sucks huge. I think we are all hopeful some new templates are released or they come out with a tool like they did with the Blog Solution to import templates into the Smarty system for use with StoreStacker. But as it is today, you are stuck with three templates.
I’m digging this new tool. For every niche site I build it will have a store attached to it. I will submit the feeds of that store to all the feed directories. I may even do what Vic says and buy .info sites and throw SS on there. Can’t hurt. Heck I can use the PLR content I have and use that content as pages on store. Or as intro text to the pages. You can literally use StoreStacker to build nothing but a niche site. That’s right. If you want to use all your PLR as pages and let your visitors hit nothing but Adsense, you can build that kind of site too. It may not be the simplest way to do it but the flexibility of this product will let you do it.
Yea, I realize I’m selling this to you. But realize too that I’m pretty excited about this product. $97 man. That is nothing considering the pain that is involved with manipulating product links and images onto your blogs or websites. If I can’t make back $97 by selling some affiliate products then I may as well cut grass after work or some shit.
The first 500 got the Crapbank module for nada. The next 500 have to pay if they want it. They are “closing the door” after 1,000 buy it, for a month. They plan on multiple re-launches as they come out with new modules. New integrations and such. My guess is that the price will increase for each re-launch. I don’t know that for sure but that is just the way IM works.
I think this is some ingenious stuff. I can’t wait to see where they take this.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Splork,
What do you think about cbnichebuilder.com ? Someone is selling this for $37.
It’s getting a lot of play lately, I think, because Pete dumped it for free with resell rights to his email list. Which if you read the terms it’s against the MRR.
Hello, I am longtime BANS user and I love the tool. I checked out Store Stacker and visited one of the gurus site that he built with Store Stacker. All of the Ebay auctions had expired.
Now this is a bad sign because BANS uses rss feeds from Ebay that update automatically with out having to run some kind of cron command.
Do you have to set up a cron command for Store Stacker to update or does it update automatically?
Other than that it looks like a good product.
The question has been asked is that doesn’t mixing together ebay and Amazon listings violate their respective TOS? Any info on that from Scot?
Thanks
Phil
Those are two questions I have no answer for. I may post each on the forum and see what Omar or Scott has to say. I thought about buying BANS last night. Just to compare and contrast the two of the them I think moving forward these two products are going to be duking it out to add more options and better performance. I doubt you could do bad with either.
I was in the forum and noted that some problems had crept on based on the Crapbank module. Seems some folks were experiencing problems with it grabbing product. Didn’t faze Omar in the least. They are aware of the issue and have a valid workaround. As long as they are moving forward and letting us know that things will be fixed when problems do occur, I’ll be a happy.
As far as Ebay/Amazon. There is so much product that if I was forced only to use one or the other and not both, I don’t see how it would matter.
Splork,
Picked up Store Stacker from your Affy…was in the same boat as you were with BANS and then I saw your post.
For a C-Note I’m a have to throw it on some of my sites and see how it works (With regard to the Cron Command – I believe it is manual right now)…
Worse case scenario I’ll pickup BANS as well…
BTW thanks for the review of Squidoo Queen… I’ve been working Lenses for awhile myself and was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to pick up anything new either.
Keep up the good work Bro.
Thanks Dan. I hope I didn’t steer you wrong. I’m with you. At worst I’ll just pick up BANS as well but right now I really like StoreStacker.
I’m pretty impressed with the diligence support has been to getting any bugs worked out or updates put. I mean, there was a Beta release but you gotta figure out of 1,000 people there are too many to count hosting sites being used. Who knows what kind of problem will come up when the product is released. From what I can tell they are doing a good job at keeping the software rolling and to me that is a big selling point. I can handle bugs and stuff as long as you help me get them fixed quickly, and dare I say, professionally.
I am interested to hear your thoughts on SS after a couple of weeks. It is a slick looking product, but I personally have some concerns about it (mainly the ones mentioned above).
I have been using BANS & Mony Tree since January and my income has increased two-fold. Many people don’t even know about Mony Tree, but I completely prefer it over BANS. The latest post on my blog gives some of the primary reasons.
At the end of the day though, I am confident that these types of sites have significantly more potential then the AdSense only sites I’ve been building for a year or so. On top of that Google really seems to love the eBay authority, so hopefully all of the work on ranking will pay off with no real risk of being penalized for any reasons.
Chris
Hey Chris. If you are using BANS/Mony Tree with success, I couldn’t see any reason to go to SS. They seem similar. I really like SS but I’m still interested, curious mostly, in what BANS is like. I may make another purchase for kicks.
the smarty template for storestacker is horrible. you cant even find someone offering custom template design for storestacker. guess their designer only knows how to code with smarty template which sucks.
Donny, I completely agree. I just make do the best I can with it. Frankly I don’t care if the store is pretty. I just want it functional. And I want people to click in and then click back out to the product they were looking for.