The Build A Niche Store program or BANS is a script that generates a web site for you and populates it with the latest Ebay listings. It regularly checks ebay for your specified categories to update the listings on your website. This way your content is kept fresh and search engines line fresh content. It is a highly successful program which was developed to take advantage of the eBay RSS feed. With the program it was made super simple to build a web site and fill it with eBay auction listings and if a visitor clicked on a listing they would be transported to the relevant page, the great thing about this was that when they bought something you would receive a commission.
The rates of commission would vary, country to country but in the US it was 50% of eBays fees and in the UK about 30%. A bonus was that for every person that registered with eBay you would receive a sign up fee so by sending loads of visitors to eBay you were almost guaranteed to rake in the cash.
eBay began to make changes. In the early days it was as simple as filing out a form to become an eBay affiliate, once you had your number you started sending visitors and away you went. Nowadays it is much more difficult and there are even companies offering to get you into the affiliate program for a fee. The acceptance rate is fairly small.
The biggest change was yet to come, from paying a commission on the value of sales, eBay has now adopted the QCP or Quality Click Pricing method. QPC is somewhat of a mystery payment plan and works by taking the amount of sales you generate, dividing it by the number of visitors, they will then pay you an amount that they decide your visitors are worth. All clear?
A change that has just happened is that once again eBay have changed category numbers and altered the feed. How does this affect Build A Niche Store users?
The category numbers eBay have effectively shut down many BANS sites as these numbers are used to pull in the relevant listings, so if golf changed from 1513 to 1614, but baby cots changed from 7134 to 1513 your golf site, which you worked hard to build is now talking about golf and advertising baby cots. In reality it means that a lot of BANS sites are now showing no listings at all.
The RSS feed many sites which used the cloaking feature, which gives pretty URLs to the listings, a feature that many BANS sites use, are now showing errors and page not found signs. The cloaking feature will not play with the new RSS and so site owners are having to apply fixes to their BANS sites. OK, fixing one or two sites is easy but many owners have tens or even hundreds of sites.
How does this affect BANS?
Acceptance into the eBay affiliate program is by no means guaranteed. In any case you will need a functioning website to apply and if you are buying BANS it is probable you do not have one or the knowledge to build one.
The recent changes to the RSS feed were not addressed by the vendors of BANS, in fact they seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Instead a fix was developed by a BANS user who was kind enough to share it with everybody who wanted it.
The unique selling feature of BANS was that it was easy for anyone to build a site and make money. Nowadays, if you do not know how to build a website, optimise it, produce good content and market it, you will not make money. By David J Fletcher