ProStores

We've discussed some of the issues merchants have encountered with the ProStores online store product in the past. We had mixed reactions when ProStores Version 9.0 was released earlier this year. Some of this was discussed in a previous blog post. With Version 9, ProStores made some needed changes to better integrate with the main eBay platform, something that was necessary in our opinion given that ProStores has advertised integration with eBay as one of its strong points.

It was another week of working on accounts with some of the “big names” in the eCommerce and web hosting world. The “size” of the name is almost directly proportional to the level of headache that I get from trying to handle even simple tasks. To clarify, I’m mostly thinking about cases where I am trying to build some type of PHP-based website.

A number of very large companies have helped small businesses and individuals make their start selling online by providing hosted eCommerce solutions (websites with a shopping cart). These include Amazon, Yahoo, ProStores (eBay) and many others. In some ways, this has been very good, as many of their customers may not have ventured into online sales had they not run into an advertisement from one of these large internet companies.

ProStores, an eBay company, is expecting to release version 9.0 of their eCommerce product on March 19th, 2008. I was pleased to see that among the many enhancements will be a better synchronization between ProStores and eBay in a number of ways. This includes:

• A quick store set-up in which a ProStores-based online store can be configured automatically from eBay listing, category, and other data;
• eBay Product Sync which allow changes to fixed price listings on eBay be mirrored in in a seller's ProStores catalog;