I think I have found my next online endeavor. I found a way to build nice looking Nice Stores while harnessing the power of Ebay, and their affiliate program. I think I am going to be tackling it over the next few days, and see if I can get something set up. But, let me tell you a bit about the program.

The program is called the Build a Niche Store program, and it appears to be a pretty simple program. First, you have to sign up as an affiliate of Ebay (scroll to the bottom of the page to find the “Affiliates” link), which is pretty easy to do. Looking at the affiliate payout scale, it looks like it could end up being quite profitable. Starting out, you will get about half of the fees generated by Ebay. Up to about $5000 you will get 55% of the fees generated by Ebay. The higher the closing bid over that, the more you will make as a percentage of the fees. Smaller items may not bring in as much, but you may very well make it up in the number of sales that you generate.

Next, you have to go over to the Build a Niche Store Site, and order the program that you will upload to your own server. You will install this program right on your site, which means that you will have complete control over it. That is a wonderful advantage! You don’t have to worry about relying on others for your site, and you don’t have to pay an ongoing fee to maintain and run your sites. You can also run as many sites as you want to run. You can build several stores, and see which ones are productive, and which are not. That is my plan at the moment. I hope to build at least 10 stores, and see what happens. Of course, once they are built, I will have to work a bit to write content, and then drive traffic to the sites.

One of the warnings that I have seen concerning the Build a Niche Store program is that it must be run on a Linux server. It is very hard to get set up on a Windows based server. If you need hosting, be sure to check out Bluehost. They have unlimited space, with unlimited domains. That makes them perfect for this type of online endeavor.

I will try to report back on how my stores are doing. I will post the links to the new stores as I get them operational. If you have used this program before, let me know how it is working for you. Go ahead and post the links to your stores in the comments section if you are running this script to manage your stores. I’d love to see what you have been able to do!