QuickieShop Comparison
QuickieShop is the best e-commerce choice for many broad categories of merchants. Here's a comparison (based on publicly available data as of 2008-09-07) between QuickieShop and some of the competition:
| QuickieShop (base plan) | eBay Basic Store | Yahoo! Stores | Amazon WebStore | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Rate: | $30 | $15.95 | $39.95 | $59.99 |
| Setup Fee: | $0 | ? | $50 | $0 |
| Transaction Fees: | $0 | over 2% | 1.5% | 7% (includes CC fees) |
| Products: | Unlimited | $0.03-$0.10 per item per month | 50,000 | ? |
| Product Images: | Unlimited | 1 per product | ? | ? |
| Categories: | Unlimited | 300 in up to 3 levels | ? | ? |
| Non-Product Pages: | Unlimited | 5 | ? | ? |
| Fully Reskinable: | Yes | No | No | No |
| Dedicated IP Address: | Yes | No | ? | ? |
| Payment Method Restrictions: | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Phone Support: | Yes | ? | ? | ? |
| Email Support: | Yes | ? | ? | ? |
| Multi-Protocol IM Support: | Yes | No | No | No |
| No-nonsense ToS: | Yes | No | No | No |
Notes
eBay Transaction Fees: eBay charges you 12% on the first $25 of an item's price, 8% on the remainder up to $100, 4% on the remainder up to $1000, and 2% on the remainder.
Amazon Transaction Fees: Amazon charges you 7%, but processes your customers' credit cards itself, so you don't have to pay separate credit card processing fees (generally between 2% and 3%).
Fully Reskinable means that you get to reskin your shop with no restrictions. Providers commonly claim that you can fully reskin their solutions, but then they have all sorts of restrictions, for example against removing/altering their branding. QuickieShop has no such restrictions, and in fact, there's no ASNET branding whatsoever by default: your shop deserves the most professional look possible.
Dedicated IP Address means that you get your own IP address assigned to your shopping cart system, so you can process a secure checkout without your buyers even having to leave your domain.
Payment Method Restrictions are typically intended either for anti-competitive purposes (for example, eBay stores can't accept Google Checkout because eBay competes with Google), or to lower support costs (for example, Yahoo! limits you to certain merchant account providers to avoid having to waste resources supporting unpopular ones). For a beginner, that might not seem like a problem, but as you get bigger, you start running into problems, when you need to manually process orders from certain customers (or just alienate them, and have them shop elsewhere). In the particular case of eBay, you also run into problems with SEO, since accepting Google Checkout allows you to have special placement in Google search results, but due to eBay's policy against Google Checkout, your eBay store can never enjoy that special placement in Google search results. ASNET keeps "strategic alliances" and tying arrangements to an absolute minimum in order to avoid having (an incentive) to push a sub-optimal solution (especially to the exclusion of a better one); QuickieShop guarantees support for your favorite merchant account today, and if you switch providers tomorrow, don't worry, you're still covered. Do you want to accept PayPal and Google Checkout, too? No problem.
Multi-Protocol IM Support means that you can find somebody to help you on all of these networks: AOL IM, ICQ, Yahoo! IM, MSN Messenger, Jabber/XMPP (e.g. Google Talk), and IRC (including two different Web-based IRC interfaces, if you prefer to use your Web browser).
No-nonsense ToS (Terms of Service) means that somebody who reads the advertising material for the relevant service won't be surprised by anything in the fine print of the actual Terms of Service.
Crunch the numbers, do your analysis, and ask the relevant companies for their up-to-date policies and fee schedules. You'll quickly come to the realization that overall, ASNET QuickieShop is by far the best hosted e-commerce solution.