I understand that yahoo mall is the leading mall on the net. Does anyone know of any strong rivals? I'm talking about volume of traffic; out of the many malls on the net, is there any viable competition?
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I understand that yahoo mall is the leading mall on the net. Does anyone know of any strong rivals? I'm talking about volume of traffic; out of the many malls on the net, is there any viable competition?
Okay, so the last two arent exactly online malls. But, Ebay does have a store like feature for some of its more commercial items. Ebay also doesnt allow one to browse all of the online stores, as easily as Yahoo. <P>But, these are the only competitors I can think of. Youre right, Yahoo by far is probably on the lead on number of stores, but I wonder which stores sell more those on eBay or Yahoo?<P>
And I almost forgot, there's also Amazon's Zshops.
there are many ways to increase your sales. There are many malls and marketplaces available. Never forget that the product you selling should be in demand.
I know a company by the name of www.inetvideo.com It is known as the source for rare movies and new releases on the web. The currently operate on all of these malls mentioned in the subject line. From regular listings and auction listings, they have it all.
They've been around for over 3 years and still growing. I guess the malls and marketplaces have really helped in a way. In addition, i guess they are successful due to the fact that the prices that they offer for their products on their own website are always cheaper than the marketplace.
To me, the mall concept is a way for various online retailers to be able to find a way to sell their products.
eBay and Yahoo's Marketplace are the only real malls that I can think of.
That website for video is really more like a single online retailer and it competes with all kinds of other online retailers who offer video from amazon to wal-mart.
My understanding is that many people who use Yahoo's mall also maintain their own website, independent of what they do on the Yahoo Marketplace. Same for a lot of eBay sellers. It's just like having a "stall" somewhere to attract customers.
The malls are also useful for order-taking. For instance, last fall I ordered some "retro" candy (Skybars, Walnettos, Valocremes, et al) from a small business. The catalogue was actually on an independent Web site, but the links for ordering were on Yahoo! Stores.
The nice thing was that you could get to the store two different ways: from the outside Web site and through Yahoo! Stores.
--Kevin
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Executive Editor, SmallBusinessComputing.com
Sounds like the non-mall store was using an affiliate/associate feature to have order buttons on their site. Once the button is clicked you go to the merchant's store (in this case at Yahoo Mall).
If this was indeed the case then the Yahoo store served no purpose for bringing traffic for this particular order. Instead it served as a shopping cart.
I'm somewhat biased in that my company supplies shopping cart software but my impression is that being in a mall is not going to do much to bring you traffic. Any money spent paying a mall premium is probably better spent buying keywords on Overture and Google.
It served as both a shopping cart and a store. The merchant had listing in Yahoo Shops that showed up in Yahoo's internal merchant search engine, so that would indeed be bringing in traffic to the site, I would think. But you may be right about buying keywords -- what's been your experience in going down that road?
--Kevin
Our company can be found in Yahoo's directory and that does bring traffic to our site without having to be in their mall. I've personally found that buying keywords does bring you traffic (even keywords on Yahoo's site.) It is also very beneficial to be listed on complementary sites or sites that may partner with you.
For example, in our case it is good to be listed on the payment gateway sites that our shopping cart supports.
There are also smaller, regional online malls that help you sell. They aren't much use if you have an online-only store. But if you have a real world store in combination with a Web site, they can help. If you're located in, say, eastern Canada, then it makes sense to get listed in TorontoMalls.com to drive foot traffic to your store.