ECRATER

Last updated

eCRATER
ECRATER-Logo.png
Type of business Private
Type of site
 Online Shopping Mall
Available inEnglish
FoundedSeptember 27, 2004
Headquarters
Irvine, California
,
United States
Key peopleDimitar Slavov, founder
Industry Electronic Commerce
Products Online Shopping Mall, Online Store Builder
Website www.ecrater.com
Alexa rankIncrease Negative.svg 37,022 (May 2018) [1]
RegistrationRequired to sell

eCRATER is an online marketplace and an e-commerce website builder based in Irvine, California. It was launched in the early fall of 2004 by Dimitar Slavov. [2] By October 2008, it reached 1,500,000 items for sale in the marketplace and, as of January 2009, eCRATER has 65,242 active stores, and 95,773 stores have been created since its launch. [3]

An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce site where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties, whereas transactions are processed by the marketplace operator. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.

E-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is in turn driven by the technological advances of the semiconductor industry, and is the largest sector of the electronics industry.

Website builders are tools that typically allow the construction of websites without manual code editing. They fall into two categories:

Contents

eCRATER does not follow the online auction business model, it is more an online equivalent of a shopping mall. Its marketplace offers the products of all registered sellers in one place, while the web store builder allows sellers to have their own custom online store. [4] [5] [6] All listings are "fixed price" and buyers can add products from several sellers into their shopping cart and buy them in one single order. [7]

Shopping mall Complex of shops with interconnecting walkways

A shopping mall is a modern, chiefly North American, term for a form of shopping precinct or shopping center in which one or more buildings form a complex of shops with interconnecting walkways, usually indoors. In 2017, shopping malls accounted for 8% of retailing space in the United States.

Marketplace space in which a market operates

A market, or marketplace, is a location where people regularly gather for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other goods. In different parts of the world, a market place may be described as a souk, bazaar, a fixed mercado (Spanish), or itinerant tianguis (Mexico), or palengke (Philippines). Some markets operate daily and are said to be permanent markets while others are held once a week or on less frequent specified days such as festival days and are said to be periodic markets. The form that a market adopts depends on its locality's population, culture, ambient and geographic conditions. The term market covers many types of trading, as market squares, market halls and food halls, and their different varieties. Due to this, marketplaces can be situated both outdoors and indoors.

Shopping cart software is a piece of e-commerce software on a web server that allows visitors to an Internet site to select items for eventual purchase.

Creating stores and listing items for sale in eCRATER is free of charge; however, while "final value fees" were not previously applied to the merchants' sales, there are now fees of 2.9%. eCRATER does offer premium positions on its website for a fee, but this is completely optional for sellers. [6] [8]

Origins

Dimitar Slavov, a programmer, started putting the eCRATER.com site together in early 2004. It took him about four months to code an initial version, coding module by module from scratch. His goal was to create an ecommerce marketplace that was nice and clean, where buying and selling was easy. [9]

Programmer person who writes computer software

A computer programmer, sometimes called more recently a coder, is a person who creates computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computers, or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.

Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality.

Slavov eliminated any fees charged to buyers and sellers because he thought that online selling should be as free as it is searching the internet. [9] This idea gave birth to eCRATER, a free marketplace, just a few minutes before midnight on September 27, 2004 in Irvine, California. [3] [7]

Irvine, California Charter City in California, United States

Irvine is a master-planned city in Orange County, California, United States in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Irvine Company started developing the area in the 1960s and the city was formally incorporated on December 28, 1971. The 66-square-mile (170 km2) city had a population of 212,375 as of the 2010 census; in 2018 the California Department of Finance estimated the city's population at 276,176.

Despite some sources pointing to eCRATER as a competitor to eBay, [6] [8] [10] Slavov says that his marketplace doesn't intend to take on eBay, but to provide an alternative ecommerce venue for both buyers and sellers. [9]

eBay American multinational e-commerce corporation

eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose, California that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in the autumn of 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 30 countries, as of 2011. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again when those items are sold.

eCRATER's first store opened on September 28, 2004 and, as a curious fact, they never listed any product. [3] By the end of 2008, eCRATER's listings hit the 1,500,000 mark and over 300,000 orders placed. [3] As of January 2009, eCRATER has 65,242 active stores [3] and has 462,000 unique visitors. [11] As of March 2011, its traffic rank on Alexa is around 4,260. [1]

Some eCRATER's selling facts: A CD by the rock group Motörhead was the first product sold, for $10.99. The most expensive item ever sold on eCRATER to date was a 2005 Chevrolet Corvette. [3] [9]

Services and features

The main service that eCRATER offers is a free of charge, customizable ecommerce website and, a free online marketplace. The website builder allows sellers to choose the color of the store template, as well as adding their own logo, main picture and category's pictures. [4] [12]

The product listings have a fixed price [12] and can include up to 10 pictures, there can be unlimited product listings in a store and they are automatically included in the marketplace. Sellers can add their own text to the homepage, about, terms, FAQ and contact pages of their stores but, they cannot use any HTML code.

The stores' back-end allows sellers to modify the store's look and contents, set up internal categories, add products, configure shipping and payment options and managing orders. eCRATER's stores also count with a bulk lister tool, [4] [12] to upload a hundred or more products at a time, and a product inventory control.

eCRATER's marketplace and stores have a shopping cart that allows buyers to pay with PayPal, or Stripe. [12] The cart is integrated with PayPal Express Checkout and Stripe merchant-card processing. [8] eCRATER is listed as a Google Checkout ecommerce partner [13] [14] [15] and it offers integration with other Google solutions, like Google Product Search [5] and Google Analytics.

eCRATER has an internal messaging system to allow buyers to contact the sellers, also, buyers can use the feedback system to rate the transaction with the seller. [8] [12] The eCRATER community forums were launched on February 24, 2006, open to both sellers and buyers with the exception of some boards that are exclusively for sellers.

The main categories covered are: Art, Antiques, Baby, Books, Cameras and Photos, Collectibles, Computers, Craft, Electronics, Movies and DVDs, Home and Garden, Music, Sports and Outdoors, and Toys, Games & Hobbies.

Prohibited or Restricted Items

There are some basic requirements to list products on eCRATER: the seller has to be a registered user, all texts must be in English, all prices must be in US dollars and equal or greater than $0.20, and the seller must be able to ship throughout the United States.

Several types of items are prohibited from sale on the site, as indicated in their terms of service agreement. [16]

Related Research Articles

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2016, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

AbeBooks Amazon subsidiary online marketplace

AbeBooks is an e-commerce global online marketplace with seven national domains that offers books, fine art, and collectables from sellers in 50+ countries. It has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008.

G-Market company

Gmarket is a e-commerce website based in South Korea. The company was founded in 2000 as a subsidiary of Interpark and was acquired by eBay in 2009.

ETLAND

ETLAND (hangul:전자랜드) is a Korean online or offline and shopping mall and auction site, similar to the U.S. site eBay. and group family by Kiswel Group.

Etsy e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items

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Google Checkout was an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. It was discontinued on November 20, 2013 and the service moved to Google Wallet.

bidorbuy or bidorbuy.co.za is an English-language e-commerce website based on an internet auction and online marketplace model allowing individuals and businesses to trade with each other. Transactions on bidorbuy are in South African rands.

Taobao Chinese website for online shopping

Taobao is a Chinese online shopping website, headquartered in Hangzhou, and owned by Alibaba. It is the world's biggest e-commerce website and the eighth most visited website according to Alexa.

An online shopping directory is a "Yellow Pages-Style" web directory that specializes in ecommerce sites. Inspired by the organizational structure used in traditional shopping mall directories, online shopping directories organize ecommerce sites by their category and subcategory of goods sold. Without the constraints related to shopping at a physical mall, an online shopping directory serves to aggregate all ecommerce sites in one centralized location in order to help a user decide where to shop online.

Bidtopia was an e-commerce site originally launched in 2007 as a private auction site for Warehouse86 Ventures, LLC. Paul St. James, owner of Bargainland, which had been the largest PowerSeller on eBay that same year, started the new enterprise in response to changes in eBay policies regarding high volume sales of brand name merchandise and restrictions on sellers with poor customer feedback. Bidtopia suffered the loss of one of its three distribution centers in 2008, and went offline and possibly out of business in early 2010.

iOffer

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eBay has experienced controversy, including cases of fraud, its policy requiring sellers to use PayPal, and concerns over forgeries and intellectual property violations in auction items.

Wigix, also known as Wigix.com, Wigix.cn, and Wigix, Inc., is an online consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer (B2C) online marketplace whose model mimics financial trading platforms. The company name is an acronym for "Want It Got It eXchange". Along with Wigix.com, the company also owns China-based ddku.com as a wholly owned subsidiary.

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Pricefalls

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Shopee Singaporean e-commerce company

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References

  1. 1 2 "Ecrater.com Site Info". Alexa Internet . Retrieved 2018-05-10.
  2. ↑ Steiner, Ina (September 2, 2007). "eCrater: Scratching an Ecommerce Itch". Auctionbytes-Update (198). Retrieved March 19, 2009.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Rich, Pat; BigTallMensClothing (October 24, 2008). "Solutions to Common Questions - The History of eCRATER.com". eCRATER Community. Retrieved March 20, 2009.
  4. 1 2 3 Haley, Jen (January 15, 2009). "Turn your skills or your stuff into extra cash". CNN.com. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  5. 1 2 Aune, Sean P. (October 8, 2008). "35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions for Your Business". Mashable!. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  6. 1 2 3 Beal, Vangie (August 14, 2006). "Breaking Up With eBay". WebMediaBrands Inc. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  7. 1 2 Slavov, Dimitar (September 27, 2004). "eCRATER News, updates, what's new". eCRATER.com. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  8. 1 2 3 4 McGrath, Lissa (September 2, 2007). "eCrater Provides Alternative for Online Auction Sellers". Auctionbytes-Update (198). Retrieved March 19, 2009.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Holden, Greg (March 2, 2008). "eCrater Founder Focuses on Vision of Free Ecommerce". Auctionbytes-Update (210). Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  10. ↑ Chu, Lenora (February 7, 2008). "EBay rivals circle vulnerable auctions kingpin". CNNMoney.com. Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  11. ↑ BusinessWeek (January 2009). "Top Online Marketplaces". The McGraw-Hill Companies. Retrieved March 23, 2009.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Auction Insights (August 6, 2008). "Review: eCrater.com – An eBay Alternative". AuctionInsights. Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  13. ↑ Ashley (February 10, 2008). "eCRATER: An eBay Alternative". CyberNet. Retrieved March 19, 2009.
  14. ↑ Beal, Vangie (October 13, 2006). "eBay Watch: Is That Relevant?". WebMediaBrands. Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  15. ↑ Google. "Integration Partners". Google. Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  16. ↑ "eCrater Terms of Service & Privacy Policy". eCRATER.com. Retrieved April 1, 2017.
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