Build A Niche Store, otherwise known as BANS appears to be gathering momentum in the world of affiliate marketing.  With version 2 just released, Sept 5th, in excess of 2,000 copies of this brilliant piece of software have been sold.

Conceptually BANS enables one to put together a professional looking website complete with real time feed from eBay in the form of a store.  Content pages can be added at will, this enables the one to add value to your site and to also increase your SEO rankings. 

To use this software to set up a BANS store one does need to purchase a domain and also a hosting package.  Because of its great deals on unlimited hosting at the moment Hostgator  would seem to be the way to go.  Free sign up to  Commission Junction account is also required.  All that is then required is to sign up through commission junction as an eBay affiliate for the US, UK, Canada or Australia.  These are the markets that BANS currently support.

There are three ways in which income can be derived from BANS.  The obvious way where is to have a visitor visit your store, click on an item which takes them to eBay.  They then buy the item and you get the commission. 

The second is to place other affiliate links eg adsense, clickbank, CJ etc on the site.  Either side of the main text or on top of or below the text.  The areas for these ads are already predefined within the BANS software making it a snap to cut and paste the relevant html, no formatting, centering etc it all just works so well.

Now the third way and this is the one I really like is the way in which the  software leverages off the incredible number of people making eBay sales.  For example some people after clicking on an item will decide not to buy at that particular moment and leave your site.  Now if they buy anything at all on eBay within the next seven days (the cookie period) you will still be credited with the commission.  If they buy multiple items within that seven day period you will receive the commission.  If they were looking at say DVD’s on your site but then two days later buy a 1995 Porsche 911 you will receive the commission! 

A once only fee of $97 will buy you this little gem.  For this you can build as many stores as you wish!  All you have to do is decide on your niche.  Could be a fishing store, sewing patterns, stamps from the Commonwealth, Harley Davidson motor cycles etc.  Across the four eBay supported countries there are over 80,000 potential areas that you can focus on.  As mentioned you can add as many content pages, include some photo’s, links etc and really make it a great site as well as a money spinner.

The package which is an electronic download also includes an extremely user friendly manual and also access to the very active members forum where much can be learnt.

Detailed information and some excellent examples of BANS can be found at www.benbowpublishing.com