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Shopablogic

Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Suzanna Low, Singapore


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Free online store? With a little catch

Oct 31, 2009 15:16

So lately I have been surfing around to find an alternative for my Web-hosting and ecommerce platform. While doing so, I stumbled on many Web-hosting sites offering a "Free Online Store". Naturally, that caught my attention. But when I delved deeper into the details of the various services, it struck me that most of these offers were, not surprisingly, marketing gimmicks.

The catch for the "Free Online Store" or "Free Shopping Cart" is that it is usually a free trial for a certain period. Or the free services comes with certain restrictions. For example, you are limited to a number of products to upload, or the Web hosting is attached with sponsored ads, or up to a certain range of services or your site would comes with the Web-hosting extension in your domain name.

It would be nice if the terms and conditions for the free services are stated upfront on the homepage. Many of these sites blatantly shout out free services and have "call to" buttons that say: "Sign up for a free shop." Well, I won't be very pleased when I have to find out about the "catch". So, guys, please state it clearly on your homepage. Customers are getting smarter these days and you wouldn't want any bad publicity arising from that.

However, if the price of the services is right, I might trial the service since it's free for a short period.

Here are some Web-hosting sites I've come across that offer free trials. As is always the case, caveat emptor, buyer beware:






 

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About Suzanna Low

Suzanna Low has more than a decade of hands-on in interactive and graphics design, e-commerce and online marketing. In fact, true to the Singapore culture, she's a diehard shopaholic and fancies herself a pioneering e-retailer who learned the painful way how to set up store back when ecommerce emerged on the Internet landscape. Low also claims to speak feline language and sometimes seeks approval for her blog topics with her two house cats.

 
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