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I am sure that a lot of you have been reading a lot of different posts about Store Stacker lately. There have been a lot of reviews on a lot of different blogs and most of them have been praising this new method of building niche stores that Store Stacker has. From what I can tell at a glance, everything that is being said about Store Stacker seems to be very true.
There is a lot of functionality with this system that BANS does not have. The ability to use multiple affiliate networks to build your store around (you have access to over 10 million products) is a huge asset which insures you make the most money possible. Also, with the future risk of Google slapping the heck out of BANS sites for having little to no value to them or calling them “Thin Affiliate Sites” your chances of this ever happening using Store Stacker is highly unlikely because of a few features that is setting Store Stacker apart from all the rest.
The two features that I think are just great are the RSS and You Tube plug ins. These two plug ins allow you to pull related content or related videos and display them on your site automatically. This builds a store that is affiliate based but a store that also has a lot of content and value for your visitors. This is something that Google loves to see, well, at least for now.
You can build your new niche store as a stand alone site or add it to your wordpress blog. It is often prefered to create a stand alone site much like any other niche store, however you can find a tutorial video on installing Store Stacker onto your wordpress blog over at feedflare.
Over all I really like this system and it is one that I am going to have to try it in the future. Just remember one thing when you do build your store is that you need to make sure you have out going links to a few other sites and also build a few links back to your store using my link building strategies for assistance. Doing this will reduce your chances of getting a Google slap or removed from the search engine all together, and will maximize your chances of long term traffic and income.
You say the future risk of Google slapping BANS websites, in my experience (and talking with others) This is already happening.
I tried Store Stacker last week and I can say that it does what is says, but it’s also some very poorly written software.
It is not “fast” to build a store. The eBay products don’t constantly stay updated. They have to run a cron job, which means when a user clicks on an eBay item, it might be expired already.
The template engine is based on SMARTY, which is a PHP template engine. I dislike smarty a lot, and the templates it comes with are ugly and generic. They’re like bad WP templates.
Oh, and the install system is barely functional. Since it uses the Zend engine(I believe to obfuscate the php code), it requires you to upload the whole thing in binary mode. Which, most FTP clients don’t default to. Also, if you don’t remember to CHMOD the proper files before installing, your install won’t work properly. It will install and let you log in, but it will bomb out in the admin panel.
Last, the software when you get it to work, it is dog slow. You have to setup separate product import settings for each category and such. It takes probably 5ish minutes per product import of say 100 products. I would estimate that to have a non-spammy looking store setup it would take over an hour. Then, you would really need to look at building 20-50 pages of unique content in hopes that it would balance out the scraped affiliate datafeed products.
Oh, and forget any kind of nice Wordpress integration. This software is very much its own thing and doesn’t even pretend to integrate with anything else at all.
All of that being said, this would probably be a good piece of software(warts and all) if you wanted to get a parked domain with traffic to get indexed(possibly) and making you some affiliate money. Otherwise, this software is a big bag of hurt for anyone else.
What I can say is that they provide excellent service and refunded my money quickly. They also have an active community around the software, so if you are dead set on getting it, there is support available if you’re willing to put up with everything I mentioned above.
very good topic.