In Part I of my BANS review I showed you how to find Ebay's hot niches and then gave you some pointers on choosing a niche that's right for you. I also came up with an easy niche for building my first BANS site. I did all of that before actually purchasing the product, so I've got my credit card in hand and making my purchase, so here we go…
As soon as I purchased BANS I received information on how to download the files to my computer, which I did immediately, I also took the advice from their welcome letter to sign up for their forum, which, by the way has a lot of good information from the creators of BANS and also other users so you want to be sure to do that.
Once I loaded the files and the user’s guide to my computer, I opened up the Users Guide right away and began following the directions.
The users guide left no stone unturned. The guide starts out by showing you how to set up a hosting account which I already had. BANS suggests using Hostgator which isn’t the host I used but interestingly enough I ended up switching to Hostgator later on due to bad experiences with my existing host, but that’s a post for another day.
The manual then moves on to help you decide on a domain name. Following their guidelines I came up with my domain name of www.guitarstruck.com. Finding a guitar domain name was a little tricky since most of them are taken but I have a little system that I’ll share with you.
For the product you are selling take the name, in my example it’s guitar. Then go to the dictionary and go to the ‘S’ section and find a word beginning with the letter ‘S’ to add on to your product. For example:
guitarsite
Guitarshelf
Guitarstop
Guitarstore
Guitarsell
Guitarsmart
Or
Shoeshelf
Shoestop
Shoestore
Shoesell
Shoesmart
Shoeshine
Umbrellashelf
Umbrellastop
Umbrellasell
Umbrellasmart
umbrellasite
I like to do this because it uses the plural and singular of your item name. Some names take a little more creative thinking but you get the idea.
Ok, moving on….
The next thing you are instructed to do is sign up for Ebay’s Affiliate program which is through Commission Junction. I already had a Commission Junction Ebay account so I moved on.
Next, the guide instructed me on how to upload my files to my new domain name and create a MYSQL database.
The BANS product comes with files for creating 4 types of stores, a US, UA, UK or AU store. I’m in the U.S. so I’ve chosen a US store. Since BANS allows you to build multiple stores you can certainly create other geographic stores if you wish.
So I selected the US store, loaded the files as instructed for creating my store and the MYSQL database.
I do have to say however; at this point I’m very impressed with the user’s guide. The instructions are very well written and so easy to understand. It took me about 30 minutes to get these installation steps completed …and I go pretty slow.
Now that my store has been uploaded and MYSQL database has been installed I followed the final installation instructions which automatically created my admin area and I’m ready to log in. BANS gave me a general login and password to get me in then I was immediately instructed to change my username/password for security purposes and that’s it. The installation has been complete.
Whew… I think it’s time for a break before moving on to actually setting up and customizing my bans store.
Stay tuned for Part III of creating my BANS store.
See you then….
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