Bravisa E-store: The Good, The Bad, And The Very Good.

One of my more recent finds is the Bravisa B-Store. They offer a free e-store with a fairly good selection of unique products that often times you won't see in other free e-stores. I've had a few things stick out in my mind about this service that I'd like to share with you, bear in mind that I am newly acquainted with Bravisa and this is just a first impression, new details will come as I learn more about Bravisa myself.

Bravisa B-Store Pro's

1. Free! We love free!
   
2. Easy to set up.
3. You can add all their available products right at the beginning.
4. This one's huge, you control the markup on the items.
5. Linking done right, they make it really easy to link products on other web pages / blogs.
   
6. Good information provided about the B-store and how you can use it.

Bravisa B-Store Con's

1. The Choice of templates for your site is very limited.
2. No option to make a custom template.
3. The templates you are given look at best sloppy and unprofessional.

Why I still love this E-store:

Product Markup. You control the price for the items you sell, this is outstanding and allows for
alot of diversification and potential income. Five stars on this one!

Do you Squidoo?

Squidoo is a community where users can create pages
called "lens" to promote or sell products
on any subject they desire.

The Pro's of Using Squidoo

1. It's a free service.
2. Really easy to set up.
3. Excellent help & how-to's for your lens via Squidu
   
4. Automated forms to "tag" your lens.
   
5. Making a web page has never been simpler.
6. Squidoo comes loaded with "modules" you can use to add content and even sell stuff.

The Con's of using Squidoo.

1. Squidoo acts as a middle man.
2. They take 50% of all Google Adsense revenue earned from your lens.
3. They take 50% of all affiliate sells made through your website.
4. They do their best to stop any links from competitors affiliate services.

So what does all this mean to you?

My personal take on Squidoo is that it's a great beginners starting off point, but I wouldn't rely on it in the long term to pay your bills. Fifty percent is a pretty hefty sum and one ultimately I couldn't see myself being happy with. For myself the ultimate goal of my Squidoo lens's will be to drive traffic to a more profitable website hosted elsewhere. But even that is not without it's danger, with the Google adsense automatically placed on your lens, there's always a risk of losing customers to those adds.