Starscapes home-based business opportunity

YOUR RETAIL RICHES

Open your own online store without upfront costs, investment or technical expertise.

For the millions of home-based businesses and individual collectors and hobbyists in the United States without a web presence through which they can sell their products

or services online, Florida-based Pricester.com offers an affordable, easily implemented solution.

“The full potential of online retailing may finally be realized with the launch of Pricester.com, an e-commerce website that enables home businesses to establish a fully functional online retail presence with no upfront costs or investment - or in-house technical skill,” said Bernard Gutman, Chairman of Pricester.com’s Board of Directors. “Until now, setting up a retail website at home involved many complex tasks that had to be bought, often at considerable cost from outside vendors unless the small business possessed the required array of diverse technical skills or software.

According to Gutman, for most small businesses and individuals, programming tasks and the costs associated with creating a retail website have been overwhelming and easily outweighed any potential additional business that could be realized online. Or they had to sell their merchandise through cookie-cutter type pages on fee-based sites such as Yahoo, Amazon and eBay.”

This helps explain why more than ten years after the launch of Amazon.com, online purchases represent less than two percent of total U.S. retail sales. While American consumers in the final quarter of 2003, the busiest retail period of the year, spent $17.2 billion buying goods online, this seemingly large figure represented a miniscule 1.9 percent of total U.S. retail sales for the period.

With more than 75 percent of Americans, or 204 million people, now having access to the Internet, such relatively meager online retail sales can’t be a function of a shortage of consumers. In fact, after a decade of optimistic growth projections, the full potential of retail e-commerce is still restrained by a dearth of stores and services available online.

“While virtually all major retailers maintain a presence online with easy-to-use, comprehensive web shopping sites, the largest component of America’s retail industry - small, owner-operated businesses - have a minor presence on the web,” said Gutman. “The likely reason is that establishing a fully functional e-commerce website on which merchandise can be viewed and selected, shopping carts filled, credit card transactions executed, orders automatically confirmed, shipping tracked, and returns authorized and recorded, is a complicated and costly endeavor,” said the chairman.

Now, according to Gutman, any small business or aspiring business person - even a hobbyist with a handful of items to sell - can set up a customized, fully functional retail outlet without having to incur the expense of website design, domain name registration, hosting fees or specialized transaction processing and tracking programming costs.
Through the Pricester.com website, all these tasks can be accomplished by anyone with a PC, an Internet connection and something to sell online. An entire functioning retail site can be set up on Pricester.com using the site’s array of menu driven, user-friendly website construction tools. Pricester.com will provide the new “e-tailer” with everything an e-commerce site needs to execute and process orders, including payments through credit cards, customer order tracking and authorize returns. The Pricester.com site will also calculate shipping costs via an array of alternative shipping methods and carriers. All the e-tailer has to do is fulfill the order by shipping the goods to the customer.

“For the home business owner or individual hobbyist too busy to bother even with the ease of the Pricester.com site construction wizard, our website designers will create a functioning retail site for them for a nominal $199 charge - a 75 percent promotional discount off our normal charge of $799,” said Gutman. “The result is a true ‘turn-key’ online store.”

Unlike every other store or auction website, or ISP hosted commercial site on the Internet, only the Pricester.com online store offers a fully functional commercial online presence with no hosting, setup, item, listing or monthly subscription or membership fees. The only cost to the retailer, or seller, is a nominal fee on each completed transaction. And this fee, ranging from one percent to four percent of the value of the transactions, is lower than comparable fees charged by eBay, Yahoo or Amazon on their store or auction sites, all of which charge monthly subscription or listing fees or both.

“In addition, Pricester.com, by allowing visitors to find products and services they’re seeking through various search criteria, including zip code, is a virtual shopping mall that can be as national or local as the visitor wants,” said Joe Puentes, Pricester.com’s developer, President and CEO.

Applying his more than 15 years of computer and information technology experience to the problem, Puentes spent the past four years and the proceeds of a second mortgage on his home, to finding a solution. The solution he came up with required technology that could handle, in a single marketplace - Pricester.com - millions of small business merchants and billions of individual products. To accomplish this, he developed a proprietary dynamic database system that allows for the creation of a virtually unlimited number of websites and web stores without the need for large amounts of centralized server capacity.

With that system in place, Pricester.com opened its doors to the public early this year. With small businesses and individuals just finding the site, and discovering the opportunities it has to offer, Pricester.com is a growing, multi-floor, virtual shopping mall with many of its shops still under construction.

Beyond the retail store section of the site, Pricester.com is a complete online trading community. In addition to being a vehicle for traditional vendor-to-consumer retail transactions, Pricester.com is set up to facilitate a variety of other transaction methods including:

Barter transactions in which individuals or businesses can trade merchandise, services or intangibles such as advertising time or space, with other individuals or businesses.
Auctions in which items can be bought and sold in real time, allowing the buyer to actually see the second-by-second countdown of the auction clock, and time their bids accordingly.
Reverse auction in which the buyer lists the item they’re seeking and sellers compete to deliver it at the best price.•

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