Free Shopping Mall To Display and Sell Your Products
Internet shopping malls / shopping carts aren't new. Today we will review a quality but free shopping mall to display and sell your products.
Mals-e
Mals-e is a remotely hosted free shopping cart application built with designer & marketers in mind. It helps people sell products on their website and makes it easy to hook into third-party payment processors. So basically you go to their website, register and start selling your products. Through some HTML formatting your website is embedded into their system and anyone who comes to mals-e can see your products there listed under one roof like we do in a shopping mall.
To Start
To start, basically you need nothing but a computer and an internet connection. If you have a little knowledge of HTML then it is more than good, though if you don't, they have a thorough and comprehensive guide which I found to be neat and explaining.
Advantages
Reach Millions of People from the Beginning
The biggest advantage is to reach millions of people at one go. The probability and sellability of your product increases multiplicatively. Because there are many people who come to mals-e for shopping and all of them will see your product listed. If you are a beginner then you couldn't have asked for a better opening. Individually hosted sites do not attract that much viewer isn't it? So logically for sellers and buyers, this is terribly advantageous.
Open Any Number of Stores
You can open any number of stores inside mals-e. So from the next time, when you are selling computer and comb at the same time, you don't have to use another name.
Sell Any Number of Items
You can sell any number of items or can display your products unrestrictively. There is no such restriction on limitations of products though for widely downloaded items like mp3, DVDs, they have a restriction of 50 elements at max.
Quick and Easy - Attracts More Buyers
mals-e is a very user-friendly web shopping cart. If you see the perspectives of a buyer then he is always looking for a neat and simple place where he wouldn't have to wait for long. mals- e does just that. It takes you to appropriate places, the three steps to buy a product (i.e. selecting, adding to cart and payment) are very smooth. I tried it myself (see the screenshots below). And so there is always a reason why people (read prospective buyers) should visit mals-e.
Disadvantage
Less Features
However people complain about mals-e not being able to bring in variety. The range of products to choose from is not that good either. So keeping that in mind I guess there is still a good room for improvement.
No storefront - like osCommerce
mals-e doesn't support storefront feature by default that its immediate rivals like osCommerce brings in. osCommerce has been more featureful with rich options as well. But there lies a complexity issue that still detains sites like osCommerce which work with complex scripts. So you need to have a good deal of knowledge to mess around with PHPs in osCommerce
In Conclusion
mals-e is a very simple and easy service. It is very reliable too. And I haven't still seen osCommerce etc to give my vote to their favour. So for now, mals-e is fair enough for me. Use it to sell products, earn money. Its profitable.
Screen-shots to Help You
Filed under Management, Marketing, PayPal, Tech Note, Web, Web Services | Tags: e-malls, internet shopping mall, Lies, mals-e, osCommerce, Sell products through third party, Sell through mals-e | 
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May 7th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
hi
please give me a full detail with ur table
August 8th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
A vital point is that mals isn’t a catalogue; it isn’t an inventory. In the shopping cart and checkout explanation, there is no equivalent of the store’s shelves. This is unusual and compares with Paypal buttons more than other software. “Designers love it”, states mal’s web site and it’s true that there’s as much flexibility as you want in how to lay-out the site. It’s also true that there’s no help updating it. Mal’s forums are full of the question “what when I sell out?” and most of the answers are paid. I used Pagemill, a freebie program of the 1990s that makes it very quick to update manually. Coldfusion is still quoted but not the more search engine friendly. Cube Cart does the job but is no longer free. An obscure add-on to Excel called XLENET.NET does the job for a one-off payment but us limited in sub catagories & search engine optimisation. There was a time when the mal’s cart could be added to Mambo. I’m looking into this now as a free open source catalogue for those who can use php on their sites, combine with a free remote hosted shopping cart that can link to paypal or your own screen if you have a shop counter card machine is a good bet for some people.
Who knows: maybe it works - any exerimtal feedback welcome
September 30th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I had Mal’s ecart for several months and was paying the $24 every quarter to have the “upgraded” version just to be able to process credit cards. I had my wallet stolen and had to cancel all my cards. I notified Mal’s Stewart that I would update the info when I received a new card. As we all know banks take their time and it took nearly 3 weeks to get a new one. I got an email saying he tried again (same card) so I reminded him I was awaiting a new card. He then got nasty and said “Well that’s what you said 2 weeks ago..” I responded back and said it had been an inconvenience for me as well and I was able to give him a temporary card # to charge. I also have had other issues because Google Check out does not work properly and all my attempts at receiving support have gone by ignored. SO I let him know he could charge the card and I would be finding a new cart soon. Instead he completely shut off my account and posted a notice on MY website that the site had been closed because of a Breach of Agreement. This is an outrage!!!! This business is the sole way I have to support my family. DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE FREE OR PAID. The customer support is poor, the cart lacks necessary functions and the owner is a snooty *^&*^!! You are much better of with a something like Zen Cart or Os Commerce.