FAQ & Site Info

Getting started is easy! Just visit this link to register an account and start selling: https://www.ecrater.com/reg.php

It is absolutely FREE to open a store on eCRATER! This means you won't pay any fees, final value fees, monthly fees or commission to open your own store and sell your products. You will get 100% of all the sales that you bring to your store. If eCRATER brings you a sale through the main marketplace or through advertising, you will receive a market cost invoice from us. This market cost will not be imposed on shipping and tax or fully refunded/reversed, cancelled or unpaid orders and will only occur for buyers that we bring to you. You are not required or obligated to pay it. Think of it as advertising that could potentially brings you more sales.

We are spending considerable efforts and money to drive buyers to our marketplace and bring sales to you. This small market cost will allow us to continue bringing you buyers and sales.

You can minimize your market traffic by selecting "Send minimum buyers from the marketplace". Then your products will appear behind in searches and when browsing categories in the main marketplace and we may stop advertising them in Google Shopping. Your product pages in the marketplace will show products of other merchants instead of other products from your store. The items will also be accessible in the marketplace if you directly enter the product url or through links in search engines. While selecting this option will allow you to incur minimal market costs, you will be losing sales and the additional exposure that we provides.

The outcome will be as described in the previous question + we may stop showing your products in Google Shopping. Your store will remain active but you should be able to drive your own traffic and sales.

If the main marketplace generated sales for you for the past month or we brought you sales by advertising your store, an invoice will be generated 15 days after that month ends and you will be notified by email. In some cases when the due amount is higher we may generate the invoice earlier.

No. You can still sell completely for free. How? If you receive an invoice from us, just do not pay it. We will not suspend your account for this. We will decrease your ranking in the marketplace and will not feed your items to Google Shopping. However your store will remain active and operational. Please remember that paying or not you will always be able to list and sell on our platform.

No. To sell on eCRATER, you must be able to ship throughout the United States.

There are no software requirements to build and manage your store. Just use your web browser and Internet connection. Currently, eCRATER is optimized for the following browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari & Konqueror.

The eCRATER platform currently does not include this feature.

eCRATER does not sell or provide products to sell. Merchants must sell and ship their own products.

There is a limit of 10,000 products per store. If you have good amount of sales, you can contact us and we will possibly increase your product quota. All quota adjustments are done on case by case basis.

It is possible to open multiple stores on eCRATER. Each store must be registered with a unique email address and must be in compliance with our Terms of Service. Note that you cannot create additional stores if there are unresolved issues in your previous or current store. All outstanding issues must be resolved first. Creating new stores to circumvent account suspension is also not allowed.

You can directly import your eBay products. It is also possible to import products in bulk if the listings are already in a tab-delimited text file, saved with UTF-8 encoding.

The eCRATER platform currently does not include this feature.

PayPal Payments Standard, PayPal Express Checkout, Credit Cards Processing through Stripe, Money Order, Cashier's Check, Personal Check, COD (Collect on Delivery is a service offered through United States Postal Services only available to US sellers)

eCRATER strives to provide safe environment for both buyers and sellers. If we find that your store violates our policies, we may deactivate the account. Please note that suspension does not mean termination. In most cases, unless you are a fraudulent merchant or repeated offender, we will reactivate your account after you fix the issue.

Please feel free to email us to confirm that there is no issue with your store. Unfortunately we will not comment on ranking issues in the main marketplace.

eCRATER is not a marketplace facilitator. We are not processing payment transactions. Merchants operate their own independent payment accounts with 3-rd party processors. When they make a sale, the funds are deposited directly into their own payment accounts. In addition we do not engage in fulfillment or storage services, listing products for sale, setting prices, branding sales of those of marketplace facilitator, order taking, providing customer service in relation to the seller's products or assisting with returns and exchanges.

If you cannot log in to your store even with the correct password and username entered please see the following:
A) You have not activated your store. If you have just created your eCRATER account, you must activate it before you can log in.
B) Your account has become suspended and you must email eCRATER Support for more information.

The activation email may have gone to your Bulk, Spam or Junk folders. Please check these folders for the email. If you have not received the email after 1 - 2 hours, please email eCRATER Support by filling out our webform here: http://www.ecrater.com/contact.php

If you cannot log in to the eCRATER Community forum even with the correct password and username entered please see the following:
A) Your login is not active yet. For spam protection your login will not be active until approximately 24 hours after your store was created. Please attempt to log in after this time has passed.
B) Your account has become suspended and you must email eCRATER support for more information.

No. You administer your store with one account, where prices are based in US dollars. You can choose to have the US dollar prices automatically or manually converted. If you choose the prices to automatically be converted, the converted prices in GBP and AUD will be updated once per week according to the cross currency rate.

By default, if you ship to UK or AU, your items will automatically appear in the UK and AU marketplaces in the respective currencies. If you do not wish to sell in these marketplaces please remove the GBP and AUD prices. This can be easily done with the global editor. Please also check off the "Do not auto convert prices" option in the Options menu.

If you cannot find your products in the marketplace please see the following:
A) Your products were recently uploaded. Please allow several hours for searching and filtering of your newly added/edited items in the eCRATER marketplace.
B) Your account has become suspended and you must email eCRATER Support for more information. C) You have a past due account and your products are excluded from the marketplace D) Ranking issues can also prevent you from seeing your products in the marketplace.

Please visit this link https://www.ecrater.com/forgot-password.php and enter your registered email address. An automated email will be sent to you with your account details.

Buyers can find your store through an item in the marketplace, or by going directly to your store's URL. All eCRATER store URLs are in this format: http://storename.ecrater.com

Yes, you can recover a deleted store and/or categories for a nominal fee. Please email eCRATER Support for more information.

Please email your reason, eCRATER order number and documented proof to eCRATER Support if you would like to dispute a buyer's feedback.

No. Buyers do not need to create an account to make purchases on eCRATER so you cannot leave them feedback.

When checking out through PayPal Payments Standard buyers are not obligated to complete payment for an order. Please check your PayPal account to confirm payment before shipping an order. You can also email the buyer to inquire if they wish to complete payment for the order.

Google Attributes are characteristics that describe the product that you are uploading to your store. Attributes are required if you wish to have your products fed to Google Shopping. For more information please click on the "Promote My Store" link after logging in to your Administrative Tool.

If a Google Feed has not been processed for your store, please check the following:
A) Your items have been disapproved by Google. Please check the reason by clicking on the link and the reasons will be displayed in red text.
B) A feed has not been processed for your store yet. Google Feeds are only processed a few times per week. If you have just created your store or your store was recently reactivated after suspension or being placed on hold, please wait for the next feed.

Products can be added to your store by going to "Products" in the left-side navigation menu once you are logged in. Click on the blue "Add New Product" button and fill in the required information for your item.

To upload a photo, you will first need to add a product to your store or item to sell. Follow the steps to add a product and there will be an option to upload your first photo. After you have added the product, you will see a Photos tab on the top of the page or a small camera icon beside your product. Click on either and you will have the option to add up to 9 additional photos (you can upload up to 10 photos total).

We have to change this for you. Please contact us at http://www.ecrater.com/contact.php. The chosen email must be unique for each store.

eCRATER supports 3 types of shipping: flat rate, weight matrix and USPS calculator that is only available for US merchants.

a) Flat Rate: For each flat rate zone, you can define two rates. A primary rate, and a secondary rate (with another item). The secondary rate determines the shipping in case the product is purchased with another item or multiple quantities from the same product are purchased.

b) Weight Matrix: Select Weight Matrix when you add/edit products and make sure you filled out the shipping rates in the Weight Matrix menu. In the matrix you can define rates for the different weight ranges.

c) USPS Calculator: It overrides the other shipping options. You can enabled it in menu Options. We support both domestic and international destinations. We recommend that when you use the USPS shipping calculator you also set up the flat shipping rates or fill out the shipping matrix. In rare cases when there are connectivity issues between USPS and Ecrater (or when the USPS API is not working), we will fail back to these "back up" rates.

Before you start with flat rate shipping, please make sure that you already defined your flat rate shipping zones. The zones can be selected in menu Flat Rate Zones.

Once you define your flat rate shipping zones, then these will appear in the add product/edit product/copy product menu. For each flat rate zone, you can define two rates. A primary rate, and a secondary rate (with another item). The secondary rate determines the shipping in case the product is purchased with another item or multiple quantities from the same product are purchased. The secondary rate is optional and if omitted will be equal to the primary rate.

Example:

Product #1:
primary rate: 10
secondary rate: 5

Product #2:
primary rate: 6
secondary rate: 2

a) if the Product #1 and Product #2 are purchased together:

- Ecrater look for the maximum primary rate of the two products. In our case this is $10 (the primary rate for Product #1)
- for the second product we use the secondary rate. In our case this is $2

So total shipping will be: 10 + 2 = 12

b) if we purchase 5 of Product #2:

-Total shipping: 6 + 4 * 2 = 14

Yes, you can. Custom domain is a premium feature that costs $5 per month. It allows you to use your own domain with your store. There is free 5 day trial period so you can see how it works.

Below are the steps to enable it:

1) Log into your eCRATER account and go to menu Options. Enable custom domain and enter your domain in the way you would like it to appear. You can use:

www.example.com
example.com
store.example.com
etc.

Do not use http:// in the domain name.

2) We recommend that you use Cloudflare to set up your domain. We will show you how to set it up with the example below:

Let’s imagine that you domain is gsmbg.com. You would like your store to be accessible when someone type www.gsmbg.com or simply gsmbg.com and to support SSL (the lock icon in your browser, which indicates that the connection is secured).

a) create an account with Cloudflare. It is free.

b) Log into your Cloudflare account.

c) Go to menu DNS and add the following records:

Type	Name	Content	TTL
A	gsmbg.com	67.215.240.91	Auto
A	gsmbg.com	67.215.240.194	Auto
A	www	67.215.240.91	Auto
A	www	67.215.240.194	Auto

*If you would like a custom domain for your UK store, please use the following IP addresses: 67.215.240.93 and 67.215.240.196

*If you would like a custom domain for your AU store, please use the following IP addresses: 67.215.240.94 and 67.215.240.197

d) Cloudflare will display the nameservers you need to use. In our example these will be:

eric.ns.cloudflare.com
ruth.ns.cloudflare.com

e) Go to the SSL/TLS menu and choose Full SSL/TLS encryption mode.

3) Log into your domain registrar (gandi, namecheap, godaddy, 1and1 or whatever you used to register your domain). Then select the domain and add the Cloudflare nameservers.

Wait until the domain changes propagate across the web. This can take from several minutes to several days depending on your internet service provider.

The checkout pages will still go through the eCRATER domain similar to how your store is working now.

You can see an example of using custom domain at: www.gsmbg.com

Yes, you can download it from here or from here