My Viaweb Mall Experience

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by Michael Wong

When I first decided to build my storefront for my online art gallery, Art Dacor (artdacor.com), I really didn't know how to go about setting one up. I looked at all the possibilities, including using one of the many online shopping mall editors and designing a basic website and attaching a shopping cart system to it.

First I decided to have my website hosted within the AOL (America OnLine) community. I felt I would get a lot of publicity from within the AOL community, which has in excess of 10 million members. To have your website hosted by AOL, you have to use their WYSIWYG editor (AOLpress). After a couple of months persevering with their AOLpress software, which seemed to constantly crash on me for no apparent reason, I gave up on AOL.

Then I looked everywhere on the web to find another solution. I finally decided on Viaweb, (acquired by Yahoo) a traditional online shopping mall. Viaweb have since been taken over by Yahoo and is now known as Yahoo! Store. They had an impressive list of merchants and have received some very good reviews.

They offered a simple to use WYSIWYG editor, along with a great looking visitor tracking tool, secure server and mailing list option. Setting up the store was simple enough. I just set up a page for each product and added the descriptions and images.

One of the problem I noticed was that I had to be online to be able to use the Viaweb editor. I spent a great deal of time setting up the website and uploading images and changing the content. This is fine if you have very cheap or free phone calls. Unfortunately, here in the UK, that is not the case and my phone bill went through the roof as a result.

I decided to start with their basic package of a maximum of 50 items for $100.00 per month. It took me about a month to get the store up and running. Soon after my store was listed within their online mall, Viamall, I received a couple of enquiries. Not bad, but not brilliant either.

Looking at the store statistics, I realized that the number of actual visitors was rather low, averaging about 20-30 a day. This was disappointing as I had expected to attract far more passing traffic, considering that Viamall state on their front page, that their mall gets tens of millions of page impressions a month.

Another problem was that my paintings were priced differently depending on the size of the canvas. But Viaweb doesn't cater for this option. If I wanted to have 5 different prices for each painting, then I would need to have the painting listed 5 times, each with a different listed price. That meant that even though I had 50 items displayed, I actually needed to have 5 times that number, for each painting listed at a different price! That added up to 250 items, which meant my rental fee would rise to $300.00 per month! I was none too pleased with this and together with the lack of visitors, I decided it was time to look for another solution.

Only when I wanted to switch providers, did I realize that I couldn't simply take the webpages (HTML files) and transfer it to another server. Naturally they didn't warn me of this. This could not be done easily as the webpages 'appeared' to be generated on the fly by Viaweb's software and they were hosted on Viaweb's servers. This could also be the reason why the webpages seemed to take so long to download.

There was a way around this problem. I just visited every page of my website, viewed the source code and copied the HTML code to a new file. This was rather time consuming, but it worked. But I also realized that I couldn't copy the images; buttons, icons, etc. as they were generated by Viaweb's system and I would be infringing on their copyright if I used their graphics. So I decided to rewrite the whole website with new code and images and have it hosted on one of the many webspace providers available for a lot less. In fact, I am only paying $49.95 a month now. I still have all the features that were available with Viaweb, but now I can list as many products as I want. The only restriction is the amount of disk space I have on my server, which at 50 megabytes is more than enough.

So, did I feel it was worth it? By my experience, I didn't feel it was worth while setting up a store within an online mall. The number of passing traffic who entered my store was relatively small. The rental fees are quite high unless your store has a small inventory. The site design is somewhat limited and transferring your website to another server is not easy.

But this is only my personal opinion based on my own experience. I am sure a lot of merchants are happy with online malls such as Viaweb, as they still seem to be attracting a lot of merchants.