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CGM Systems, Inc. - Technology Consulting since 1988
(all information is provided as-is and without warranty. You assume all risk for it's use)

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Pros

• It is simple to learn the basics

• The sites we have launched using freemerchant have been showing well in the search engines.

• They have 4 different plans, one of which will meet the needs of a beginner.

• You do not have to install scripts or worry about hosting

Cons

• Scalability is somewhat limited

• If you want to have the same item/page in two different categories you will need to recreate the page or manually add a link

• The traffic logs are very limited in scope. They provide the number of visitors per page but they do not provide referrer information

• You are limited in what you can do with the pages as far as links by their terms of service which may limit your ability to do really serious search engine optimization

• You should set up your shop with a domain name. However, viewers will see the url change from www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.safeshopper.com . If you were to leave freemerchant, links to your products would be invalid.

• If you build your site manually (instead of uploading from a spreadsheet or catalog) you will not be able to easily back up your site. If you move to another solution such as oscommerce, you will have to recreate your product pages by hand

Summary

Freemerchant is great if you want to get products online quickly without a lot of technical knowledge on the part of the user. If you were to move to a hosted shopping cart solution at some point, you could conceivably run both shopping carts in parallel for a period of time

CGM Systems, Inc.
Resources home
Contact Us
Online Store

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by CGM Systems, Inc