eCrater’s name makes me think, “Eeee! Crater!”

While far from perfect, eCrater is an excellent example of a marketplace that has features worth your time. What really distinguishes eCrater is that, while you can browse items on eCrater like a typical marketplace when shopping from the homepage, buyers that enter the site through your store only see your items as if it were a standalone storefront. This storefront is customizable and completely free making it the best of both worlds. You’re still part of a marketplace where buyers can find your items alongside the items of others, but with no additional work, you also have a slick standalone store that is a portal to only your items. They also give you free import from eBay so moving items is fast if you’re already on that platform.

Visit any eCrater storefront to see what I mean. Other then the url and a discreet link at the bottom of the page, there’s nothing to even indicate that you’re on the eCrater marketplace and not on a standalone web store. But if you go to the eCrater homepage and browse the categories or search for those keywords, those items come up alongside everything else on the platform as a part of the general marketplace. It’s this feature that makes eCrater stand out as a unique hybrid of web store and marketplace while still providing a wallet friendly free service.

While eCrater’s marketplace suffers from many of my complaints above, the biggest being that it fails to bring in enough buyers on its own and puts the bulk of the marketing burden on the sellers, its storefronts compare with far more expensive options. If you ignore the marketplace and use eCrater solely as a webstore, it’s one of the easiest to use and completely free storefronts out there. When you look at it like that, the marketplace aspect is really just some bonus exposure to the items listed in your storefront.