IncomeShops Affiliate Stores Review – Not Bad But…

Product: IncomeShops
Overall Ranking: 65 out of 100 or 3.25/5 stars
Price: From $29.95 per month for 500 products to $99.95 per month for unlimited products.
Owner: Goliath Software
Website: http://www.incomeshops.com/

IncomeShops is a site that allows you to build online stores with products from a large variety of retailers. Based on affiliate marketing, you obtain a commission from 5% to 20%  on anything a customer purchases after being referred from your site.

Although this is a legitimate program and a good idea, when looking a little deeper there are a few problems.

What is IncomeShops?

Incomeshops is a site that provides a content management system to allow its customers to build web stores to market products online. You choose what products you want to sell and you build your niche store around these products. With the IncomeShops software, it is really very easy to select and import the products to your store.

As you can see from the home page (below) you get a website, choose your products and put them on your web store, change the look of your store, and then follow the training to attract visitors.

The desired result is affiliate income.

What is a niche store?

It’s a store that focuses on specific products.  For example, if you are a keen golfer you could have a store that is aimed at golfers, where you could sell golf clubs and a few accessories related to golf.

It is always good to aim at a specific market or group of people. Another example if you are interested in cosmetics you could create a store for organic cosmetics. Someone searching for organic cosmetics is more likely to check out your store than a store with all sorts of cosmetics and perhaps other products.

By writing articles and sharing your knowledge, you gradually become a store that your visitors will trust. People will consider you an expert if you only promote one group of products.

Another advantage of having a specific niche is that it is easier to be found on the search engines, which means free traffic.

On IncomeShops you can add products from many retailers to make your store more complete and specialized than other general stores like Amazon.

It is always more enjoyable if you choose a niche that is a hobby or something that you are passionate about.

How IncomeShops works

You create a niche store containing the products you have selected and articles or reviews you have written.  You drive traffic to your store, customers can then compare products.  When they decide to buy one of your products, they are sent to the retailer’s website such as Amazon, Walmart or Boots. The retailer then deals with the transaction, shipping and customer service. You earn a commission for each sale.

Who is IncomeShops for?

The program is for people who have little or no experience of running an online business or website. As long as you know the basics of using a computer you can use this system.

Although the products are promoted to the US and UK markets you can run a store from anywhere in the world.

The main features as promoted by IncomeShops

• get your online store operational very quickly
• web hosting included
• some control over the design – the store builder with drag and drop functionality, you can change the color scheme, the font, or upload your own image logo – this is the minimum you would expect from any site builder.
• 7 million products from over 2000 retailers
• easy to add content – again this is something you would expect
• automatic membership of +plusvisitors.com  – a site where you pay for Twitter followers, Facebook likes or Youtube views – not to be recommended.
• mobile friendly site – again something that is normal
• SEO – you get some good training to get traffic from Niel Patel an internet marketing expert
• support and training with step-by-step video tutorials showing you all of the aspects of running your site from customizing and adding products to promoting your store.
• earning and revenue – IncomeShops stores are built for different income sources. Of course the products you promote, but you can also earn from Google Adsense, affiliate banners and Skimlinks (turn product references in your content into affiliate links)

Getting paid

Although all the products on your site belong to different retailers, the retailers all belong to an affiliate network. All products and retailers are managed from there.

At any time you can check to see if you have made any sales and what has been purchased. The commissions you have earned are visible from your store dashboard.

Payments are made directly from the affiliate networks, not from IncomeShops, you can choose the regularity every two weeks, monthly or quarterly. The payment methods – bank transfer, check or international wire.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• rapid to build an online store
• relatively easy for a newbie to set up a store
• some training provided
• you are told it will take work and effort (not a get rich quick scheme)

Cons

• not possible to transfer the web store
• you are only owner of your domain name
• websites don’t look that good
• a limited number of themes
• no free trial

Training and tools

There is quite a bit of training included with IncomeShops, but for me, the most important training has to be the lessons for getting traffic.  Without traffic no sales.

It’s a shame you cannot see the training that is provided before signing up because for me this could be a deciding factor.

Help and support

Before actually asking a question you can check out the knowledge base. Your next alternative is the support center where you can create a ticket and they will answer your questions as soon as possible. There is also the option of live chat for Plus, Pro and Premium members.

How much does it cost?

There are four different price options.

• Basic $29.95 per month – you can have up to 500 products in up to 50 categories from up to 10 retailers and you have a choice of just 2 store themes. Live chat not included in Basic option.
• Plus $49.95 per month – up to 2000 products in up to 100 categories from up to 20 retailers and a choice of 4 store themes.
• Pro $59.95 per month – up to 5000 products in up to 250 categories from up to 30 retailers and a choice of 6 store themes.
• Premium $99.95 per month – unlimited number of products, categories, and retailers,  choice of 6 store themes.

For all the payment options you can pay annually and save 30% on the monthly price.

How many products do you need to create a successful store? Research has shown that when you offer more products for sale, more people visit your store, but less make a purchase. You only need just a few products that sell well and you can generate a good income.

With my #1 recommendation no limitations on the numbers of products + FREE trial.

Why is the charge for the Plus, Pro and Premium options so much more than the basic? This is something I find a little strange, the cost to IncomeShops for a site with 500 or 10000 products is not much different. The bigger sites just need more disk space and perhaps greater bandwidth, although the bandwidth will depend on the number of visitors to your site. You pay nearly $70 per month for this!

At IncomeShops you can cancel your subscription at any time and they also advertise a seven-day full refund. After 7 days, there is no refund but you are free to cancel, to do this you will have to go via the support desk and register a ticket.

Let’s see what some of their users are saying

Although I searched I couldn’t find any negative comments about IncomeShops.

Pre-Built Stores 

Another alternative to building your own store is to choose a pre-built store. There is a selection of stores in different niches, for example, a Television Store, Baseball Store, Software Shop and Athletics Store.

A pre-built store costs from $29.95 per month for up to 500 products to $99.95 per month for unlimited products. If you pay annually you can save 30% and also get a free logo design.

According to the pricing, a pre-built store is the same price as the basic membership. For me, this is the way to go (if they have a niche that interests you) $250 for a year’s membership with a free logo design.

Here is an example of a pre-built store, to me, it looks a little dull and not very inspiring, but could be improved with the free logo.

Additional Services

Complete Graphic Design – if you want your site to look different you can order a custom design by the IncomeShops graphics team. You get a logo, stylised content boxes and product and category banners. You get this for a price that I find expensive $469.95

The Works – this may be a good way to launch your web store, but again the price is a little prohibitive at $695.97. For this you get the complete graphic design, Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook pages all designed to match your store design, a 400-word article for every category (up to 15) and a professionally written press release to promote your site.

Blog Posts or Article Creation – if you are not a good writer or you don’t have the time to write you can use the IncomeShops team writers to produce some articles for your store. The price starts at $99.99 for 5 posts, for 30 posts the price is $300.

Tweet – with IncomeShops Twitter marketing they can Tweet about your store to thousands of potential customers from different Twitter accounts. Price starting at $49.99 for a Tweet to 5000 followers

Make Your Store into an Android App – it’s possible to have your store converted into an Android App and listed in Google Play. Price $49.99

Logo Creation – get a logo created  Price $249.99

Social Media Bundle – have your social media accounts created for you Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.  Price $114.99 Possible to have done individually $49.99 per social media account.

Category Creation – if you don’t know how to categorize your products it can be done for you. Of course at a certain price from 5 categories $69.99  to 30 categories $240.

Banner Design – beautiful banners may help you to keep people on your site. Price from $59.99 for 1 banner to 5 banners $230

Press Releases – have a professionally written press release distributed to PR services. This service costs from $40 for 1 press release to $200 for 5.

For most of these services, it is possible to find cheaper alternatives online.

My final opinion

IncomeShops is another site that is a good idea but just lacking something to make it a great site. The store builder reminds me in some ways of the site builders at Wix or Weebly a drag and drop editor that is very easy to use.

The fact that if you leave IncomeShops you lose all your work, it’s not possible to transfer your site, is certainly a negative point. All you keep is the domain name. I understand that you are using their software, but imagine you are a newbie and you work on your site for a few months, you don’t make any sales and you can’t afford the monthly payments. You have to give up your store and all your hard work. That would be very disappointing, lots of time and money wasted with nothing to show.

Next, there is the cost, $99.95 per month for an ordinary looking site where you can display unlimited products seems too expensive to me. Nevertheless, for $29.95 per month or $250 for a year, I might be willing to try a small store. It’s a shame they don’t offer a free trial.

The stores are easy to set up, but as with all online businesses you need traffic and this is where most will fail. To get free traffic from the search engines you will have to write content. Such as articles about solving a problem related to your niche and writing reviews.

One thing that surprised me, I didn’t find any negative comments about IncomeShops, so people must be quite happy with the stores they build.

Despite one or two misgivings, IncomeShops is not a bad program, it is easy to create a store with their software and most of their customers seem happy. It is possible to find cheaper alternatives like WordPress + plugin, nonetheless, this system does simplify the process of building an affiliate store for a newbie. But to get traffic, customers, and sales you will have to work very hard.

Visit Income Shops

Verdict: Legitimate

An alternative

If you do want to build an affiliate store you can do it through Incomeshops or there is another way. You could sign up with my #1 recommendation where you will access complete training in building an online business. With this program, you do get a free trial and you also keep your site if you leave.

Some other advantages:

• free hosting for 25 subdomains and 25 domains
• thousands of WordPress templates to choose from
• live chat
• full training on all aspects of creating an online business
• no limit to the number of products you can add to your site
• weekly webinars
• keyword tool

If you have any experience with IncomeShops or in creating an affiliate store I would really like your comments. Thanks.

Peter