With eBay’s changes to their affiliate program, I’ve had to take some time with my BANS sites, getting them updated. But I also wanted to start some new ones.

The particular site I’m working on today is one I’d never switched to Build a Niche Store in the first place. I’d used eBay’s affiliate tools back before I’d ever heard of BANS. It’s brought in some sales depite being in Javascript, so it’s definitely a category I want to update to something the search engines will actually care about.

The installation of BANS is very simple. Create your database on your hosting, then upload Build a Niche Store. They’ll tell you to CHMOD the cont/cont.php file to 777, and the instructions tell you how to do that with your FTP program. It’s pretty simple - right click on the filename, select properties and change the 644 to 777. At least that’s how it works for me.

Then you go to your site and follow the instructions to install it. You’ll need your mySQL host and login information for this. A few seconds later, it’s all installed. Delete the install.php file and CHMOD the cont.php file back to 644.

Login, and you have one more very, very important step: Change your password. You can change the login name too, if you like, but since all BANS installations come with the same default admin name and password, changing the password is a vital bare minimum.

Next you’ll want to set up your store. I’ve circled the areas you need to fill out to get started.

There are other areas you can fill out, such as if you want to customize your site wide meta tags, but you don’t absolutely have to do that. You can also decide if you want open or closed navigation - that is, do you want links to all the categories showing or not?
The campaign ID you get from the eBay Partner Network, and you can follow the link to get your eBay category. Make sure you create a new campaign ID for every site so you can track which sites are profitable for you.

Hit Save once you’ve added all your information. Your basic store is now active… maybe. Some hosts need you to switch from normal mode to curl. That’s at the bottom of the Setup page:

Just make sure you customize it. The basic templates are very plain. I always change up the colors and give it a header graphic. In this particular case I’ll be coordinating it with the main site. There are several to choose from, so it’s pretty easy to find something that matches the basic layout of most sites, and you can customize from there.

Now I know I’ve skipped over one very important step - researching the niche. There are many ways to do that, and I’ll discuss it when I start my next BANS site.