Today I’m doing a review of a new software called Shop Express.

So what is Shop Express? Well its an affiliate store builder. With it you can build affiliate stores that display Amazon products (and with the OTO also Ebay or AliExpress products). When a site visitor clicks on one of the products in the store they are redirected to Amazon (or Ebay / AliExpress) to make the purchase and you get an affiliate commission from the sale. You can see the demo store that was shown to potential affiliates by clicking here.

This has not a new concept by far. There have been many different store builder that where release over the years. In fact I have personally reviewed several of them. However there are some really unique things about this one. Most of which center around one major  fact. This is not a WordPress plugin or theme. As far as I can remember every other store builder I have come across was centered around WordPress.

Now why is that important? Well because it being a stand alone site / store builder has some very positive and a few negative consequences. It makes the set up a bit of extra work that requires basic tech skill but it also means that the system is not constrained by the limits of WordPress so it can be more functional in its design and its features. Ill cover both the good and the bad aspects of this not being a WordPress based software.

First the bad:

Developers (including myself) often use WordPress as a platform for plugins that are very different from the simple blogging system that WordPress was initially created to be. Why is that? Well there are two main reasons. First of all it ensures that the software they are creating will be run in a standardized environment. Second of all it makes the software easy to install for the end user. All they need to do is upload the zip file for the plugin inside of WordPress, press ‘activate’ and the software is installed on the end users site. Super easy.

However ShopExpress is not a a WordPress plugin. It is a stand alone web based system. This means two things:

First your going to have to ensure that your hosting meets the minimum requirements for the software. Fortunately most of these requirements are very basic and just about any *nix hosting is going to be sufficient. You need PHP 5.3 or greater (if you have a older version you really need to yell at your hosting company). You need MySQL (if you have PHP you have MySQL), you need cURL (again fairly standard). In fact the only thing you might not have is a greater than 2mb max upload setting. Most decent hosting packages (even shared ones) are going to have this though, however if you have a very low end hosting plan it is possible that your max upload might be less than 2mb (though unlikely).

Ok so given that the requirements are fairly basic just about everyone with a website should be able to meet them. Easy enough. However there is the other thing. The ease of instillation. Since Shop Express is a stand alone web based software your going to need to install it yourself, manually.

What does that mean?

Well first off your going to need to know how to use FTP so you can FTP the site files to your hosting. Also keep in mind that this is a entire website builder. What this means is that the only thing you can use the domain for that you install ShopExpress on is for ShopExpress (though you could use a sub domain if you really wanted to). Using FTP is not super hard, there are several free FTP software you can download such as FileZilla and FireFTP. Also its something that everyone with a website really should learn how to do anyway. But I want to be clear that if you don’t know how to do FTP you are going to need to learn in order to use ShopExpress.

The second thing is that you are going to need to create a database. Hence your going to need to know how to log into your sites cPanel area, create a database, and create a user account for that database. Again this is not as difficult as it may seem and also it is something that everyone with a website should learn anyway. However I want to be clear that if you don’t know how to do this, you are going to have to be willing to learn in order to use ShopExpress.

Finally your going to need to know how to set up a CRON job in your site, fortunately they give you the exact command to run and a video tutorial right inside of the software’s admin panel.

So what about the good side of this not being a WordPress plugin?

While the setup aspect of this being a stand alone software may seem like it is a real pain there is also some advantages of this being a stand alone software.

First of all your site is going to run faster because its not running on top of another system. As I said WordPress was designed for blogging. Sure you can change the way WordPress works with plugins but that still means you have to load all the WordPress code / functionality every time in addition to the code / functionality that your plugin uses. This is not the most efficient and it can make your site run slow. Since ShopExpress is a stand alone software that does not require an entirely separate software to load first it is naturally going to run faster.

Second of all there wont be any conflicts. A big issue with WordPress plugins is that they get written by different developers who know nothing about each other yet are expected to work together in harmony. As anyone with a WordPress site knows, this is often not the case. Plugin conflicts can and will happen. However since ShopExpress is not a plugin this is not an issue.

The final advantage is something that you might not notice as a end user, however it is something I can attest to as a developer. Writing WordPress plugins kind of sucks. The functionality of the software you write is often limited by the fact that it has to run ‘on top’ of WordPress. ShopExpress is easy to use and feature rich largely because it is a stand alone software.

But what about the software itself? Is it any good?

If you want to see a demo of what an actual store created with ShopExpress looks like you can click here to check out the demo site that the vendors put up for potential affiliates to test.

When testing the admin area I found it well executed, easy to navigate and very functional. It would take a long time to go over all of the features of ShopExpress however there are two that really stand out that I feel are worth mentioning.

The first is the systems ability to automatically search for and add new products to your store. It does this completely hands off and that is actually the reason you need the CRON job set up. With this feature you can guarantee that your site continually gets updated with new products and new content. This way you can grow and expand your store without needing to do any additional work yourself. Personally I really like this feature. I think its going to be a huge value. It’s also a ‘functional’ feature. Adding new products is something you would likely want to do anyway. But by automating this you save the time of having to do it manually. If you go the route of having many nice stores this is going to be invaluable. Imagine having to update 10-15 stores every few days manually. That would really suck.

The second feature is the ability to have the software automatically make a post to Facebook (and other networks with the OTO upgrade) for the new products that get added to your store. This way you have a back links and a source of free traffic automatically as well as the ability to grow your store on autopilot.

Something I normally dont do is talk about the OTO’s:

.. and while I did not test them for this review I do know a lot of people like to at least know what they are before hand so I will at least tell you what they are. I cut the following graphic which explains the OTO’s from the ShopExpress affiliate page.

So what do I think of ShopExpress over all?

Well I want to be clear. Very clear. Regardless of what the sales page video is going to tell you I don’t believe for one second that you are going to make a ton of money from one single affiliate site.  Also I asked them for a link to the Amazon site that they built to get this income proof from and they refused to provide it.

However even though your not going to get rich from a single site, you can make some money from a Amazon affiliate site. Amazon, Ebay and AliExpress all have large affiliate networks and I 100% for sure believe that the action takers on these networks do make money. The key seems to be to have multiple nice sites though that each make a bit of money which can add up to a decent amount. Fortunately there is an option to get an unlimited site license to this on the front end.  Further given that this system can actually grow each site with new products, posts and content automatically as well as post to social networks for you the sites you set up can really be ‘set and forget’. Though of course you do need to do the initial work of setting it up.

Because of this I’m going to say: If you willing to actually use this system, to set it up, and preferably create multiple niche sites with it, each centered around a specific type of product catering to a different type of potential buyer, you can make some good money that is largely passive once you set up all the sites. If you don’t take action with this and let the software sit on your hard drive than you will be wasting your money buying it. This is a well written and very functional software, however in the end the results you get with it are largely going to depend on the amount of motivation you have to actually use it.

Bonus: So you want a bonus eh? Something nice and shiny to sit on your computer and collect dust, or better yet to distract you from setting up your stores and taking action on your ShopExpress purchase? Sorry not going to happen. While my #1 goal with this blog is to help people make informed purchase decisions a very close second goal is to help people as much as I can to make money online. Some bonus is not going to help you if you decide to grab ShopExpress, what is going to help you is taking action and setting up your stores.

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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