Build A Niche Store began its life as a small side project which was "launched" (a misuse of language!) in a single marketplace thread in the Digital Point internet marketing forum on October 18th 2006. It had been coded many months earlier over a period of several weeks after Adam, one of the orginal developers, had purchased a PHP book from a local bookstore in an attempt to automate (take the pain out of) what was for us at that time a manual process of adding eBay product listings to existing sites and developing new sites around eBay product niches...the origin of the whole "niche store" concept. The original script was absurdly basic revolving around a one page setup file but it did its job of pulling relevant eBay product listings onto our own sites. Happy with the basic effectiveness of the tool, and curious to see what others thought of it, a basic 14 page user manual was cobbled together, a basic sales page written and the sales thread in Digital Point was put up. Fast forward 22 months and BANS has grown into one of the most popular affiliate marketing tools on the internet, has been through four "major" (not a misuse of language!) upgrades, now supports 11 eBay affiliate programs, has a user base of over 9,000 from over 2 dozen countries and a community forum with close to 100,000 posts. However, despite all this growth and improvement the whole "niche store" concept and BANS as a development platform remain in their infancy. http://nichestorexp.blogspot.com/#
