What is better? Bans or PHPBay?

Currently, my biggest money maker is the eBay Partner Network. As you know you can build sites and make money selling eBay products with Build A Niche Store and PHPBay. I have been using Build A Niche Store (BANS) on my sites and had time to look at PHPBay. If you search on the Internet, you will come across many blogs doing the comparison between PHPBay and BANS. Most of them say PHPBay is far more better than BANS but in my opinion they fail to convince people as to why PHPBay is better than BANS.

I would say that BANS and PHPBay both have some advantages and disadvantages. If you are really serious about making money online using the eBay affiliate program then I would suggest you to use both PHPBay and BANS on your website. Below are few points which will give a proper comparison between PHPBay and BANS.

1. PHPBay is  clear winner on this. The latest version of PHPBay, which is a wordpress plugin has the GEO IP targeting feature. This does not limit your store to be for a particular country. This means the eBay products shown will be as per the visitor. This feature is not yet present in BANS. You can use some extra scripts to achieve this but it is not easy. PHPBay gives you this feature out of the box in the latest 3.0 version.
2. Setting up a store using BANS is easy. You just need to add 2-3 options in your admin panel and the script will do the rest for you. With PHPBay, you need to manually create store pages.
3. Adding content in PHPBay is super easy because it is integrated in your wordpress blog. You can add content pages with BANS as well but it is not so easy as it is with wordpress.
4. With BANS, possibilities of missing a product are less. All you need to do is add the category number from eBay listings and the script does the rest for you. The script will automatically add products and sub-products to your website. With PHPBay it is everything you ask the script to do. So you need to add your products manually.
5. The themes/templates that come with BANS are bad. They are super ugly in my view and many people use those default templates making all websites look similar. Integrating BANS with wordpress is possible but its is not so easy. Since PHPBay is a plugin in wordpress, all your ebay listings take the same color, fonts etc. of your current wordpress theme. This takes care of the store looking a part of your blog/website.
6. The most important feature of PHPBay is that you can have a custom URL pointing towards your product listing. This is not possible with BANS. For e.g. If I want to send a user to my website with products listings for ‘blue socks’. Then I can simply give him an URL like www.myphpbaysite.com/index.php?s=blue socks. This makes my job a lot easier. This helps you a lot in terms of advertising on adwords using the keyword parameter.

So like I said before, both BANS and PHPBay have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you are planning to build a eBay Store I would recommend you to have both and make it easier for your site/blog visitors.