ECRATER

eCRATER

Type of business	Private
Type of site	Online Shopping Mall
Available in	English
Founded	September 27, 2004
Headquarters	Irvine, California, United States
Key people	Dimitar Slavov, founder
Industry	Electronic Commerce
Products	Online Shopping Mall, Online Store Builder
Website	www.ecrater.com
Alexa rank	27,719 (April 2014[update])
Registration	Required to sell

eCRATER is an online marketplace and an e-commerce website builder based in Irvine, California. It was launched in the early fall of 2004 by Dimitar Slavov. By October 2008, it reached 1,500,000 items for sale in the marketplace and, as of January 2009, eCRATER has 65,242 active stores, and 95,773 stores have been created since its launch.

eCRATER does not follow the online auction business model, it is more an online equivalent of a shopping mall. Its marketplace offers the products of all registered sellers in one place, while the web store builder allows sellers to have their own custom online store. All listings are "fixed price" and buyers can add products from several sellers into their shopping cart and buy them in one single order.

Creating stores and listing items for sale in eCRATER is free of charge; however, while "final value fees" were not previously applied to the merchants' sales, there are now fees of 2.9%. eCRATER does offer premium positions on its website for a fee, but this is completely optional for sellers.

Dimitar Slavov, a programmer, started putting the eCRATER.com site together in early 2004. It took him about four months to code an initial version, coding module by module from scratch. His goal was to create an ecommerce marketplace that was nice and clean, where buying and selling was easy.

Slavov eliminated any fees charged to buyers and sellers because he thought that online selling should be as free as it is searching the internet. This idea gave birth to eCRATER, a free marketplace, just a few minutes before midnight on September 27, 2004 in Irvine, California.

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