Elite Store Builder Review – Why You Don’t Need This Stuff

Elite Store Builder claims it will build you a fully automated eCommerce store, using revolutionary technology, state of the art designs, and will save you a whole bunch of money in the process.

Essentially, it's just a WordPress template plus a free eCommerce plugin that they don't even own (WooCommerce). I'm going to review Elite Store Builder now, and let you know why you just don't need to waste your money on something that isn't going to work for you.

And no. It's not automated.

What Is Elite Store Builder?

The ESB guys claim to provide a solution to one of the biggest problems with eCommerce stores:

  • They're hard to set up.
  • They're hard to get traffic/sales to.
  • They often look ugly.
  • The checkout process is complicated.
  • Customer support is tricky.
  • They're very time consuming.
  • They're very expensive.

Fair play to ESB, they understand the problem well. They describe exactly what the average person struggles with the most about setting up eCommerce stores. In fact, even people familiar with traditional WordPress sites can struggle with setting up a eStore variant. They don't quite work the same.

Does Elite Store Builder Solve These Problems?

Yes and No. Once again, fair play to them, the store template they've made is modern, attractive, and works on any platform, so mobile and tablet visitors will have no problems viewing the site. This isn't exactly revolutionary though, most sites these days have that ability. Every single site we build has it.

I'd say that ESB solves the following problems:

  • Your store will not be ugly (but it won't be unique either).
  • Simple checkout process (they use the WooCommerce plugin like we do).
  • It will be relatively easy to set up.
  • After an initial learning curve, it won't be time consuming to maintain.
  • It's very affordable.
elite-store-builder-template

So that's pretty promising. You can get a decent looking site, with a simple checkout process, and it won't cost you a whole bunch of money or time. I reckon you could get your store completed in about a week, depending on how many products you need to add.

However…

Those problems they solve, are nothing really difficult to solve. All you need to do is find a nice eCommerce or Portfolio style theme, upload the WooCommerce plugin to it, and you've got yourself to basically the same situation. ESB is saving you a bit of money by offering it cheaper than you would pay yourself, but that's about it.

What About The Other Promises? Traffic, Automation, Customer Support?

This is the whole reason why I say you don't need Elite Site Builder, because they don't solve the hardest problems.

For this section, I'll break down what they say about each aspect, and give my own thoughts on this.

Traffic:

ESB doesn't go into this a lot (because they are glossing over it). Instead, they mention how when people use the “add to wishlist” function, they are also sharing your website on social media. So basically, someone sees a product, adds it to their wishlist, which prompts them to share it on Facebook etc, and that gets you more traffic. Then those people add to their wishlist, and so on.

This is a pretty cool feature I have to admit, but it has one fundamental problem. How does that get you traffic in the first place? And what happens if nobody adds anything to their wishlist?!

As I said, this is a pretty cool feature, but it should be used as a bonus for additional traffic, not the sole traffic generating mechanism. It's scary.

So do you get traffic from search engines? Probably not, every site has the same design and most likely similar content to each other. Google's not going to see any value in giving you high rankings.

So what about social networks? This is probably your only real avenue, it will take a long time, but if you are active on social networks and create Facebook pages and so on, and really know what you are doing, then you can get some visitors to your site that way.

Of course, you can also buy traffic too, but if you're a beginner, stay away from this.

For me, this is enough of a reason to not recommend ESB, the fact that they claim your site is autopilot, but really it takes work. They've got a nice template for you, but they lie about it. No thanks.

Anyway, what about their other claims?

Automation

People really need to get over the idea that stuff online is automated. Google loves new content, so if a site isn't update regularly, it gets lost in the ether. Equally, if you don't promote your site, it's not going to earn you a dime.

“Set and forget” is the claim by ESB. That REALLY means “Set it up, then forget about it earning you anything”.

Nice feature, but inherently useless
Nice feature, but inherently useless

Customer Support

I watched the video and read their sales page a number of times, but I couldn't find anything about customer support. There was this hyped up “S.M.A.R.T” store that tells customers what the most popular items are, but not much else.

So basically, like Amazon, this store has a “Top purchases” list to help sell things to other customers. Pretty cool I admit, but it's not really customer support is it?

Elite Store Builder Review – One Final & Fundamental Missing Item – Sales.

Here's a quick lesson about sales. People aren't just going to visit your store, see a few pictures, and then buy something. They generally need persuading. Amazon is one of the only stores in the world that can do this, and that's because when they go to Amazon, people have already made up their mind to buy something, and are now just price shopping.

Do you really think your little eStore will be able to compete with Amazon? If you want to make sales, you're going to need to learn a bit about marketing and writing articles. Simply saying “These are our top 10 products” and hoping for the best is going to get you nowhere.

So while you can get a decent-looking, multi-platform, user-friendly site for a very reasonable $30 with Elite Site Builder, that's about all you're going to get. Don't expect to actually do anything with the site out of the box.

Final Thoughts And Summary

So if you do go ahead and buy ESB, here's what you'll get:

  • An attractive template to load products to.
  • A few plugins to set up your “store”.
  • Some nice site features.
  • Not much else.

As I've already explained, there's no way this is going to work for you unless you do a lot of other work on top of it. Additionally, your site will be a duplicate of many other sites, and is unlikely to get you anywhere at all.

So What Alternatives Are There?

I'll give you just one:

Let us build a site for you. It will be unique, it will come with training, and it will work. It won't be as cheap as ESB, but it's better to pay money on something of quality, than waste money on something of little value.

4 thoughts on “Elite Store Builder Review – Why You Don’t Need This Stuff”

  1. Haha. I had to laugh at “fully automated eCommerce store, using revolutionary technology”. To someone inexperience, it may sound fancy, but it sounds like they use pretty standard stuff. I haven’t done much with ecommerce in the past, but am working on a homebrew site that uses WooCommerce.

    1. Yeah. There’s no automation involved really. OK so the site updates based on how people use it, but that’s it. No automated money for sure!

      Let me know how the homebrew site goes. I’m running a few experiments with eCommerce too.

  2. Wow it would appear they owe Woo commerce royalties for doing this…

    But that’s beside the point. They are essentially advertising services and programs you can get for free. I’ve tried Woo Commerce before and it’s a great program for any e-commerce website.

    One thing these places seem to try and make people think is that once you install this “awesome service of theirs” that everything else will flow perfectly. Not so. You need traffic (targeted) to get anywhere in this business and that should be the #1 priority of the website. Once that starts coming in, then you focus on decorating your site with whatever fancy plug ins you want. Thanks for letting people know about this!

    1. Yeah you are right. As I was reviewing these guys I was fairly impressed with their service, until I realized it was just a shell, and was nowhere near as inclusive as they were masking it out to be. What a shame. I just know that the low price is going to encourage a lot of people to buy and waste their money. I guess that’s the point.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Copy link
Powered by Social Snap