Set Up for Your Basic Online Shop
Posted by admin in eBay Shop Tips on May 8th, 2009
Right then. You’re interested in knowing more about setting up a shop online, what it involves, the equipment and knowledge needed. If you use a relatively simple set up you are able to promote a small range of merchandise alongside product photos, prices, descriptions, and of course are able to accept all orders online.
To do all of this you must have a computer, access to the internet, email, a website and hosting services. Broadband internet is a far more professional move than relying on a dial-up connection since broadband is ‘always’ on. The more time you are connected to the internet the more internet security becomes an issue too, so implementing an effective, cost-wise online security system is essential. New viruses and hackers abound and tend to overcome the weakest online defences most successfully. Firewalls are a great way to start, and in some cases can come with your operating system. Employ a spyware, virus and email attachments content scanner. Also, ensure that all your security measures have the latest patches/ service packs so as to deal with all the latest intrusion techniques and bug fixes.
Hosting will be required for your website. HostGator is a very good service I have come across, search around though since hosting services better attuned to online retailers may well exist. Regarding hosting, the quality of the service is usually dependant on the amount you pay. Make sure you read all the small print. Research the level guarantee and the various sorts of technical support that are available. 24 hour support is best.
The majority of online customers prefer to pay for things using their debit or credit cards. Electronic mail-order forms can easily be created with one of the many authoring software packages on the market today. Forms like these allow customers to email their orders for processing offline. If a website of yours already exists then e-commerce software adds great payment functionality. Software like this can sometimes be offered by some companies for free with the catch that they get a percentage of any future transactions.
Dropshipping can be a great move for people who are new to online shop management. This is a supply chain management method where customer orders and postage requirements are solely with the manufacturer or wholesaler/ dropshipper who also then sends out the merchandise direct to the customer. Two main benefits stand out, supply chain costs are reduced since there is no duplication of effort in the picking, packing and shipping. Secondly, total inventory management is reduced, shipping costs are also reduced, therefore the overall price passed on to the consumer is also reduced. Reliable dropshippers are vital, many are not, and at best deliver goods late and/ or in pieces. To avoid dropshipping nightmares take a good look at Salehoo.com, one of the internet’s best sources for pre-assessed legitimate wholesaler and dropshipper lists, currently with a database containing over 8,000 suppliers worldwide.
Setting up a basic site with a limited product range is both relatively cheap and quite easy. Design and functionality may be restricted though. The degree of security may also be more limited when compared with other more sophisticated options that exist.
E-Commerce Sites often Fail – Avoid these Common Pitfalls
Posted by admin in eBay Shop Tips on May 8th, 2009
With so many people trying to succeed in the online business what works and what doesn’t is vital knowledge. Whilst some mistakes are difficult to rectify, here are some that are easily put right:
• Customers don’t like:
o Incorrect/ out-of-date information
o Complex site navigation and purchasing procedures
o Low to non-existent customer support
o Low customer fulfilment and late deliveries
o Lack of information about your business
o Unprofessional visual website design
• So, you really need to:
o Ensure your site contents are all up to date, particularly any prices
o Keep a close eye on all the website’s information regularly
o Ensure that all the infrastructure is there to support your website. Orders must be processed on time, emails dealt with fast and any customer support helplines manned by trained staff at ‘fair’ times
o Make sure finding and then purchasing products is very easy for customers
o Make sure a professional has designed the look of your website
What is important to remember is that since you have absolutely zero personal contact with your customers you are actually having to try very hard to find them and then keep them.
You can, still further, provide a greater customer experience which in turn induces them to feel your site is safe and secure to buy from time and time again by:
• offering a 100% no questions asked money back guarantee on any order
• using very clear, ideally ‘zoomable’, photos of the exact product shown in thier best light
• becoming part of Salehoo.com – one of the internets largest wholesaler communities where for a once off fee you’ll be able to pick constantly updated, reliable, quality wholesalers/ products, and have excellent help on hand for any product related problem – for life, along with constant free updates to databases and such like.
• employing customer service professionals able to provide advice by phone to customers concerning more expensive and/ or complex products
• streamlining your order procedures so that they are clear and fast, alongside quick email confirmation immediately after
• making sure there is a means by which customers can easily check the availability of their orders, and also track the progress of their delivery
• simply being honest, e.g. explain when and why you were unable to deliver on time
How to Succeed with Your Own eBay Store/ Shop
Posted by admin in eBay Shop Tips on May 8th, 2009
On the internet there are millions of ideas of what is the right path to take to succeed when selling items through eBay. What is extremely important is for such advice to be properly backed up with good evidence, typically the best of which comes directly from the hard work of actually having been a seller who stuck with the numerous problems everyone faces eventually becoming successful. For example, if you are interested in making fast progress with locating trustworthy product suppliers/ wholesalers joining professional wholesale communities (most notably Salehoo.com) started by people who were in the exact same difficult position as you are in right now can really speed things up. You can dodge all the common pitfalls of trial and error that they had to go through, profiting faster than would normally be possible.
People often ask, “are eBay shops really worth it?”. Like most things in life, once you’ve carefully weighed up everything and gone with certain ventures you absolutely have to stick with them to give them your best shot. eBay shops definitely work, making many people very well off, consistently. The key point with eBay is that it has a colossal amount of traffic every single day of which there is no end, at all, in sight!
Many people wrongly assume that eBay selling is easy, you just list items on your site, sit back and wait for the huge easy profits to come rolling in. Well, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Absolutely nothing in life is free, something that really rings true with setting up and maintaining a business!
There is a huge contention with eBay fees, which many online shop owners say are simply far too much. What these complainers don’t remember is that to pull of the same kind of business in a bricks and mortar venture incurs far higher costs. Additionally, owning and operating an online store/ shop makes listing costs far cheaper. A good example would be standard listing costs that are normally somewhere around $0.20 for 10 days being reduced to $0.02 for 30 days. That’s three times the exposure for far less than it would normally cost your average joe without a shop! Yes, these items don’t appear in the main auction search listings, BUT there are numerous ways to get around such problems. What is helpful is that search engine’s spiders do start to crawl shop/ store listings, a potential extra boost to your income, especially if you engage in SEO with some of you more promising adverts/ deals.
A big reaction to what has just been said is that “no one will see the items listed if they don’t appear in the search listings meaning all the money spent there is a total waste”. Yes, that is exactly what happens if you just sit there after you’ve listed your products in your store. One of the many ways you can drive traffic to your eBay site is by employing the use of so called ‘loss leaders’. Basically this involves advertising sure fire popular items that you don’t sell in your shop at a small overall loss. The auction its self acting as a teaser to what else could be in your store all just an easy click away. All you are having to do is place enticing text, images etc (within eBays terms of service) around the actual auction.
So, to cap it all off, eBay stores/ shops come highly recommended to interested people who are dedicated to the idea of properly developing an online business opportunity for themselves. The two main reasons listed above should be strong enough to convince you of the awesome potential of eBay. Here are some extra very important eBay shop tips: (1) give your ebay store a unique domain which can then be cross-linked from your own site so as to further search engine awareness and increase traffic to BOTH sites (2) try to get your eBay shop having the exact same look as your own site, since branding is important (3) play the SEO game and put all the keywords you are targeting onto your eBay store, great search engine rankings can bring huge amounts of traffic (4) try to make some of your most high traffic keywords being promoted in your own site your eBay shop product category headings (5) Get all kinds of good related sites, be they forums, other shops etc, lining to yours. PPC may also be potentially great move for improving traffic to your sites.
Whats left is to carefully monitor stats and tweak it all to perfection, continuously.
What Makes a Great Dropshipper?
Posted by admin in Quality of Dropshippers on May 8th, 2009
Locating that perfect list of dropship wholesalers is just as important as establishing a decent reputation in your chosen market niche. Avoiding scam artists is vital since otherwise they can cost you and your company a lot of wasted time and money.
So what exactly defines a great dropshipper? Firstly they need to be good communicators. If something needs ironing out/ improving then effective and immediate action is always preferable. Great drop shippers listen to their customers and try to work with them. Dropshippers should be only too willing to explain and pass on helpful information to you. You should be able to build a good working relationship with them which will be beneficial for you in the long run, e.g. first to know of any new products, deals, incentives, new sales techniques, when out of stock goods are arriving in etc.
Useful, good dropshippers are constantly updating their products and general services, have a reasonable list of products they can deliver in good condition to your customers doors, on time and in one piece! A very effective way to know how good they are at doing this is to speak to past customers and read dropship performance reviews from people and companies who’ve used them in the past. Then, if you still think they are good, have maybe heard a few good recommendations, then join them and try out their service a few times with some low cost goods. If everything works well, then you could be onto a winner.
As with most wholesalers, ideally the dropshipper has a very straightforward system in place for you to sell their goods, along with great deals, decent product variety and healthy quantity of standard good selling items. Additionally there are hopefully loads of software tools, training programs and active forums on everything associated with setting up an online shop and selling products.
A recent trend in dropshipping has been to customise goods being sent to your customers. Basically there are now a wide range of customizable goods such as t-shirts, simple keychains and nutritional supplements. Designated by you, custom logos and pictures can for example be applied to this merchandise by the dropshipper before shipping takes place.
Avoid scams. Typical examples are middlemen who claim they are dropshippers, when in fact they are company doing little except collecting your money and passing you through to a dropshipper when you think you are communicating with them. The problem is that your profit margins will at best be minimal, and they also often try to charge recurring fees for their services. Ebay is notorious for poor quality, often outdated product sourcing lists, so its best you be very cautious when surfing such webpages.
Here are two more great ways of determining if a dropshipper/ wholesaler is genuine or not: (1) genuine wholesalers never show their product prices to the general public, (2) by far most wholesalers in the U.S. require a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) to be able to conduct business.
Lastly, save yourself a lot of time and money going through loads of trials and errors finding which wholesalers and dropshippers, liquidators and manufacturers are legitimate and worthwhile or not. Join one of the webs largest and most respected wholesale communities – Salehoo.com . With over 8,000 pre-screened and legitimate wholesalers from all over the world, including many that offer decent profit margins, it could just be one of the best business decisions you’ve made so far!
Important Aspects worth Considering when Sourcing Good, Reliable Wholesalers & Dropshippers?
Posted by admin in Sourcing Wholesalers & Dropshippers on May 8th, 2009
So, your online shop is up and running, and now you’re desperately looking for a nice big list of trustworthy and reliable wholesalers to promote products from, but don’t know where to begin!?
A good start is to simply Google wholesaler related keywords. You’ll find that there are a huge number of sites out there all claiming that they have or know where to find large, relevant and great value product lists. Very quickly you’ll realise that you can find massive lists of suppliers easily, but as to how trusted and reliable they all are – that’s a completely different thing!
Only a handful of sites out there offer really can deliver a wholly viable business solution to sourcing good quality wholesalers. Salehoo is one such website. This website covers over 5000 suppliers and/ or drop shippers in their constantly (often daily) expanding database. A lot of communication is relayed between the Salehoo staff and the suppliers they list. As a result new products are often found as soon as they appear in a suppliers inventory. Salehoo staff then test the product themselves before letting any of their clients (you, the online store owner/ worker(s)) try them out, saving you the expense of discovering if the postage process or the product actually works. With so many very high risk overseas suppliers out there just waiting for your money this is really is powerful, potentially saving you a lot of wasted time and energy! Salehoo categorize all their products, inform you of what to do when you’ve found your perfect selection of goodies to sell and compare product prices where possible. The constant liaison between suppliers and Salehoo mean that you can enjoy a large number of goods at decent prices. Additionally, if there is a particular product, or set of products, you can’t find in their directory there are very helpful forum staff that can help you.
For webmasters who are very new to starting up their own online shop Salehoo has a whole range of free eBooks, software tools and live chat support aimed at making finding and implementing great products into your site a synch.
Be vigilant, there are many unscrupulous creators of false suppliers lists who literally take your money and run. Just because there are well known businesses listed don’t take it for granted that the list must be genuine.
Venturing into the offline world can also be a great move for finding new products/wholesalers/ drop ship wholesalers. Look into trade exhibitions/ expos, magazine ads, and associations. These are superb places to find new and very professional companies that may not always have easy to locate websites.
Lastly, build upon your business relationships with fervour. Communication is essential!