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Is Your Online Store Ready for Christmas

bobby — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:25:08 +0000

Christmas online sales

Halloween is nearly upon us and sales of costumes and accessories have been going quite well, but is it just me or are there Christmas decorations and other seasonal items on full display in all of the high street shops already?

That to me is a sign, that tells me to start getting ready for the upcoming Christmas selling season and to prepare a checklist of some important aspects to look at and address before it’s too late. You should expect to be busy in the forthcoming weeks as literally millions of pounds are spent daily in the build up to Christmas on gifts and other seasonal items.With this in mind, it may well be beneficial to you to take time out and follow a few of the following points.

Establish the stock you intend to sell, check with your dropship suppliers what they will be holding within their available inventory and importantly, what are their stock levels going to be like. There is no point putting in a lot of time and effort into listings of products that your supplier only has handfuls of.

How is your online store looking these days? Have you thought about sprucing it up a bit. Give your e-commerce store a bit of a Christmas feel to it by tweaking the text colours or adding a few Christmas themed images here and there and it could improve your sales levels by keeping your visitors online with you that little bit longer.

Have you thought about offering your customers a present from your store, maybe a reward for purchases over a certain amount? Sometimes a small token that doesn’t necessarily cost much can mean an awful lot to the recipient, especially in the current economic hard times we are witnessing. If you have had some inexpensive stock lying about for a while that isn’t selling then this could be a great way of getting some return from it by way of repeat business from your customers.

How technically efficient is your online store in terms of the search engine optimisation, consider reviewing your keywords, meta tags and descriptions for your existing stock and try adding a few seasonal Christmas references. You should also give your online store a quick health check and address any broken links that you may have and and slow loading pages. Any error messages and poor load times are a sure way to drive traffic away from your site and are obviously potential sales lost.

Given the current economic climate, it’s a tough market out there for any retail business so make sure that you are prepared and have your online store ready to grab your share of the seasonal spending.

Is Your Online Store Ready for Christmas is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Never Underestimate your Product Descriptions

bobby — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:48:32 +0000

product description writing

Anyone that says selling dropship products online is going to be easy must be ignored. Sure you can pay your supplier for a ready made ‘cookie cutter’ online store that is pre loaded with their available inventory. You can design and create your own e-commerce store and have the inventory from your dropship supplier populate your site by way of a feed. Great!! That saves loads of time and effort and gets you up and running selling online in no time at all.

In reality, by setting up your e-commerce store in this way, you have probably made the biggest mistake of all, one that will set you back for a long time until you take steps to put your store back on track to achieve success.

Too many online entrepreneurs who are just starting out underestimate the value of good and unique product descriptions and the lesson learned is from lack of customers and therefore sales.

Think about it, online shoppers can not touch or hold the goods that they are looking to buy, so apart from good images of the product and more than one is advisable, your product description should be written in such a way that the photo’s aren’t even needed. The product descriptions that are provided by your dropship supplier are usually just a few ‘key word’ ones that are the same on countless other e-commerce stores where the lazy web store owners haven’t made any effort to create their own. So why should a visitor buy from your store if what they see is no different to many other stores that they may have visited.

It is well worth the time and effort that you will have to apply to create your own product descriptions, use your imagination and use words that compliment the product, create a feel of desire, a sense of urgency that the customer should buy before you are sold out. You may have heard the phrase ‘power words’ well if you haven’t then look it up because this is where you will need them. To give an example, if you are selling a high value item, then make sure that the words used in your description emphasise the perception that it is, words like ‘quality’, ‘luxurious’, ‘recommended’, ‘desirable’ to name a few.

Power words aren’t just used for high value or luxury items, they should be used for any item but ensure that you use words relevent to the product in question as you wouldn’t want to over do it.

Another reason to create your own product descriptions is because of the way that the search engines, Google and Yahoo for example will know if your descriptions are the same as other sites and will penalise your store in the page rankings for copied content.

Original content is the way forward, no doubt about it. So take the time to look at your e-commerce store product listings and make those important changes if you want to achieve more sales and higher placement in the search engine listings.

Never Underestimate your Product Descriptions is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Is Dropshipping the Answer in These Hard Times

bobby — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:26:00 +0000

The doom and gloom is all around us, on the T.V. news, the newspapers and it seems like everyone is talking about recession.

In times like these, every online retailer, should be looking for ways to guard themselves against the effect of the current economic downturn. It is virtually impossible to come away totally unaffected, but there are some measures that you can use to avoid the worst of the impact during these uncertain times to your internet business. It’s in these gloomy economic times that dropshipping makes more sense than outlaying your hard earned cash on stock that may not sell.

In these hard times every online retailer should be making twice the effort to keep the sales coming in and the best tactics to employ do not necessarily cost much money, if any at all, just a bit of time.

The first recommendation we have for you is to spend more time to brush up on your search engine optimization. This means that you should keep up to date with any news about how search engines work. Basically, what happens in between the entering of search terms and the return of search results? Why are some pages placed earlier in the results list than others? Fundamentally, the results have to do with having words on your site content (especially in page, section, or picture titles) that match the searcher’s keywords, spaced fairly close together. You can perform many of the basic techniques yourself while designing your site, or if you haven’t got the time to learn for yourself, then you can hire an SEO consultant to help you raise your result rankings. Obviously this will incur a fee but may well be money well spent.

There is a certain element of unpredictability, since you cannot foresee the search terms input by absolutely every potential customer but there are plenty of free online tools that you can use and alot of hosting companies offer software that can give you the search terms used by your existing visitors.

Frequently-used search terms related to a certain topic may also change over time so regular checks to update your keyword list is a must. However, you can do research and find the latest statistical data from popular search engines, and revise your site accordingly.

Besides trying to design your site in accordance with the functioning of search engines, you can also try to ensure that customers find your site easy, or better yet, fun, to use. Try to go through your site as if you were a customer. Do you see any unnecessary distractions or difficult to navigate areas of your site on the way to the most important aspects of the shopping experience (i.e. finding, viewing and understanding products, and then making a purchase easily)? If so, give your site a good pruning, and then watch your profits blossom.

If you would like a deeper, more thorough overhaul, you might try hiring an analyst, again at some cost. A specialist will make a holistic examination of how your site appears and functions in a way that you may not see. Is it safe? Is it user-friendly? How might the overall site design be improved for better simplicity, attractiveness and accessibility? It is true that many online store owners can do some of the more basic aspects of this analysis themselves but in many instances site owners who hire analysts end up doubling their profits. In other words, expert advice can be a great investment.

Investing in help from search engine or general consultancy experts can provide a huge boost for your business, and in these time give you that cushion you from the recession. Making your site more user-friendly is also great measure at any time, so you can draw in those customers, even in these hard times.

Is Dropshipping the Answer in These Hard Times is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Done Any Link Baiting Lately?

bobby — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Not sure what link baiting is?

Well you are more than likely doing it already

Linkbaiting is a term used on the internet that describes a number of activities that generate links back to your own website.

There are plenty of easy and practical ways to do this, there are many that are more widely used simply because they have a proven track record.

You are probably already blogging and using social community bookmarking sites, if so, then it only takes one interesting page on a site….and only one person to notice that page….and then a handful of other people who share the link…and in the in no time at all, you find that you have a large number of links back to your ecommerce website all coming from a vast array of other sites. This is the result that you are aiming for.

the name of the game is to attract as many new visitors to your ecommerce website! as it goes without saying that visitors are your potential customers, and you can never have too many of those.

Have a go at the following tried and tested link baiting techniques, you may be putting some of them into practice already:

Try Something Funny: Almost everyone loves a good grin or chuckle to brighten up their day. Using humor, posting a funny quote, short story about a funny experience, a cartoon or even humorous photo or video, having something that is funny is a great way to get people to notice your web site and achieve that click on the ’share this’ button. The result for the right post can be astounding, generating thousands of links to your website. One of the best things about humor is that people love to share it with colleagues and freinds and pass it along, which is obviously what you want to happen.

Competitions: This can be a sure fire way of getting passed around and shared if done correctly! All humans love a competition, who doesn’t like the chance of winning a prize? Offer a great contest on your website with what appears to be a great prize and you will be surprised how many visitors it generates!

Gossip or Controversy: There’s something appealing about a bit of celebrity gossip or a contraversial story that can stir the interest of a lot of people. If done correctly without being libelous, the results could be quite beneficial to your site.

Surveys or Polls: Offer one of these options on the right subject and the results could be amazing, it’s crucial that you set it up in a way that others can post it on their sites.

Freebies: Just about everybody loves something for free, you can never go wrong with a good freebie. It’s almost guaranteed that people will share and pass along to others the information of a decent freebie that they have found on the internet.

Lists: People like lists. Bulleted lists, numbered lists, any kind of list. Research has proven that posts or articles posted on the internet that have a number in the title will attract more readers.

A community: Consider setting up a ’shout box’ or even a forum on your site to deveop and promote a community feel. It’s a well known fact that people like a sense of belonging and being part of a community. Think of it as a pyramid scheme, get some initial contributors and they will then encourage others to join in and then those new one will also bring along some new contibutors and so on. Before you know it you have your community.

So if you aren’t already, give it some thought and try link baiting and see your e-commerce business grow.

Done Any Link Baiting Lately? is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Google’s New Sidewiki Good or Bad?

bobby — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:49:00 +0000

Have you come across this snippet of information in the last few weeks?

We have just stumbled upon an article that states on September 22nd, Google released a new update to their so-popular toolbar called SideWiki and looking at it, this update could spell all kinds of trouble for your ecommerce business!

Here is one of the articles that we came across http://www.marketersboard.com/google-sidewiki-controversy/

Basically, what it boils down to is that anybody using the Google toolbar (and we are talking thousands and thousands of people here) can add a comment to your website.

If they add good or complimenary comments about your site or business then obviously this would be very helpful to you and probably generate more sales.

The problem is, what if they don’t? What if they leave bad, negative comments that will obviously damage your business?

As it stands now, if a user has the Google toolbar and any sort of Google profile—Gmail, AdWords, AdSense or Google Checkout then he or she has free rein to make comments about your website in google search listings. The comments show up on the left hand side of the web site page.

This could be catastophic for your online reputation if your competitors or just some nasty person with a perverted sense of mischief decides to bombard your business website with malicious and harmful comments.

You can’t delete them.

You might notice a sudden drop in sales over a few days, and then check your website only to discover that someone has left a malicious comment.

It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, the visitors to your site have no way of knowing whether it’s true or not, do they? They’ll take it as gospel and run a mile without buying anything.

Not only are you unable to delete comments of this nature, there is no way to opt out, nor a moderation queue so that you can approve or disapprove later.Once the comments are made, they’re there until Google removes them At this point, that’s your only way of getting rid of them. If someone leaves untrue or malicious comments on your website, you are supposed to notify Google and then wait patiently for them to remove the unwanted comments.

You might have a long wait, as there seem to be a LOT of irate ecommerce business owners grappling with this problem as this is being written. So Google probably has its hands full at the moment.

An enterprising programmer has come up with a download called the SideWiki Comment Blocker. You can check it out and learn more about how to protect your business from this potentially very serious threat here: http://www.swikiblocker.com/?id=redspell

Hopefully Google will take action to correct this dismal state of affairs in the near future if enough people complain about it. But until then, you might want to consider getting the download to block unwanted comments.

Google’s New Sidewiki Good or Bad? is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Top 20 Social Media Sites

bobby — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:36:00 +0000

Social media marketing is now a sure fire way of helping to drive traffic to your ecommerce store.

Blogger, Facebook and MySpace are the giants, but there are others that will fit the bill quite nicely to help in your marketing campaigns. As an online store owner, you will need to always be aware of where the people you need to target are online most, and which of the numerous sites will fit into your social marketing strategy.

Some will definately be more appropriate to your online store and its available lines for sale than others. So you will need to spend a little time doing your research by browsing around each of the social media sites to establish which one(s) will be most appropriate to your needs. Find out as much about the membership of the site, where most of its members are located and average age of user etc.

For instance, some sites are favoured by and mainly populated with teenage members. If you are marketing to teenagers, then obviously this site would work well for you in your social media marketing campaign.Friendster is predominantly Asian. Baidu is out of China.

Maybe, if you are marketing your dropshipping business on a global level, it would benefit you to register on as many of these sites as possible and incorporate them all into your social media marketing plan.

Below is a list of the top 20 social media sites:

1. Blogger (222 million)

2. Facebook (200 million)

3. MySpace (126 million)

4. WordPress (114 million)

5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)

6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)

7. Flickr (64 million)

8. hi5 (58 million)

9. Orkut (46 million)

10. Six Apart (46 million)

11. Baidu Space (40 million)

12. Friendster (31 million)

13. 56.com (29 million)

14. Webs.com (24 million)

15. Bebo (24 million)

16. Scribd (23 million)

17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)

18. Tagged (22 million)

19. imeem (22 million)

20. Netlog (21 million)

This list is based on the membership figure research carried out by Comscore, a marketing and research company that measures visitors and so on in the digital world.

Once you visit each site and see what it’s all about, you can decide which ones to focus on. Unless you are super quick and have tons of free time to spare—or have somebody hired to take care of social media marketing—it’s not a good idea to join too many communities and spread yourself so thin that you aren’t doing justice to any of them.

Take your cues from the site. For example, if you sell photographic equipment and/or cameras, then Flickr would be a great site for you to join because it’s all about photos.

Whichever social media sites you decide to make part of your marketing plan, rest assured that if you do it right, you will see an increase in traffic to your dropshipping website!

Top 20 Social Media Sites is a post from: Dropship Resource

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eBay is Moving Goal Posts Again!

bobby — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:51:00 +0000

During the reign of the current CEO, there have been many changes to the policies and systems on eBay, and it has to be said that most of them are viewed as decidedly unfriendly to eBay sellers. The trouble is that eBay has the market sewn up amongst the online auction sites which leaves the auction sellers with very little choice of alternative venues to sell their wares.

Although there are quite a few other online auction sites, some with good usage in their native countries and others with what appears to be a worldwide presence, non have really given eBay a run for their money. What about Amazon? we hear you say, well we are really referring to auction sites, Amazon is a different kettle of fish.

So, if you are currently selling on eBay, or seriously considering doing so there are some perils and pitfalls on eBay that you should be made aware of. In fact, there are quite a few. We can’t deal with all of them in this article, so we’ll focus on a couple of the biggies.

Here is the Number One pitfall to avoid on eBay:

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, even eBay’s basket.

If your livelihood depends on your online sales, you should never, ever depend solely on eBay! As a back up, start your own website, ASAP we would advise this anyway as eBay buyers give you a mailing list to send your website newsletters and updates to. It is like a minefield on eBay for sellers these days, and more booby traps have recently been added by way of changes to their DSR policies.

Unless you sell in huge volume, all it will take is a mere handful of unreasonable buyers within a 30 day period to get you suspended from selling for at least a month if your DSR scores fall to an unacceptable level.

Can you afford to lose your entire income for a month? maybe 3 months? maybe indefinately!

If not—protect yourself!

If you are unlucky enough to run across a few bad buyers within a short period of time, with your own website to fall back on, you would have at least a some money coming in and who knows, if your site has been up and running for a while then with a little effort you should be matching or exceeding the number of sales you are making on eBay but if not then at least some sales are better than none.

Another pitfall to avoid: Don’t think of eBay as just your income. Sure, sell all you can. But besides your income from selling on eBay, think of eBay as a marketing tool. Use eBay to help drive traffic to your own website. They refused to allow sellers to post links to their own websites on an About Me page for a while, but apparently the uproar was so loud that the powers-that-be at eBay decided to recant and allow links again.

Post a link to your own website on your eBay About Me page! You are paying very high fees to sell on eBay, so get as much value for your investment as you possibly can.

Probably the biggest mistake sellers can make on eBay is to proceed as though it was the be-all and end-all for making online sales.

So, get your website up and running now!

eBay is Moving Goal Posts Again! is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Page Mage: A New Service to Enhance eBay Listings

bobby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:17:00 +0000

Ever heard of ‘Page Mage’?

Well it is a new web service created to enhance eBay listings and we think it definitely does that!

It is a third party tool that can help increase your eBay sales.

Page Mage allows you to create interactive, extremely eye-catching advertisements for your auctions, rather than the same old standard eBay listing page.

It is a flash-based Web service, so you can imbed videos, animated text, and image galleries to your listings. No worries about coding or special HTML knowledge—Page Mage has user friendly drag and drop tools.

Internet market research has proven that users respond best to interactive websites and ads.

Page Mage will certainly provide this, as well as allowing you to create much more appealing and engaging listings for your auctions!

It will provide eBay sellers with a great platform to leverage their own unique interactive branding. In addition to sprucing up your listing pages, you can also use Page Mage to create fantastic About Me, My World and other pages.

How Page Mage Works

After registration, you link your eBay account to your Page Mage account. From this point onward, any listing you create for eBay will be automatically published by Page Mage.

You design your item listing using one of more than 100 pre-designed templates on Page Mage. There is a great variety of themes, colors, and styles. The templates visually match several of the most popular categories on eBay such as clothing and antiques.

The templates are all editable. You can add media such as scrolling text, video and/or images to make your listing really pop!

There are step-by-step design links on the Page Mage dashboard, so you only have to click whatever feature you want to add….pictures, text, videos, interactive features, clip art gallery, picture frames, YouTube videos, shapes, pages and so on.

You can create multiple linked pages, also.

You can save your pages as drafts until you’re ready to publish the listing on eBay, and save the fully customized template for all future eBay listings if you so desire.

Page Mage has a 60 day Free Trial with no credit card required. It’s endorsed by dear old Griff, eBay’s alleged “seller advocate” and Dean of eBay Education, if this cuts any ice with you.

Competition is fierce on eBay. Page Mage might give you an edge that will make the cost of subscription more than worthwhile!

Page Mage: A New Service to Enhance eBay Listings is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Starting a Dropship Online Store

bobby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:03:00 +0000

For many people who are looking to establish their own business an online venture is considered by many as the way forward.
It’s no wonder as the size and complexity of the Internet has now grown to such a scale that it appears there is room for thousands or even millions of entrepreneurs to ply their trade and earn a living. When done right, an e-commerce venture can enable an entrepreneur to reap enormous benefits even if it is a home based one.
At the start, one of the biggest, and probably the most intimidating issues new entrepreneurs usually face has to do with supply. Online traders have to ensure that they have acces to a certain amount of stock, should someone wish to buy one of their advertised products. For a while, even owners of many online businesses had no choice but to flounder and sink under this kind of challenge.

Nowadays, online businesspeople have a better option…… dropshippping. When dropshipping, to a certain extent you can stop worrying about holding stock, because your wholesale dropship supplier takes care of that for you. You do not even have to worry about paying out large sums of cash to buy in stock that may not sell and take up valuable storage space, cluttering up your own home by filling it with bulky objects. You will not even need to outlay up front for packaging materials. This arrangement saves you both cash and effort and greatly reduces your initial financial risk. Using a dropship wholesale supplier means that you now have the time and energy to focus on some of the many other aspects of setting up and running a business.

In short, the work that is left for you to do yourself is to set up your site, promote it and market the goods available to people, receive payments from your purchasers, and use these funds to then place your order with your supplier. In some ways, it is not all that different from the way that traditional High Street retail establishments operate, so entrepreneurs with prior experience in such establishments will have an advantage.

Finding a good dropship supplier is critical to enable your success. Your reputation and customer base will rise if you manage to find a supplier that holds ‘in demand stock’ items at good prices that ensure a decent profit margin and who is reliable. On the other hand, if you have a dropship supplier that constantly delivers goods late, or in bad condition, or possibly both then this will cause you no end of grief by having to refund your purchaser and having you jump through hoops to salvage your customer satisfaction levels. You would be well advised to spend a lot of time researching to find a good supplier, because there are now quite a few out there that don’t necessarily promote themselves using the term ‘dropshipping’ so the good ones aren’t always that easy to find.

Remember that Happy Customers are the best advert for your online store!

Starting a Dropship Online Store is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Social Networking Online: Promote your Online Store

bobby — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:06:00 +0000

The idea has been around for a while now and it seems like the marketing tactic is taking the online business world by storm: social networking websites.

This is not without reason, or a vain attempt at appearing trendy. Research has shown strong evidence that this marketing ploy can boost your stores online visibility and therefore increase your sales. For example, the most rapidly-increasing group of new members on Facebook made up of people 35 years old, or older. This is an interesting piece of knowledge as it is these people that tend to have more money to spend than their younger counterparts. Twitter is a great business hot spot as well. Its 40 million users may seem a bit underwhelming next to Facebook’s quarter of a billion members, but an interesting fact to bare in mind is that the average Twitter user spends significantly more (about two-thirds!) money shopping online than the average Facebook user.

Recent studies also indicate that social networking does have a significant impact on what products people choose to buy. Yes, many buyers do start out having a specific product in mind, and then proceeding to make purchases via search engines. However, not everybody buys this way. Some people prefer browsing. They have a vague idea about what they want to buy, and can easily be influenced by the word of trusted friends and acquaintances on their social networks.

Larger corporations are now using social networking to sell everything from cars to pizza. As an example, Ford motors gave away a hundred Fiestas to some bloggers, in exchange for which the bloggers would have to make and display videos-not necessarily positive ones-about what it was like to use a Fiesta. In a similar manner, you can actually get your customers to do your advertising for you. Quite a sweet deal for you, since many buyers are more likely to trust the word of fellow customers than that of the person trying to make a sale.

The very nature of social networking websites-whether they be Facebook, Bebo, MySpace or any of the others can be very beneficial to you if you give it some thought. You can post store announcements like seasonal sales information or your entire online store inventory on some or all of the social networking sites, attracting many more visitors which will hopefully become loyal customers. This is because the very nature of these social networking sites is to link people who are friends, or friends-of-friends, or share some kind of common interest, even if they have never met. Or to put it another way, think of it like a pyramid, you can reach just a view people directly, but then the people in their networks will find out about you, and then the marketing just spreads like wildfire. You can even offer better perks and services for your customers, as social networking sites are constructed specifically to facilitate fast, easy contact. Its definately something to look into and experiment with. Find out how much it can do for you!

Social Networking Online: Promote your Online Store is a post from: Dropship Resource

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