Dropship Resource » General Tips

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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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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Can Micro-Blogging Improve Your Ecommerce Business

bobby — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:05:00 +0000

Does your stock inventory or prices change on a regular basis? or do you often send mass updates to your customers? Well if your ecommerce business is one that needs to send short messages to users frequently then micro-blogging is the way to go!

This method enables you to connect with customers or prospective customers without a big investment in time or effort. Plus, you can connect with consumers without the necessity of being in front of your computer.

The facility to Micro-blog allows you to stay in touch while on the move pretty much anywhere you might be where you at least have access to your mobile phone. After all, how many of us actually leave home these days without our mobile phones?

Micro-blogging is well worth considering as a way to stay connected is not only quick—it’s easy! These two features alone make micro-blogging an invaluable tool for the business owner or ecommerce entrepreneur.

As you can only send out a limited amount of text, the amount of information you are able to send in a micro-blog is actually a huge plus for you and it’s also a great plus for your customers or potential customers too.

Why?

Because they’re most probably busy too. Most people now lead busy, rushed and hectic lives with packed-to-the-limit schedules and timetables. It’s hard to get a person’s attention! especially if they receive what they feel is a hard pitched lengthy message that on first appearance can look like spam. Even if they had the desire and inclination to open and read a lengthy email or blog post, they probably don’t have the time.

But a micro-blog, on the other hand, is suitably short and sweet. It’s concise and to the point. The recipient won’t mind this so much as it doesn’t take up much of their time or attention and most of them will respond to it favorably. After all, you can be criticised for having too little communication or interaction with your customers just as much as you can be for sending out a deluge of unwanted correspondence. So a short and sweet message or update using this method shows a consideration to your customer which should be appreciated.

Building goodwill for your business is of paramount importance, anything you can do to facilitate that feeling of goodwill is a benefit!

Here is a list of what is deemed to be the Top 5 Micro Blog Websites so you can create an account and take micro-blogging for a test drive:

Twitter – This is the main player according to the industry currently. It was started in July 2006 and has grown rapdily ever since. This free service gives you the options to post status updates via Text Messaging (SMS), e-mail, or web browser. The great thing about Twitter is the fact that it has opened its platform to allow third party developers to build applications on top of it!

Jaiku – Jaiku is considered the main competitor to Twitter. Most features are similar to Twitter as well. We already seem to have the Google / Yahoo competition brewing!

Tumblr – This one inlcudes a variety of features. Text is a staple, but also photos, quotes, links, chats, videos, and what is nice is the fact that you can select different templates for your micro blog along with being given the option for a ‘custom’ template if you want to get into the CSS of your template.

Six Apart – (formerly Pownce) Is one of the latest entries into this space. Besides text messaging, it allows users the ability to share links, files, and events with anyone on their contact list.

Frazr – Last but certainly not least is the international entry known as Frazr. This is the Twitter of the French and German markets. Of course it is very similar to twitter in its functionality.

There are over 150 international micro-blogging websites services. All have similar features with a few bells and whistles extra.

Besides your current or prospective customers being appreciative of the time-saving aspects of receiving micro-blogging messages from you, staying in touch with important updates or things that you think might interest your customers will help to instill some trust in your business. The importance and value of building trust in you from your customers or those who you hope will become your customer at some point cannot be underestimated!

When you are micro-blogging and staying connected to your customer base and potential buyers, you are, in essence, reassuring them that you care about them and that you aren’t just some fly-by-night operation who will take their money and run. You’re letting them know that you’re around for the duration and that they can count on you to stay connected!

Can Micro-Blogging Improve Your Ecommerce Business is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Mistakes to Avoid When Dropshipping Online

bobby — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0000

So you have done your homework by spending hours researching the items that you intend to sell, studied your competitors and their prices/marketing and service, devised your own business plan that includes your amazing strategy to achieve a high search engine page ranking and attract millions of customers each month to spend their hard earned cash in your store ……… No?

O.K. read on……

When starting up an ecommerce dropshipping business, it’s always helpful to know what to do, it sometimes feels like there is all the information that you need right in front of you, but your brain goes into overload when trying to digest and make sense of it all and then apply it to your business.

However, it’s probably more important to know what not to do, the list of don’ts is probably longer than the list od do’s but here are a few suggestions that should feature high on the list to consider.

Some of these mistakes may seem like common sense, but you would be surprised at how many hopeful entrepreneurs frequently make them, to their regret.

Don’t build your business around a product or products that nobody wants:

Yes, it happens. Many aspiring ecommerce entrepreneurs have sunk small fortunes into building lavish websites filled with something that they’d be hard pressed to give away, much less sell. You might have stumbled across an item that you believe is just the absolute most exciting, innovative and indispensable item on the internet. The problem is this: if nobody else agrees with you—you’re sunk. So, before creating an entire website around any product, test it out on friends and family first. Drill down deeper in your product research and have your friends and family members survey coworkers and others in their social circle about your wondrous widget. You can’t realistically expect everybody to like it, but if almost nobody likes it, go to Plan B and find something else to sell.

Don’t overbuild your website initially:

Having a positive attitude is great. Being an optimist is commendable. But there’s a difference between being optimistic and rushing in where angels fear to tread. Its best to build a professional looking website and take all the necessary steps to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Then, see if it gets traffic and sales in sufficient quantity after a reasonable length of time to make it a profitable proposition to continue. It may not. But, if it doesn’t, take heart, learn from the experience and move on. You can try again, and again until you succeed. It’s not like you are only allowed X number of attempts at being successful, a set limit of attempts and then no more. In reality you can go on and on until you finally hit the jackpot, if that’s what it takes. But if you have invested every penny that you have into the first venture, you’re seriously in trouble if it doesn’t take off. So in short, be optimistic, but be prudent and hedge your bets at the same time.

Don’t build a dropshipping website that you can’t maintain inexpensively by yourself:

If you need to hire professionals to design and build your website, fine, but make sure that it will be easy for you to maintain without their help after it’s up and running , after all if you have to pay somebody to do routine website maintenance, it will be a never-ending drain in your finances. If you hire somebody to get it off the ground, make sure that you convey to them your need to be able to handle everyday maintenance thereafter and ensure they let you know what information you will need to do this.

Many thousands of people just like you have created successful ecommerce dropship stores just in recent years alone. So can you ! if you work hard at it and take note of the above!

Good Luck!

Mistakes to Avoid When Dropshipping Online is a post from: Dropship Resource

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How to Make Your Dropship Website Effective

Amanda Brooke — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:57:00 +0000

Do you monitor your e-commerce store on a regular basis?

What steps are you taking to make your online dropship website more effective?

If you have an ecommerce business, one of your top priorities should always be making your website run like a well oiled machine! Some entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that once they get a great website designed and built, it’s finished.

But, the fact is that a great website is never finished. Instead, it is always and forever a work in progress. In order to stay on top, a smart entrepreneur will be continually testing, improving, tweaking and otherwise tinkering with his or her website.

Here are some tips for helping to keep your website in optimum performance mode:

At least once a week or so, check your site for any broken links. Don’t just assume that there aren’t any. Test them and make good any that you find

Test the speed of your website frequently. Are pages loading quickly? If not, you’re wasting your advertising and marketing dollars, because regardless of how much traffic you get, if your pages load slowly you’ll be hemorrhaging visitors at a rate that will soon prove fatal to your business. Internet shoppers are notoriously impatient. So, test those pages often to make sure they’re up to speed.

Make sure that your coding is squeaky clean. HTML coding must be clean in order for accessibility, search engine ranking and compatibility to function as it should. You can check your code FREE at http://validator.w3.org/.

While it’s imperative that you add fresh content to your dropshipping website often, check to be sure that you are maintaining a consistent brand and voice throughout the site. You need to be really careful, when adding new content, that you don’t muddy the water and drift too far away from your branding and unique message.

If you want to really stay on your toes about keeping tabs on your website, sign up with a service such as http://www.howsthe.com/. There are paid plans available, but for the average online home business, the FREE plan is fantastic! It will monitor your website and send an email if anything is amiss.

Take care of your dropshipping website and it will take care of you!

How to Make Your Dropship Website Effective is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Dropshipping Made Easy and Fun

Nikole Cruise — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Much of the time, business advice is to do solely with increasing profits. However, advice concerning at-home work should take a broader approach. After all, many people choose to work at home not only because it is often more cost-effective, but because they wish to make time for other pursuits, or because their regular office work has sunk into the doldrums. Therefore, advice about dropshipping should do more than tell you how to make more money. It should also indicate how dropshipping can be made more efficient in terms of time, and also more enjoyable. Here are some tips reflecting this more holistic approach to dropshipping advice.

1. Know what tasks and objectives are the most important to you. In other words, keep your priorities straight. This is an integral part of planning when it comes to allocating resources, like time and money. It will also be of especial use to you in an emergency. Instead of getting swamped by the new circumstances, you will already be aware of what truly needs your attention, and what you can afford to change or let go. In fact, all this holds true not just for business, but for your personal life, as well.
2. Learn about and exploit modern communications technology. You may know the basics, but there are plenty of gadgets out there that might make business even better and more convenient. For example, being able to receive and answer email via your cell phone means that you can conduct business while on the go. You will be able to use commuting time to get work out of the way, instead of staring into space waiting for your journey to end. Assuming you are not driving, of course! In addition, you can try to program certain functions of your website to work on their own, so that you do not have to keep doing repetitive updates.
3. Understand your business processes, and find the particular tasks or segment of time that have the most direct impact on your profit. Focus on those tasks, instead of spending too much time on other aspects that will not influence your profit much.
4. Obtain support, if you need it. Try to determine the business tasks that take up inordinate amounts of your time. Perhaps certain tasks are necessary, but far too time-consuming. Or perhaps you do not yet have the expertise to accomplish certain programming tasks. You might actually make more money if you invest in the salary of one or more support staff, or outsource certain tasks. For example, if you do not know the intricacies of site building, you may choose to buy a turnkey solutions site, which does a lot of the complex initial programming for you. Think of it as dropshipping made easy by giving you a template you can quickly use and update. It is true that some people choose to work at home because they like working alone. However, if you pick the right assistants, work can become not just efficient but a positive joy.

Dropshipping Made Easy and Fun is a post from: Dropship Resource

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Free Return Service and other Dropshipping Tactics to Net More Customers

Nikole Cruise — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:05:00 +0000

If you own an eBay shop or plan to get one, there are certain principles you can use to sell more products.

The first is to pleasantly surprise your customers. Give them more than what they feel they are entitled to. Of course, the most important thing to know is exactly where the bar is. What do customers insist on, and how can you top that? The best approach is to recall some of the times when you were surprised, too. What did store staff do that went beyond the call of duty? Did they give you bonuses, or extra service? Answer these questions, and apply the answers on your site.

The second is to be trustworthy. You might choose to be a customer on eBay before you open your own shop, so you can become a practical eBay expert that your customers can rely on. Try to get happy customers to give you good reviews, so that new visitors have some evidence that you are a good seller and that your products are all they are cracked up to be-and more!

Return policies are an important part of a trustworthy image. Returning products should be a free dropshipping service in the sense of being a total-not partial-refund. Customers have come to expect this because the absence of a money-back policy means that you expect people to be dissatisfied with your products, and are guarding yourself against the results of your incompetence. A return policy makes you seem more believable.

In addition, don’t be afraid to really sell your product. Many sellers make the mistake of laying out the important product details, and just leaving it at that. In fact, you should make it a point not just to talk about the product, but about how great the customer’s relationship with the product will be, and how the product will improve his/her life-whether for practical reasons or for pleasure.

Also, pay attention to your schedule. No, there is no need for you to glue yourself to your computer, but do check your Inbox frequently so that you can answer inquiries as soon as possible.

You should begin to use this information to improve your sales right away! Good Luck!!

Free Return Service and other Dropshipping Tactics to Net More Customers is a post from: Dropship Resource

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