Dropship Resource » Website Appearance

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

Sphere: Related Content

Why Should Online Shoppers Buy From You?

bobby — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:01:00 +0000

Without wanting to state the obvious but……

competition is fierce in the world of online retailing. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, unless you have designed and made it yourself the chances are that you aren’t the only online store selling the same item.

In fact, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of other e-commerce websites selling exactly the same products as you.

So, why should any online shoppers buy from you and not one of the many other online stores?

In order to stay on top of the heap and achieve those sales, you have to ask yourself that question…..and then do your best to answer it and take the required action!

Let’s say that you sell a popular and very well known brand of work boots called bestevaboot. When any online shopper does a Google search for “work boots” or “bestevaboot” they will be bombarded with many pages of results.

So, what can you do to set yourself apart and above the rest of your competitors selling these bestevaboots? How can you convince the shoppers to part with their cash and buy from you instead of the multitude also offering the exact, identical product?

Well, you might try reducing your price to undercut your competition, but this is definately not advisable, simply because it’s a mission to failure, a game you can’t and won’t win. There will always be competitors who will lower their prices even more so than yours, in the hopes of acheiving a sale. This may happen for a short while, until either you or yet another competitor comes along and cuts prices even lower. Ultimately, you wouldn’t have any profit left, and that defeats the whole purpose of being in business, doesn’t it? So definately rule out the idea of trying to sell your products cheaper than everybody else.

What else might you do to make your e-commerce site stand out in the crowd and encourage shoppers to buy from you before anyone else?

One proven tactic you might consider is making your website more interactive. Internet marketing research has shown that shoppers really, really love websites that allow them to interact. You may have to shell out some bucks to hire a pro to do this for you, but sometimes you simply have to spend money to make money.

Or, another proven option is to make your product descriptions a bit more appealing and descriptive. Many entrepreneurs vastly underestimate the importance of good, informatime (and not forgetting accurate!)product descriptions. So food for thought there….don’t make the same mistake, that will give you an edge over a lot of the competition.

Think about it for a moment, if you are selling bestevaboot work boots and your competitor is also selling bestevaboot work boots and his product descriptions reads “Leather work boots. bestevaboot. Brown.” and your e-commerce store description for the same pair of boots reads “Bestevaboot: Rugged, high quality work boots since 1901. Rich brown smooth leather, high cushioned padded collars, steel toes, lug soles for extra traction, waterproof and insulated to keep your feet dry and warm—built tough and made to last!”

Which site sounds like they offer the better deal?

There are other ways to get shoppers to buy from you instead of your competition, these are just a couple of suggestions to guide you in the right direction.

Put your thinking cap on and jot down some ideas of things you might to do increase your competitive edge, maybe experiment with your ideas and then in theory you will be watching your sales increase!

Why Should Online Shoppers Buy From You? is a post from: Dropship Resource

Sphere: Related Content

Tips for Making the Best Wholesale Dropship Website

Nikole Cruise — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:08:00 +0000

To many owners of online business, it seems that setting up shop on the Internet is fundamentally different from owning a traditional brick-and-mortar store. In many respects, this is true. However, both types of businesses do bear certain similarities, because customers shopping online often look for the same benefits available to them in more traditional stores.

One of these benefits is the presence of store staff, especially if it is the customer’s first time on the premises. A store-owner may have marked out the locations of certain item categories, but it might still be a bit difficult for a new buyer to find precisely the product that he or she wants. It is therefore very reassuring to find service or sales staff willing to help the customer find his or her way around.

A similar issue exists for online stores. Your customers need to find their way around your site easily, but this time, without the presence of staff at their beck and call. The best wholesale dropship websites structure themselves so that customers can find the products and information that they want without being inundated with extra sales-talk or misdirected by a confusing navigation system.

One of the best ways to do this is to include an internal search engine on every single page, so that the customer can jump to something else or get their bearings whenever they want. Every page should also lead easily to FAQ pages or contact information where they can get help.

Site content as well as site structure can also play an important part in making a website either user-friendly or frustratingly difficult. For example, you should try to guess when you are being guilty of TMI Syndrome, or giving too much information or sales talk. Yes, it is important to include important facts about your products, such as specs, unique functions and tips for optimal usage. However, it is sometimes safe to assume a certain amount of basic knowledge on the part of your prospective buyer. After all, you are not introducing an unfamiliar product. Rather, the customer found you, most likely by typing the relevant keywords into a search engine. Therefore, they must have known something before they showed up at your website. In addition, resist the urge to advertise your other products too much. A person who is looking at a product page for a camera will probably be very annoyed if large parts of the page are filled with marketing material for computers and mp3 players, as well. In that case, the customer might even become so annoyed that he or she will leave without purchasing anything.

The best overall guideline is to try to think like a customer. If you visited somebody else’s online store, what kind of experience would you like to have? What kind of site structure and content would encourage you to buy something, and even come back for more at another date? Keep that question in mind, and start improving your website.

Tips for Making the Best Wholesale Dropship Website is a post from: Dropship Resource

Sphere: Related Content

5 Ways You Can Lose Customers in Your eCommerce Business

Amanda Brooke — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:24:00 +0000

While there are many differences between online ecommerce businesses and traditional brick and mortar stores, there are a lot of similarities, too.

Think about some of the most obvious things that would make you not want to shop at a traditional brick and mortar store:

High prices
Dirty store
Unfriendly and/or pushy salespersons
Lousy customer service
Messy and disorganized, hard to find anything
Bad location

All of these showstoppers can be applied to online stores, as well!

Who wants to shop where the prices are astronomical, especially now? Everybody in business wants to make a profit, naturally. But you can’t throw out the baby with the bath water. If you set your prices unreasonably high—so high that no one will buy from you, then zero sales equals zero profit, right?

Your online store will turn people off if it’s sloppy. Misspelled, poorly written, ungrammatical web copy is the equivalent of a brick and mortar store where nobody has swept the floors or washed the windows in ages. Make sure that your online store is “clean” and tidy!

You might wonder how an online merchant or salesperson could be unfriendly. It’s simple: If your web pages, checkout process and every phase of doing business with you isn’t geared to be user friendly, then it’s the same as a disinterested or unfriendly salesperson in a brick and mortar store. Ditto for pushy-ness. If you are laying on so much overblown hype that your online customers need hip boots and a shovel to dig out of all that manure, it’s no different than a pushy, clingy, very annoying sales clerk following a customer around in a regular store.

Lousy customer service is lousy customer service, be it in a traditional store or in cyber space.

If your search function and links don’t function in the most user friendly ways possible, or if your products are poorly organized and hard to find, it’s no different than going in a disheveled store where items are strewn around on the shelves higgledy-piggledy, with no rhyme or reason. Who would want to take the time to try and find what they want? It’s a shopping trip, whether actual or virtual, not a scavenger hunt.

As they say in the real estate biz: location, location, location. If your online store is using a free domain that doesn’t work right half the time, or if you have named your business and domain some off-the-wall, obscure thing that nobody would ever think to search for—then you are going to enjoy about as much success with your ecommerce store as a brick and mortar store would have in downtown Nowhereseville, population 11.

To avoid losing customers, employ some of the common sense tactics that you would use in a traditional store!

5 Ways You Can Lose Customers in Your eCommerce Business is a post from: Dropship Resource

Sphere: Related Content