The Wholesale MisconceptionWritten by Chris Malta
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In fact, a few days ago, I went online and bought a couple of SmartMedia memory cards for my digital camera. I could have gotten them for a very cheap price that I found on 'Net, but I chose to pay $5 more each for them because cut-rate site looked cheesy, and I was not sure I could trust them. I was more than happy to pay extra ten bucks total when I found same products at a higher priced site. The site was well-built, easy to navigate, and went out of it's way to explain it's customer service policies to me. I'd rather spend an extra ten bucks and be confident that cards would show up at my door than lose thirty bucks plus shipping to a site I didn't feel I could trust. As a small business owner, you should remember to choose comparison areas very carefully. Too many people simply go to big search engines and look for absolute lowest price on earth, and then give up on selling that item if they can't beat it. That's wrong approach, as I've mentioned above. You need to be comparing prices against sites that will be seen in same places that your site will be seen, and even if your prices are higher, you can bring in sales by building a clean, focused site. Alternatively, you can simply sell models that others are NOT selling. After you begin to earn some profit, you can then start to buy and stock better sellers in quantity, lowering your price, if you really want to. Even then, you're going to run into stores that stock a lot of merchandise, and are getting price breaks on greater quantities. This allows them to sell at a lower price. Go around them. Sell models that they don't, from same brand names. You don’t have to purposely go head-to-head with big superstores. They don’t carry every product ever made on earth. Sell something in same general brand and product lines that they DON’T have shelf space for! Besides reasons mentioned above, there are also too many people who buy entire pallet loads of last year's closeouts, liquidations, and refurbished goods, and claim that they are NEW. They get that junk at "rock bottom" prices, and of course, sell them dirt-cheap, fooling customer (and other Internet retailers) into thinking that they have corner on best wholesale prices around, when they DON'T. The important thing is to work effectively within framework of available products and prices, and work around those who have millions of dollars available to stock inventory. That's what THEY did in order to EARN those millions in first place. You can do it too. I know it's frustrating to be just starting out, and thinking that you can't succeed because of competition from large stores. That's just not true. We're succeeding at it, and so are thousands of others. You just have to be willing to be flexible, and to make serious decisions for good of your business. You may have to give up selling certain products that you personally like, in order to make money on other products whether you like them or not. You’re in business to make money, not to satisfy your personal taste. One thing I tell people all time is that it’s very important to “jump through hoops” and form a LEGAL business. It’s right thing to do, and it’s ONLY way to work with GENUINE wholesale suppliers. However, anyone in business will tell you that hoops never end; not for home businesses, and not for big businesses either. Even big guys spend much of their time "hoop-jumping" in order to be successful. Imagine how purchasing agents at CompUSA feel when they spend a million dollars on 19" monitors so they can sell them for $329, and a week later, they find that Best Buy spent three million buying up same monitor at a better price break, and is now advertising them for $298. Suddenly CompUSA can't compete. Should they throw a tantrum, and berate wholesaler for simply performing normal function of a wholesaler? Of course not. They can simply stop advertising that monitor by itself, and bundle it with an entire computer system that has it's own serious price breaks, and move monitors that way. Adapt and improvise. There are no magic bullets, even though there are plenty of people who will tell you that there ARE. Don’t believe them! When you’re in business you will always have to compete. It's all part of sales, on Internet or anywhere else. Chris Malta WorldWide Brands, Inc. For more information, visit http://www.YouCanDropship.com
Chris Malta is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. He has worked with computer Systems for 18 years. He's been involved in eCommerce systems, networking and site design for more than 6 years. He's taught college-level computer courses in Western NY. He developed The Drop Ship Source Directory, and he and his partners at Worldwide Brands, Inc., publish the Directory and run eCommerce sites of their own using Drop Shipping as their only business method.
| | What Should I Sell on my Site?Written by Chris Malta
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So let’s check out competition. We want to know how many other people are selling Fiskars products in Yahoo Shopping. So we search on “Fiskars”. Only 54 stores selling Fiskars products right now! That’s considerably better than 497 stores selling electronics we were considering. Are these store devoted to selling ONLY Fiskars products? Wow…not a single one! All top search returns are stores selling general merchandise. When we build a store, we like to specialize in one product line. There are many benefits to this; chiefly fact that customers feel more comfortable in a store that does one thing, and does it well. It’s also much easier to rank a single product line in major search engines than it is to rank a general store with lots of unrelated products. Ok, we have a product line that we feel will sell, and competition in Fiskars brand name itself is minimal and unfocused. However, when people search for garden tools, they’re going to use search words like “Trowel”, and “Pruning”. They’re not going to search on term “Fiskars” very often, unless they’re looking for scissors. So, we go back to Yahoo Shopping search engine. We search on “Gardening Tools”, and we find 113 stores carrying 324 products. Still not much competition. Even better, NONE of these stores are focused on just gardening tools. They are gift stores, general merchandise stores, etc., who just happen to have word “Gardening” somewhere in their product description. We know that we can put word “Gardening” in our very product names themselves (ex.- “Gardening Trowel, Steel, 9 Inch”), and we will show up right at TOP of a search on word “Gardening”. We search on word “Pruning”, and find 81 stores carrying 418 products. Still not a problem, since top returns are BOOKS on pruning, and rest are more unfocused sites. After a little more searching, we’re convinced that we’ve found a product line that will sell well for rest of Spring and Summer. Since it only costs us $100 a month to open another small Yahoo Store, we more than happy to do it. In Fall, sales will slack off, but we have other stores that are geared toward Fall and Winter merchandise. They are also small and focused, and no matter how many Yahoo Stores we open, we know that each one of them will easily cover it’s $100 a month cost, and turn a profit of some kind all year ‘round. Of course, now that I’ve opened my mouth and told everyone about Fiskars, we’re going to have to scrap that idea and go back to drawing board! That’s OK, though…we have nearly half a million others to choose from. (NOTE: The numbers mentioned regarding search results were at time of writing of this article, and will have changed. The point remains same!) Chris Malta WorldWide Brands, Inc. For more information, visit http://www.YouCanDropship.com.
Chris Malta is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. He has worked with computer Systems for 18 years. He's been involved in eCommerce systems, networking and site design for more than 6 years. He's taught college-level computer courses in Western NY. He developed The Drop Ship Source Directory, and he and his partners at Worldwide Brands, Inc., publish the Directory and run eCommerce sites of their own using Drop Shipping as their only business method.
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