Why not make sure web site you use works as hard as you do to establish credibility? Let's look at elements that can be built into a well designed web site to enhance credibility in eyes of your potential customers.

1. Offer A Guarantee Nothing beats a solid, believable guarantee for building credibility online. It may be hard to believe but buying via Internet is still unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, territory for majority of people. It is up to you, business owner, to put their minds at ease.

One way to do this would be to offer an unconditional, 100% money back guarantee. Include cost of shipping and handling in your guarantee. By assuming all of risk, you will earn instant credibility points with most potential customers.

2. Provide Contact Information Even best guarantee won't help establish credibility if potential customer can not contact you. Post accurate contact information on your web site and make it easy to find. Provide as many methods of contact as possible, do not simply post a link to an email address.

For maximum credibility, post complete mailing address, phone number (preferably a toll free number), and email addresses for customer's to use if they feel need to contact you.

3. Use Testimonials Testimonials are Internet equivalent of word of mouth advertising. They can be very effective tools for building credibility provided they are believable. To get quality testimonials, ask your past customers for their opinions.

Obtain their permission to use their word and names as part of your advertising. Do not use celebrity endorsements, most people assume these are paid endorsements.

In a reselling relationship, reseller is not an employee of service provider, but instead acts as an extension of larger company's marketing, sales and support operations. The reseller markets product independently, and signs up customers to original provider's service, often providing simple side of service, like offering basic tech support and administration of account.

On service provider's side of deal, a reselling program allows a business to expand its customer base without overextending its marketing and sales operations. From reseller's side, a reselling program allows a small, independent operator to profit from a small piece of Internet services market without requiring a lot of technical knowledge, or a big investment in infrastructure.

THE FIRST STEP

The first step in a successful reselling venture is defining what type of product/service you want to resell. A big mistake most new resellers make is cramming lots of different products and services into a website.

Start small, start with 2-3 related products that you can resell and support with ease, then expand into a broader range of products and services as your client base grows. If you have experience in a field, choose a product that flatters your knowledge, create a niche market, and then expand.

HOW TO SPOT A GOOD RESELLER PROGRAM

An excellent higher-tier Web host truly values its relationships with resellers. Through such relationships, a company enhances market reach of its product and services offerings through reseller's specific market segments.

A higher-tier company will thus offer a myriad of specifically tailored services to enhance reseller's service offering. By providing a wide range of options, a reseller's business can scale along with its customer base.

The options, or resale models most usually made available to resellers include "volume discount" reselling, discount per domain, affiliate and private label reselling.

VOLUME DISCOUNT MODEL

The volume discount approach provides increased revenue per domain as reseller increases number of accounts within their hosting portfolio. This model is extremely cost-effective for larger resellers, since cost per account declines as volume of accounts increases.

The major disadvantages of this model however are that resellers are usually directly identified as resellers, since infrastructure and brand identity throughout entire Web hosting service is usually identified with higher-tier hosting provider.

The model also is not very advantageous to newer and smaller reseller operations which have just started-up, since reselling under this model is much more expensive if reseller's customer base is small.

DISCOUNT PER DOMAIN MODEL