Sellers Guide To eCommerce
Recently we read an news article on the topic of Poverty In America. The figures though startling, we really not that far from what we thought.
The CNN article dated August 27, 2004 says, and we quote, " The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.3 million last year, while the ranks of the uninsured swelled by 1.4 million, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. It was the third straight annual increase for both categories. While not unexpected, it was a double dose of bad economic news during a tight re-election campaign for President Bush. Approximately 35.8 million people lived below the poverty line in 2003, or about 12.5 percent of the population, according to the bureau. That was up from 34.5 million, or 12.1 percent in 2002.
The rise was more dramatic for children. There were 12.9 million living in poverty last year, or 17.6 percent of the under-18 population. That was an increase of about 800,000 from 2002, when 16.7 percent of all children were in poverty. The Census Bureau's definition of poverty varies by the size of the household. For instance, the threshold for a family of four was $18,810, while for two people it was $12,015."
We have pretty much thought that poverty had increase dramatically. It made sense. The internet and sites like ebay had grown at recording breaking speeds during the last recession. With more jobs off-shored, more jobs lost in America due to off-shoring, more employers trying to avoid paying benefits by hiring cheap temporary workers, there is no way the figures good be good.
The number one question we are asked by new internet users, and those savy internet users, who have recently lost their jobs, is "How do I get started?". That is a tricky question, and the only way I can answer it generically is to say four things.
1. Do what you know
2. Find out what sells
3. Get it cheap
4. Sell it cheaper than your competitors
Doing what you know is almost always the best idea. This means if you have always been in hardware, then you need to sell hardware. If you were in the garment industry, sell garments, if your lifelong hobby has been fishing, do something fishing related. Go with what you know. The exception is this. If what you know is not popular, then unfortunately you will have to learn something new. To do that, you will need to do alot of research on the more popular product line.
The best way to find out what sells, is to go to ebay. Browse the auctions there and see what items closed WITH bids in the highest percentage. The way to begin is to first find a high volumn seller in the catagory, then do a search on him and find all auctions closed in the last 30 days that he listed. How many closed, as a percentage, and what was the average price? Now, see if his price is lower than his competitors. If he was pretty much the norm or lower, it tells us that his price is the price to beat or match if he is a volumn seller. Note how many bids he had on each item. This tells us popularity of the product.
Also, see how many competitors he has. How many items are listed total in that ebay catagory? Keep checking the ebay catagories, one by one, until you have a list of products and product lines that are popular and you know what retail price point you would need to sell them at.
Next, go to the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. and search for those products at wholesale. You will be searching for wholesale xxxx, xxxxx wholesale distributors, xxxxxxx wholesalers, xxxxxx manufacturers, xxxxx closeouts, xxxxxx overstocks. As you search for those terms, put the main players in your favorite folder in your browser. Create a favorites folder called wholesalers, and bookmark all the distributors there. Who had the best price? What where their terms? What were the minimum orders? In the search results you will find our listings over and over. You might as begin here when you start looking for suppliers.
Now, you know what to buy, and where to buy it, you need to know how to sell it. The one product that sells the best on the web is, wholesale. Everybody wants to buy wholesale, the public, and resellers. If you can it cheap in volumn, resell at wholesaler in mini lots to those ebay sellers and small website owners who can't afford to buy in volumn. If you can't buy in large volumn, then you can start at etailing and then move up to wholesale. You can always offer at wholesale only select products, not all products you sell. The name of the game in ecommerce is to keep your monthly reaccuring costs low. For that reason, you need a cheap host, but they must be realiable. If their system is down alot, it is costing you money, and making you look bad.
The really important thing here is to get a professionally looking site. There are 30 million website on the internet, and about 90% of them look cheesy and don't make a dime. With all the choices on the web, savy internet shoppers know a flight by night site when they see one, and will click off those sites faster than you can say the word BANKRUPTCY. It needs to have a nice clean look, be easy on the eyes, look professional, and be well organized. When possible, cross market the goods as much as you can. For example if you have a huge collectible doll inventory, put the dolls in toys, but also in collectibles. Place a wind chime in Yard and Garden, but also in Home Furnishings, Home Decor and Household.
One of the biggest mistakes a new ecommerce business makes is sign up for the click programs. Those programs offer visitors by the tens of thousands for $20 or less. The problem with this, is the traffic is not targeted, and the clicks are not from shoppers. The clicks are from other business owners who are trying to earn clicks at the ratio of 2 to 1 for their own site. Yes, you get a flood of traffic, but they do not buy.
Don't waste your money.
Other problems that you will overcome are low traffic and sales in the spring and summer months. Internet season is fall/winter when more people are inside, the weather is colder, and more people are on the web. This is normal. During the spring and summer, especially the summer, you work on your site, expand it, and make it bigger and better for fall/winter. Fall and winter you concentrate on email Get right on customer queries. As well, beware of international customers, posing as United States customers, who will no doubt have a stolen credit card. The best way to protect against it, is to require a phone number, and have the phone number and shipping address match the credit card billing address.
With a stolen card, the phone number doesn't match the shipping address or the billing address, 99.99% of the time. The phone number is frequently a stolen cell phone. This may mean calling the credit card issuing bank to get this verificiation. Normally, you will not get this problem with orders under $100. The trend is to place several small orders in the $200-400 range, then a big order of several thousand dollars or more, all in one month. Make excuses to call your customer to verify this or that, and check at www.whitepages.com to see that the name and phone and addresses match your information.
There is much to learn when you start something new, and ecommerce is no different. The best thing can do is deal with professionals who have wholesaled and retailed, and have master ecommerce. They will help you through the pitfalls of ecommerce, and help you become a success. You are not going to get rich overnight on the internet, but if you keep at it, get a good product line, and a good price, and try to sell cheaper than your competitors on the web, you will begin to build a long term web business
Lighthouse
Wholesale Clothing Distributors Directory
Free Wholesale Womens Clothing Distributors Resources
Free Wholesale Childrens Clothing Distributors Resources - Free Wholesale Mens Clothing Distributors Resources
Your source to the wholesale lingerie trade, includes addresses and phone numbers to some of the largest lingerie manufacturers in the industry.
