Trusted reviews: personal computers, internet and web, webmastering
March 21st, 2006 — ecommerce
Author: Anthony Ellis
There are many systems that can lock your software or document, allowing you to control access to that file. But the problem arises with assuming that this will stop all theft. A well thought out, thorough protection system can deter theft, but it cannot stop it 100%.
An “unbreakable” protection system simply does not, and will never exist. If someone really wants your information, they can get it, even if it takes years of work.
September 30th, 2005 — ecommerce
Copyright 2005 Keith Gloster
You’ve heard about it many times in recent months. Being the business-minded person that you are, you most probably got curious and did some research of your own. But resources seem to be few, and what meager data you’ve found made you wonder even more…
I can’t blame you. There are quite a lot of reasons why information about drop shipping hasn’t fully invaded the internet marketing scene. The few sites that promise to teach you about this novel concept are usually full of crap. Often, they don’t even know the difference between a drop ship and a mother ship. They’d rather capitalize on the growing curiosity about the subject, and make a quick buck at your expense. But don’t let this discourage you.
September 30th, 2005 — ecommerce
Copyright 2005 Log Cabin Rustics
For small Internet retailers, drop-shipping is one of the best innovations since sliced bread. How else can a start-up offer a wide variety of products and convince customers that they have a fully-stocked warehouse—while investing virtually nothing in inventory or warehousing? Before you jump right onto the drop-shipping bandwagon, however, there are some pitfalls to avoid.
While a quality drop-shipper is truly a dream come true for the Internet retailer, there are plenty of painful pitfalls to avoid. Things can get embarrassing and costly in a hurry when a drop-shipper:
A Matter of Credibility
August 14th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Dave Davies
The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. This model has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.
July 24th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: K.D. Wiseman
Our website,www.bestofthehome.com has been listed in the Open Directory Project for over a year. Recently, I conducted a search of the ODP for my site, to update it, and found that it was no longer listed in any category.
I went to the ODP forums http://resource-zone.com to try to obtain information as to why this had happened. The editors and moderators of the forum informed me that websites that sell products via the drop-ship method do not get listed in the ODP, “because the content of these websites are not unique and the sites are just “order takers” for the wholesalers.” ODP will gladly list the wholesalers if they meet the ODP guidelines.
The guidelines for a site to be listed in the ODP Shopping/Home and Garden/Furniture Category are listed below:
“Submission guidelines include that the web site itself actually be a means of selling the Furniture products. Thus, appropriate product images and descriptions, specific product pricing and a means of ordering from the web site itself are required to qualify as a “Shopping” site.”
June 1st, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Scott Smigler
If you’re a small business with a goal of doing between $500,000 and $15 million in annual e-commerce sales, you need to learn more about Yahoo Merchant Solutions. And to answer your first question… no, Exclusive Concepts, Inc is not in any way affiliated with Yahoo. I’ve simply been persuaded over the past 6 years that Yahoo provides the most powerful and scaleable e-commerce solution for the small business that cares about search engine placement. Why should you care about search engine placement? Search engines are the single most powerful and cost-effective mechanism for driving qualified traffic to your site. What good is a great online store if customers can’t find you?
First things first – What is Yahoo Merchant Solutions (a.k.a. “Yahoo Store”)
May 12th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Heidi Richards, MS
In Part One we talked a little bit about what Ecommerce is, getting a domain name and setting up a merchant account. Ecommerce is more than that, much more. To have a really good online presence that gets people to stop and shop you need a strategy for success. Your strategy must include your USP or Unique Selling Position in the marketplace. What makes you stand out from all the other online entrepreneurs looking for the same type of customers as you? Can you stand out from the competition based on quality, price or benefits? Once you know your USP, you can begin the monumental task of telling the world about your site. A really unique selling position will give you an advantage over all the competition – well that and a lot of planning and investing of your time and money.
FOCUS
Emphasize the benefits and the results the customer will get from purchasing from you and using your product or service. You can discover the benefits by listing all the features and then converting them to benefits. List everything your product or service offers. For each feature list a relative advantage from the customer’s perspective. You can discover the customer’s perspectives when they buy. Simply ask them, “ Why did you place an order today or use our service?” BE very specific when creating your benefit statements. An example of this is, “You will save $100.00 sells better than “you will save money.” “You will loose 20 pounds in 10 days” sounds better than “you will loose weight.” Rank your benefits in order of importance to the customer. If you have enough of them, use bullet points for emphasis.
Emotion sells. People make most buying decisions with their heart and not their head. Paint a picture of the results the customer will get when they purchase from you. “ You will look 20 years younger.” “You will be $100 richer.”
Make sure you include a call to action. Want them to make a buying decision today? Give them a reason to do so. Offer a bribe (discount, bonus, something for nothing).
Your website must load quickly and function easily. If your site loads slowly people will get impatient and go elsewhere. Do all your links work? Have you tested your order page by running sample orders? Have you tested load time using different connection speeds? You can get a fr*ee analysis by visiting Submitplus.com.
Make your website easy to look at and read. I find dark background tend to be more difficult to read than do pale backgrounds. The overall look of your site should be clean and professional. When we were first creating the Women’s ECommerce Association, International we did everything in-house. Not being truly adept at HTML coding we thought we could just use a simple program to create a professional site. It was okay, but the one we now have is so much better. Why? Because we hired a professional. You can create a website with a good template program. We are using ECommerce Templates to create our new look for WUN Publications. It is simple to use and relatively inexpensive.
When it comes to graphics, be conservative. Sites that are laden with graphics and flash tend to take longer to load. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to do so, you will loose many visitors and potential buyers. If you must use graphics, make sure the files sizes used have been reduced as much as your image editing/compression software will allow.
View your site using as many different browsers as possible. In addition to Internet Explorer and Netscape, there is Opera, Mozilla, Lynx and those are just the ones that run on Microsoft Windows. WebMonkey has a chart of those supported by Macintosh, Unix/Linux and others. Also, many people will surf with their browser’s graphics switched off. Make sure you know what your site looks like without the graphics and that it is still easy for visitors to surf.
One last thought Make sure all your important information is above the fold. If you know that visitors are looking for something specific and you make them scroll down to find it, chances are they won’t.
© 2005 - Heidi Richards
About the author: Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s ECommerce Association, International www.WECAI.org (pronounced wee-kī) – an Internet organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” Basic Membership is FREE. Ms. Richards can be reached at Heidi@speakingwithspirit.com or heidi@wecai.org.
May 12th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Heidi Richards, MS
In 2004, Enquiro.com conducted a study of the search behaviors of men vs. women. They found that women spend more time in their searches and at specific sites. The study also revealed that women tend to be more deliberate in reading search results, linger longer at sites and have a greater satisfaction in the overall shopping experience. Another study conducted by iProspect.com revealed that women are more apt to click the paid search advertising because they find it more relevant to their searches than do men (WebProNews - July 14, 2004).
What does this mean? It means that if we understand the searching and shopping patterns of our target audience we are better able to create marketing strategies to effectively drive traffic to our sites. Don’t yet have a website?
Electronic commerce or ecommerce is used to describe doing business over the Internet. Selling products and services to customers over the Internet can be accomplished a number of ways and various levels of sophistication.
The first thing you need is a professional Web site with its own domain name. You need to design and promote a Web site. You’ll need access to expertise that can regularly design and maintain this Web site for you. A good website which gets visitors to return is constantly evolving and therefore, require ongoing attention. There are thousands of resources available for you to take advantage of, many of which are free. You can surf the Internet for what you need or you can simply visit www.WECAI.org to see the many resources we have listed. We have resources for guests and if you are a member we have even more resources to help you get started. In fact, you can search our domain registry and purchase your own unique domain name at www.wecaidomains.com.
Developing a business over the Internet requires many of the same major activities as starting any other business. You need a business plan, something to sell such as a product or service; you need customers and you may even need financial backing to get started. In addition, you need to market products to your customers, exceptional customer service practices and many other resources just as you do with traditional bricks and mortar enterprises. They may include inventory, fulfillment, shipping banking relationships and more.
Your store will need a “merchant” account, or the ability to process your customers’ credit card transactions over the Internet. This includes needing a “secure server,” (security certificate such as Versign or Geotrust) so that thieves cannot gain access to your customers credit information. Your merchant processing can be as simple as accepting payments through PayPal or as complex as a custom designed shopping cart system you pay for.
Getting a Merchant Account - If you have a good relationship with your bank and they don’t require a security deposit this may be your best option for setting up a merchant account. Alternatives to getting a merchant account through your bank are to go through a broker, a fulfillment house, or using third-party billing.
For more information on establishing an ecommerce presence check out the e-book entitled: Show Her the Money – The Woman’s ECommerce Handbook for Online Transactions (www.showherthemoney.com). If you are, or become a member of WECAI – www.wecai.org, this resource is yours with your membership.
© 2005 - Heidi Richards
About the author: Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s ECommerce Association, International www.WECAI.org (pronounced wee-kī) – an Internet organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” Basic Membership is FREE. Ms. Richards can be reached at Heidi@speakingwithspirit.com or heidi@wecai.org.
May 12th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Ray Yee
Choosing a carefully pinpointed niche market should be one of the first steps that an internet business owner has to take. A very common way of describing a niche market is ‘a targeted group of individuals with very specific and similar needs or interests.’ These people engage in similar activities and hence they would most probably demand the same goods or services to cater to their needs. Online businesses that drop ship their products to their customers would thrive by focusing on a specifically targeted niche market. In this article, I would focus on the advantages a niche market can bring to an online Drop Ship business. This article also provides you with practical steps for you to select your niche market.
By focusing on a specific niche market, Drop Ship businesses gain an edge because they are like ‘monopolies’ for that particular niche. The ‘monopoly’ for that niche would be able to provide a much wider range of products and better services for that market, enabling it to dominate. Because there is a very large number of niche markets on the internet, most Drop Ship businesses are able to survive and thrive online by selecting a niche that no major competitor is targeting, and directing their marketing efforts to their respective niches. With limited resources, a small Drop Ship business just starting out cannot hope to sell ‘mainstream’ products that are also supplied by huge competitors like Wal-Mart.
It is critical to first establish a market with an unfulfilled need and then develop products or services to meet these needs. Most online ventures fail by first selecting a good product, and then looking for the market for that particular product. They fail when the product’s demand is insufficient, or when the product already has a strong competitor supplying to the market.
The internet is not the only medium where niche marketing dominates. In our corporate world, the majority of the successful companies also selects a niche market and develops products or services that cater to their specific niche. Microsoft develops software as operating systems and platforms for computers. Nike offers shoes and footwear targeted at the sporting population. This illustrates the importance of first selecting a niche market for your business to focus on.
There are a few simple stages in the selection of a niche market:
1) Brainstorm for niche markets that are related to your area of interest or expertise. It is simply easier to succeed if you focus on an area that you are passionate about and have the most expertise in. This way, along the learning curve of starting an online business, the frustrations that you face along the way will be reduced because whatever you are doing feels more like fun instead of work.
2) Research the market in detail. This involves producing a detailed profile of your market, including the estimated demand for your products, the products in the niche likely to have the highest demand, and where these prospects normally congregate online.
You can use the free Overture search term suggestion tool to gauge the market size for the products you have in mind. It is available at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Simply type in the product keywords and this tool can suggest more specific keywords, and also the number of times this word has been searched over a period of time.
Chat rooms, forums and newsgroups are where your target market normally congregates online. By monitoring these discussion boards, you should be able to determine the evolving needs of your target market, and what new product is likely to be in high demand soon. Forums can also be a good source of ideas for your products. Google Groups is a good place for you to start finding newsgroups or forums for your niche market. It is available at http://groups.google.com.
3) Select a niche market that has a need not currently being adequately met instead of targeting a niche whose need a competitor can fulfill very well. From the newsgroups, discussion boards and forums, you can get valuable information about business opportunities. For example, if consumers voice out their dissatisfaction about any unfulfilled need, you can quickly find and offer any product as a new solution to their problem. This fills a ‘gap’ in the market and your business is established.
4) For the niche markets that do not have their needs adequately met, conduct research on the major businesses in that field. If there are no major competitors, you can congratulate yourself on finding a suitable niche market for your Drop Ship business. If there are several major market players, you have to either develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to differentiate your products from your competitors, or you can narrow down the definition of your niche market to a more specific level. For example, if your niche market is the group of individuals passionate about oil paintings, you can narrow down your focus to abstract oil paintings by Rembrandt or Renoir.
If you want to be a retailer of Rembrandt oil paintings, for example, note that your competitors are not the websites selling oil paintings from all artists, but the websites that focus only on Rembrandt oil paintings. All things being equal, an online shopper will certainly choose a website focusing only on Rembrandt oil paintings, instead of a website selling paintings from all the famous artists. This is the edge that a niche market can give to a small Drop Ship business.
You can use the free Overture ‘View Bids Tool’ available at http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ to gauge the competition for your products. Overture is a Pay-Per-Click search engine, which provides search results ranked in order of how much businesses are paying for every click-through to the business websites. This tool lists the amount that each business is paying for every click by visitors. The higher the bid for the keyword, the more popular the keyword, thus the stronger the competition you face for your products.
5) Test your market. Once you have confirmed your niche market, you must test your products for that market. Start off your business by selecting a few of the most popular products and placing them in your catalogue. Next, you announce your products to newsgroups and discussion boards and gauge their response to your products. Observe how well the individuals are reacting to the introduction of your products. If you did your research properly and fulfilled a need well, most probably you would receive a very warm response from forums and newsgroups.
Finally, as the online retailer for your niche market, you should aim to be the best online resource for the market. Articles, strategies and guides should be included on your website to provide your niche market with valuable information. For example, you can write your own guides on how to properly use tools for magician tricks if that is what you are selling. However, it is not advisable to start off by selling an enormous catalogue of products. You should first establish your credibility by supplying your market with useful know-how for the products, and recommending them a few popular products. As your business stabilizes, you can slowly expand your business catalogue to include other products.
Selecting a niche market is one of the most important steps for setting up a Drop Ship business. It lays the foundation for how your business will develop in future. Thus, spend some time carefully deciding on your niche market before taking the plunge into your business.
You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the Author’s resource box with the article and the entire article remains unchanged.
About the author: About the Author: Ray Yee is the founder and president of Dropshipperscentral, a website which provides a wealth of informative articles, tips and resources on everything you’ll ever need to know about setting up a Drop Ship Business and marketing it. Click here for the Wholesale Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com
May 12th, 2005 — ecommerce
Author: Ray Yee
Simply put, business plans can make or break your business. Starting a Drop Ship business online is no different from starting a traditional non-online business. With the strong emphasis individuals place on writing business plans for starting up non-internet-based companies, it is equally crucial to prepare a business plan for your online business.
A business plan serves many important purposes for the online business. First, because the business plan has a detailed list of the tasks to undertake, it is a call to action for you to promote your business actively and not procrastinate on your marketing efforts. Second, it provides a blueprint that describes your company effectively: the market, the products and the steps you need for effective marketing. This serves to guide your business through the months ahead.
Business plans normally comprise of five sections:
1) The Objectives. This section will describe the objectives for the venture, and the mission statement that defines the online business. It states both the financial and strategic objectives and is normally about one page long. There should be a concise description of the Drop Ship business at the start. A brief example:
‘Magical Stores Online is an internet company that provides quality tools and resources for magic tricks. We aim to consistently provide magicians with reliable tools for conducting magic tricks, and also accurate information and guides on how to properly perform the magic tricks with our tools. In our first year online, our target is to have U.S. $400,000 in revenues and $100,000 in profits. This can be achieved by attracting an average of about 5000 visitors to our website every month through effective internet marketing. Our strategy is to attract recurring traffic to our website by continually updating the useful resources and information on our website. Magicians will constantly return for more useful tips on magic tricks. This cuts our marketing costs drastically and adds to our profit margin.’
2) The Executive summary. The executive summary should contain a few important details. It should outline the basic model of the company, how the business functions, the market environment, and also the business opportunity in the market. A continuation from the previous example:
‘Magical Stores Online is a retailer of magic products on the internet. We specialize in card and coin tricks and stage magic, and classify our products according to age group, skill level, features, and the occasion they are used for. Magicians can browse the product catalogue on our website and buy their products with a shopping cart software. They can choose to pay either by credit cards or by checks. We use a third party credit card merchant to process our payments, hence eliminating the need to have a merchant account ourselves. A profit is realized whenever a sale is made, because we obtain our products at a wholesale price and we sell them at a retail price. Since our supplier, Company XYZ, drop ships the products directly to the customers’ address, we do not need to hold any inventory. Our market comprises of magicians of any age group who specialize in card and coin tricks and stage magic. The opportunity lies in the internet as a marketing medium for magic products. Since the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s, we find that the major magic product retailers do not use the internet effectively to market their products. With effective internet marketing skills, we believe that we can reach a wider audience than the other major players, thus claiming a large market share.’
*Note that in a real business plan, the business owner should aim to provide a more detailed version than the examples given above. The examples here only serve to illustrate an overview of what the basic business plan should encompass.
3) Marketing Strategies. In this section, you will describe the steps you intend to take in order to market your business effectively on the internet. There are a few basic marketing methods available on the internet. Mentioned below are three of the most popular methods.
- Email Marketing. Ezines and newsletters are powerful tools. It is simply the most cost-effective form of marketing on the internet. Sending out email promotions or newsletters to your subscriber base costs virtually nothing, except for the time you spend on writing your newsletter. With the web form on your website, you can capture the names and email addresses of the customers who subscribed to your newsletter. I do not recommend that you send your subscribers with product promotions regularly, but you should continually provide them with useful tips and information. In this way, you establish your credibility as an expert and maintain a strong relationship with your customers, instead of appearing as someone just out to make money. Promotions for your products should only be sent out about once or twice a month.
- Search engine optimization. Optimizing your website for high search engine results on google, yahoo and msn, is a powerful way of getting large volumes of traffic at low cost. However, you have to put in a lot of effort for a long period of time, as top rankings do not appear overnight. There are two factors for search engine optimization: On-page or Off-page optimization. On-page optimization involves tweaking the page title, header and meta tags to include the website keywords. It also involves scattering the keywords throughout the page to improve the site relevancy. Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is much more important than on-page. It involves soliciting links from relevant websites. The more the websites that link to your site, and the higher the importance/relevance of the website linking to yours, the higher your website will be ranked on the search engines. Google places a very strong emphasis on this.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) Search Engines. This requires you to pay a sum of money for every visitor that clicks through the search engine to your website. The higher the amount you pay, the higher your website will be ranked on the PPC search engine. The basis for profiting with this marketing tool is by bidding less than the amount that each visitor to your website is worth. Overture is definitely the market leader for pay-per-click search engines.
4) Competitive Analysis. In this section, you have to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and the factors that will differentiate your products or services from your competitors. You have to analyze your competitors and record what makes them so successful, and also the weaknesses you can capitalize on to get an edge in the market. For example, competitors may not be using email marketing effectively to promote the products to customers. You can capitalize on this by using newsletters more intensively, establishing your credibility as an industry expert. To differentiate an online Drop Ship business, it is more viable to provide a reliable service from your website. This usually means providing a wealth of tips, articles and information for your visitors. This will attract them to continuously return to your website for the latest tips and resources that will benefit them. Fast response to their email queries and also fast shipping are also good services you can provide.
5) The financial projection section. In this section you can project the profit-loss statements and the cash flow statements for your business. The profit-loss statement records the monthly profit/loss realized over the months, while the cash flow statement records the difference between revenue and expenditure over the months. The costs for an online Drop Ship business will include:
- One-time costs for software like shopping cart software, email marketing software, and also search engine optimization software.
- Recurring costs for the wholesale price of the products, web hosting fees, a proportion of revenue paid to your third party credit card merchant to process your payments, and also internet marketing costs.
This section will be useful for you to gauge how your Drop Ship business performs according to your expectations.
In conclusion, business plans do not only apply to real-world businesses, but are equally critical to online businesses as well. They serve as blueprints of the companies and also as strong calls to action for the aspiring internet entrepreneurs to achieve their success in ecommerce.
About the author: About the Author: Ray Yee is the founder and president of Dropshipperscentral, a website which provides a wealth of informative articles, tips and resources on everything you’ll ever need to know about setting up a Drop Ship Business and marketing it. Click here for the Wholesale Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com