Entries Tagged '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

Author: Ray Yee

Your website is your tool for showing the online community an image of your Drop Ship retail business. Whether or not your business succeeds depends heavily on your website. If your website design is user-friendly, more visitors will purchase your products or subscribe to your newsletter. This will ensure that you are not wasting the time and money you spent attracting visitors to your website. It does not pay to drive large amounts of traffic to your website and have 99% of them leave due to poor content and navigation.

When designing your website, it is important that you switch from your own profit-oriented perspective to the prospective customers’ perspective. First place yourself in your customers’ shoes. After which, you should take some time to sit down and plan how your website should look like.

Below I will describe the factors that contribute to a successful sales-optimized website for a Drop Ship business.

1) The critical components of your homepage.

- Your title tag. It should describe your website effectively and concisely. For search engine optimization purposes, it is necessary to include your main keywords in your title, without it being unnecessarily long. For example, a good title would be ‘Renaissance Oil Paintings ½ Abstract Oil Paintings’.

- Your headline. Being one of the first few elements of your homepage that captures the attention of the visitor, it should clearly and concisely state what benefit your website can offer to the visitor. For example, your headline can tell your visitors how to earn extra income, how to lead a healthier lifestyle or how to save them time or money. In short, it should offer a solution to their problems, or address their needs. The headline should be placed strategically right at the top center of the page. You can also use the italics or bold functions to draw attention to your headline.

Internet surfers are not known for their patience. That is why it is crucial to capture their attention during the first few seconds of their stay at your website. Your headline plays the most important role, as it is usually the first thing that visitors see. Research has shown that you have about ten seconds to fully capture the attention of the visitors and compel them to read on, before they leave your site.

- Your content body. In your main body of your homepage, you have to describe in further detail the benefits your website or your products can offer to your visitors. Note that you provide the benefits, and not the features of the products you are selling. This is the basis of effective marketing: you tell the customers what is in it for them. You must also give strong directions to action in your content body and tell them the steps they need to take in order to benefit most from your website. For example, you can include links like ‘Click here now to discover why our oil paintings are among the best in Europe’, or ‘Sign up for our free newsletter now to get the latest tips and guides on good gardening practices.’ Note that you have to be concise in your content body so that you can include the most attractive benefits near the top of the homepage, without the visitor having to scroll down.

- Your opt-in offer. Ask for your visitors’ names and email addresses in your opt-in offer box. Email marketing is central to the success of your Drop Ship business. First-time visitors who leave your website without buying anything have a chance of signing up for your free newsletter. This allows you to keep in contact with them and send them promotions in future, and your effort and money in attracting them to your website would not be wasted. This feature should be placed somewhere near the top left or top right of your homepage because of its importance.

2) Professional look/atmosphere. Your website must not be full of graphics, banners or flashing advertisements. These only serve to distract your visitors from your main product offers. You should avoid flash animation as well. When formatting your text, use only a single type of font like Times New Roman, and two different colors at most. Page backgrounds should preferably be white or plain, and not be patterned or fanciful.

Another important factor to keep in mind is to minimize the time that your webpage takes to load. Since visitors are normally very impatient, they are likely to leave if a page is slow to load, hence the need to exclude large graphics or animation which slow down your loading speed.

3) Good content. Most online retailers sell products in a niche they have expertise in or which they are passionate about. For visitors to be convinced of your authority in the niche, you need to establish yourself as an expert in that area by providing useful, reliable content. Customers tend to trust retailers with strong background knowledge as they can recommend the best products for the customers’ needs, or answer any queries well. Fly-by-night businesses, on the other hand, are just out to make money, and normally do not have the necessary expertise to earn the trust of customers. It is thus critical that you make a consistent effort to update your website regularly with the latest tips, resources or articles to serve your visitors well. At least even if visitors do not buy from your website on their first visit, they would continuously return to your website for useful information. After a period of time, when you have earned their trust, they would feel more compelled to buy your products. This form of marketing, which develops an online community, is a very cost-effective method as it costs next to nothing to supply the necessary information.

You can find free articles for reprint at: http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.ideamarketers.com, http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.freesticky.com, http://www.amazines.com.

If you would like to create a forum on your website, you can use this free forum software at http://www.phpbb.com. It is very easy to set up and only requires you to create a database with your web host, with some customization.

Of course, you can also go for the option of writing your own content on your website. When writing your content, remember to include your keywords evenly throughout the content for search engine optimization purposes.

4) Good navigation. This is another strong determinant of the success of your website. For a website to look ‘professional’, it has to be well organized into categories, and the pages must be linked to each other and to the homepage. Your navigation bars must be placed consistently at the same area on every page of your website. Navigation bars are most commonly placed on the left hand side of the page or at the top of the page. If you have numerous different categories on your navigation, it makes sense to place them on the left of the page. However, if you have only about five to seven options, you can place your navigation bars at the top of the page.

Use text links for your webpages on your navigation bars instead of graphic links. One factor that search engines like Google use to determine the relevance of your webpages is by the inclusion of keywords in the text links to that page.

It is also crucial that you name your navigation accurately and descriptively. Visitors would instantly know which link to click on to find what they want. If your website is cluttered with many obscure links, visitors would feel lost and leave your site immediately.

Organize your content well so that your visitors can navigate your site easily. They should be able to find what they want with the least number of clicks possible. Research has shown that for any extra click that visitors have to take to reach their goal, the number of visitors leaving your site can reach as high as 50%!

When deciding what to include in your navigation bar, first place yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about what they would be most interested in when they visit your site, and place these links near the top of the page. Other links, which are secondary in importance for the visitor should be placed nearer the bottom of the page.

5) The standard pages. Like every other online business, your Drop Ship business website should also include some important pages that serve the customer.

- Testimonials. This page is considered as a ‘must-have’ for many online businesses. When you display the testimonials of other customers on your website, your credibility is established. Testimonials are like votes or ratings for your business that shows the real value of what you offer. The better the comments from customers, the better your website would appear to prospective customers. You can choose to place a separate testimonials page, or you can select a few of the best testimonials and place them on your homepage.

- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). After you have described your benefits in detail, visitors would still have several queries about your products. It is thus useful to create an FAQ page to write down the answers to what your customers are most likely to ask. When visitors have questions, they can simply visit your FAQ page, instead of sending you their queries by email. This saves you a lot of trouble for answering individual emails. Remember that most customers are not willing to make purchases when their doubts are still unanswered.

- Contact Us. Having this page boosts your reliability as a business. Remember to include your email address, mailing address and telephone numbers on this page.

- About Us. Describe what your team and your business aims to do.

- Privacy Policy. Customers value their privacy highly on the internet. When they submit their personal information like email address or mailing address on your website, fears about privacy may arise. You thus need to include a privacy policy to reassure your customers that their personal information will not be abused or given to any other third party. Remember to place links to your privacy policy on your order pages and also your opt-in offers.

HTML editors like Macromedia Dreamweaver are useful for those unfamiliar with HTML. Dreamweaver can be found at: http://www.macromedia.com/dreamweaver.

In conclusion, whether or not your website generates sales determines heavily on the design and navigation ease. You should definitely spend more time planning on your web design and navigation well before plunging into constructing it.

*You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the Author’s resource box with the article.

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

Building a Web Store on Shoestring Budget in less than Four Hours

Author: Nowshade Kabir

Starting a business online is no longer as difficult as it used to be! Now, there are plenty of interesting business ideas that anybody can pick up from various Internet resources. Startup related cost, which used to deter many in taking action, has become negligible. Many people already started to notice this! According to a recent report GoDaddy has gained 294,368 new sites in just the first 5 months of 2005 while the top four domain registrars combined, including GoDaddy, have gained more than half a million. Mind it! This is not the quantity of domains registered, this is the quantity of websites hosting with them! This recent explosive growth means one thing. Online business is on the rise!

So, if you have one or several products to sell to a large geographical area and you would like to start an online business fairly quick but you don’t have much money to spend on it, there are still ways to do so.

Using the integrated features of many portals you can start your dream e-commerce site on a shoe-string budget within several hours. I am going to show you how to do this on Rusbiz.com.

Sign up Preparation needed: Write an informative, precise but easy-to-read profile of your company in less than 600 words. If your company’s name is less than 12-letter long you are fine. If not, choose a nice name, preferably, by shortening the company name. This you will require for login name. Create a logo for your company. You can do it later if you don’t have a logo as yet.

Steps: Register your company by filling up the membership form. Choose a membership other than basic. You need an option with the ability to build a web store. Copy and paste your prepared profile. Once you submit the form you will be taken to a page called My Business.

Time required: Maximum one hour including preparation.

Add products to the e-catalog This step will help you create electronic catalog of your products that you will use on your website as well.

Preparation: Take digital pictures of your products. Each picture should not be more than 100 KB. Make thumbnail versions of your pictures. Thumbnails should be less than 10 KB. Both pictures and thumbnails should be of JPG or GIF formats.

If your product requires special instructions, schemas, etc., make an electronic copy of them as well. This should be of doc, txt, or PDF format and less than 50 KB in size.

Steps: Now from your My Business page click on the “Add Product” button. You will be prompted to “Add Product” page. Next step is to select the correct subcategory, where your product should be listed. First, choose the main category and than keep on selecting the right subcategory until you end up on the final subcategory. This E-catalog is based on USPSC, electronic classification standard, which offers a ten-digit, five-level logical hierarchy for organizing products and services. Once you successfully selected the fifth level subcategory you will be prompted to a detail form. Add all the necessary information about your product. Insert the pictures in the designated places. Once you finished, submit the form. Continue doing the same for all the products. You have just created your first electronic catalog!

If you face difficulties, as a premium member you don’t have to go through the steps outlined above, you can just send all the required information to Rusbiz customer service and they will take care of your e-catalog.

Time required: half an hour including preparation.

Build your web store You will be surprised to know that part of your web store is already created from the information that you have inserted so far! From My Business page click on Manage web store in order to check and edit what you already have so far and what else do you have to do. Your web store has 9 more pages apart from the product pages. The pages are Home, Contact, Company events, Services, Employee information, Company News, Surveys, and FAQ.

Preparation: You can gather information for some of the vital pages to give your site a professional look and feel. As the pages are template based, you can edit and insert needed information, whenever you like.

Steps: From Manage Web Store the first thing you should do is configure your web store. This means, you have to select currency of your choice, payment and delivery methods. Next you should choose which of the products you would like to display on your home page. I’ll also suggest you to fill up some of the above mentioned pages, i.e. employee bios, etc. This gives your web store a human touch.

Voila! Your e-commerce website is ready to go!

Time required: Maximum two hours including preparation.

Here are the advantages of having a web store like this one:

• You don’t need to know HTML • Navigation and editing of your website is easy and simple • You receive instant access to Rusbiz community of thousands of prospective customers • Shopping cart is an integrated part of the package • Membership allows you to sell products through Rusbiz e-marketplace • As a member you are also allowed to use Rusbiz business process management system • You will get access to other useful features of Rusbiz system • Your website will be indexed by major search engines within a matter of days

The best thing about this method is you can start with 3 months Simple Membership for just US$ 65! If you need to use a domain name, you can readdress it to your Rusbiz web store. After a while, if you feel that you require a full-fledged e-business website, professional developers from Rusbiz can take care of this as well. As more and more people are getting involved in online business, if you don’t start now, you might miss the boat! So, take action!

About the author: Nowshade Kabir, is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com – a Global B2B Exchange with solutions to create e-catalog, Web store, business process management and other features to run a business online. You can read various articles written by Nowshade Kabir at http://ezine.rusbiz.com.