Tag: online store

Build an eCommerce Store

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October 23, 2010 at 2:49 am Filed in:Uncategorized

When starting your drop shipping business, you need to decide where to sell your products. Many people like eBay because it’s a highly trafficked marketplace with lots of hungry buyers. Unfortunately, theres also tons of competition and they charge ridiculous fees that hurt your margins. Other people like to sell on Amazon because they don’t charge listing fees and offer a similar amount of traffic. But again, they charge high fees and have very strict rules. The third option is to build your own online store, and that’s what we’ll discuss here.

Building an online store may sound intimidating, but it’s actually a lot easier than you’d think. There are lots of premade shopping cart solutions available to you that can be customized to your liking with minimal programming experience. Shopping cart software is a type of script that allows you to easily add products, add descriptions, options, pricing, and more. They also should include an integrated shopping cart and payment processing options.   All you have to do is populate it with products, descriptions, graphics, and features.  Here are a few of the best solutions for building an online store:

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

Yahoo offers a shopping cart solution that is highly customizable and gives you everything you need to start selling as fast as possible. This includes your web hosting, software, payment processing, marketing tools, and more.  They even help you customize it with detailed tutorials and support.  Plus your store automatically gets listed in the Yahoo shopping directory.  They charge $39.95 per month for all this, but it’s well worth the simplicity it delivers. If you want to build your own online store but don’t want any of the hassle that comes with it, this is a good option.

Zen-cart

Zen-cart is a free open-source shopping cart software that is a spinoff of the popular osCommerce software. It’s highly customizable, it comes with hundreds of free add-on modules, templates, marketing tools, and most important of all, its free! This solution is a little more difficult, and requires you to have your own web hosting, but is fairly easy to learn. Most of the modules and add-ons you need are already premade and available for download.  It’s cheaper this way, but requires more work on your end. On the plus side it’s much more customizable. This is how I build my online stores.

Whichever solution you choose, you will already be ahead of most other dropshippers. Many people rely completely on eBay to sell products. Having your own website allows you to utilize tons more marketing tools and get a lot more customers. Plus, you can always sell on eBay as well. I highly recommend building your own store if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Of course, the most important part your drop shipping business, as always, is finding the right products.  Check out Salehoo for a huge directory of legitimate wholesalers and dropshippers.

Best Dropshippers

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October 23, 2010 at 2:36 am Filed in:Uncategorized

Looking for the best dropshippers? We all are. Unfortunately, finding the best dropshippers is no easy task. Most of the companies you find in the search engines are not legitimate companies. Most of them are middlemen that give you marked up wholesale pricing and sometimes charge monthly fees on top of that. Many times they will offer you a premade online store or other cookie cutter solution.

It sounds like a great deal. A premade store packed with products just ready to sell? Sign me up! Unfortunately, these sites will NEVER make you any money. They sucker thousands, sometimes millions of people into these deals, and the only one who makes money is the middleman.

Think of it this way. If there are thousands of other people selling the same products in the same basic store with the same wholesale pricing, why would anyone buy from you? Don’t try to answer that, because i’ll tell you right now, they won’t! You can’t win with a generic solution like this. Even though it sounds so easy and so profitable, it really isn’t.

Search engines hate cookie cutter sites and duplicate content. Your online store will NEVER have any authority in a search engine if you go this route. And forget about selling on ebay or Amazon. You’ll never be able to beat the pricing and product selection that a real dropshipper supplies. The only one who wins in this relationship is the middleman.

If you’re trying to find a real wholesale or dropshipper on the internet, you’ll be sorely dissapointed.  The best dropshippers and wholesalers do not advertise in search engines.  All you will find in the search engine are middlemen and scammers.  To find the best dropshippers you’ll need to either start looking in offline business directories, making phone calls, driving to their locations, writing letters, etc.  Either that, or use a wholesale directory.

So if you really want to know where the best dropshippers are, forget about using a search engine. Take it from me, nothing good will come from it. The best dropshippers are found in wholesale directories like Salehoo or WorldWide Brands.

I have already been scammed, ripped off, and generally disappointed by many of the most common wholesalers and dropshippers. Check this out to see what I got out of it.