How to start your online business with drop-shipping

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By using drop-shipping firms to handle your orders, you could route all your ecommerce site's orders to wholesalers, and they will drop shipped your order directly to customers. And you as the online retailer can eliminate the expense of carrying inventory and the risk of being stuck with the goods if these goods didn't sell.

Before you get started, consider these seven steps involved in starting a drop-ship e-business:

Step 1: Decide to sell your products with or without your own website

You can start your drop-shipping e-business either with or without having your own website. If you decide to sell with your own domain name, then you need to get your ecommerce site up. If you do not want the hassle of getting your own ecommerce site, then you could build your online store at eBay. eBay e-store site builder allow you to build your online store easily.

Step 2: Decide products to sell

Then, you need to decide what types of products to sell at your online store. You could identify a group of products such as electronic products, household electrical appliances, cell phones & etc. It is advisable to identify similar products or products under the same category to sell instead of totally different category products such as shoes and CD player. Because, by selecting products within the same category, you can give your customers more choice to choose from, and you can group two or more products in a bundle for promotion or marketing activities and you get more sales on each transaction.

Step 3: Locate suppliers who will drop-ship for you

After identify your products to sell, you need to look for your drop-shipping suppliers. On time delivery is important to ensure the satisfaction of your customers; hence, be sure you check for the drop-shipper performance record before you sign-up an account with them. Discussion forum, message board and blogs are sources for you to find some hints or comment for the drop-shippers. Or you just simply key-in the drop-shipper name on the Google or Yahoo search box; you should get some information of your selected drop-shipper.

Step 4: Set up an account with the drop-shipper

Once you select a drop-shipping company, you need to set up a reseller account with the company. This can often be done online or by phone, but some companies will require that you complete and return a reseller application to open an account. Some may also require a tax ID and a business license. Most drop-shipping company will charge some fee to open their reseller account.

Step 5: Advertise the product for sale online

Many online retailers failed in their drop-shipping e-business because they could drive traffic or visitor to their website and convert these visitors to the actual paying customers. To get traffic to your product page (either your website or your eBay e-store), you need to advertise your products so that your products get exposure on internet and attract targeted traffic to your product page.

There are many ways to advertise your products. You could advertise on eBay, use pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement service such as Google Adword or Yahoo PPC. Or you could go for the cheapest but equally efficient way in driving traffic to your e-store: Article Marketing. You could write a review on your products in an article and put your e-store URL at the end of article or at the author resource box and submit them many article directories for maximum exposure. Many internet visitors will drop-by to your e-store via your URL link at the end of your article if they are interested to know more.

Step 6: The Product Sold & Place Order To Drop-Shipper

Once your have product sold, your customer will pay you on your selling price via your online payment system such as PayPal. And you place the order with your drop-shipper and pay them via their payment system at the agreed price, which is lower than your selling price, so that you could earn the profit.

Step 7: After Sale Follow Up

Many e-business entrepreneurs will miss out after sale follow up portion. Just because your customer has paid you and you have placed the order with the drop-shipper, it does not mean that this is end of the loop. Because if there are problem occur, you are the one who need to responsible in the eyes of your customers. Hence, you should follow up with your drop-shipper either via phone or email to ensure that ship out your order to your customer.

You should proactively follow up with your customer to ensure they have received their order and satisfy with it. Offer yourself as the personal contact for any issues that may arise. This is also a great way to sell customers more products because if your customers are satisfied with your service, they may give you repeat orders.

In Summary

By integrate drop-shipper into your e-business, you can forget about inventory handling issues and find a shipping partner to fulfill orders for you; all will be done by your drop-shipping partners. By following correct steps to set up your drop-shipping e-business, you can save your time and efforts in getting your business started faster.

How to really annoy your web site visitors

It is quite easy to build a web site. It is even easier to really annoy your web site visitors.

Build A Winner

Anyone can build a web site. Building a good web site is another story. Web designers can easily avoid some of the most common mistakes by watching out for the following pitfalls:

1. Pop-Ups – Pop-ups can really annoy a visitor as these advertisements that open automatically in a new window can be quite distracting. The visitor might be interested in looking at the content of your site but a pop-up can force the visitor to focus on other things. A better way to annoy visitors is by having pop-ups that spawn more pop-ups when the visitor tries to close the first one.

2. Never Ending Web Pages – Another way to annoy your web site visitors is by putting mass amounts of information on one long continuous page. The visitor will keep scrolling endlessly down the web page only to get lost in web site content unrelated to what he or she was looking for in the first place. Long pages are one of the easiest ways to make a web page look hokey. It is much better to keep web site pages short and sweet so that it is easy for the visitor to get right to the information that is being looked for.

3. Excessive use of Graphics – Some web developers think that by using flashy graphics they can attract visitors to their site. Instead, the visitors are likely to get irritated. Too many graphics will make your web site download very slowly. Due to slow download speeds people might leave your web site before even knowing what your site has to offer. In this fast moving world, nobody has spare time to sit and wait until your web site pages load. This is particularly true for the 42 percent of people still on dial-up.

4. Under Construction Pages – Another way to irritate your web site visitors is by diverting them to a page which reads “under construction”. Most people try to find content oriented web sites and if they come across your web page that reads "under construction," the visitor is likely to be annoyed, having spent time getting there with no positive result.

5. Plug-Ins – Some web sites use plug-ins that visitors have to install before they can view the web site. This is one of the easiest way to really annoy your web site visitors. Some people feel that if they like a particular program then others should like it as well. A web developer might like a good-looking icon program which needs to be installed before his or her web site can be viewed. If the program is obscure and not used by most people, this will only be a source of discontent when things do not work properly on the site. Don’t make people download software to see your site. Never ever make them take extra steps to do something.

6. Lack of Content – Most people like content oriented web sites that give information on specific topics. Even search engines love content-based web sites and will rank content heavy sites higher in search results. Usually people visit a web site to see what benefit the site can offer them. Lack of proper content results in annoyed visitors leaving the web site.

7. Music – A few years back music was quite common on the web and many web sites had music that automatically played. Gradually people have realized that music creates a lot of distraction and is a nuisance to a lot of people. If you really want music then a choice should be given to the visitor to switch it on or off. Remember, may people surf the web with music playing already or while sitting in their office. When a web site automatically plays music, it will aggravate them to no end.

8. Inconsistent Page Design – Some sites are designed in such a way that after moving from one page to another the visitor feels as if he or she has come to a totally different web site. There should be some uniformity in page design or else visitors will feel lost and disoriented.

By paying close attention to factors that can annoy web site visitors, web site owners and designers can keep their visitors happy. Following, or rather not following, these eight web site annoyances, webmasters can make the most of each web visitor.

Fraud protection and e-commerce

Fraud Protection on the Short term

The bad guys that have this debit card data are not going to attack online merchants for goods that they will have to convert to cash. They have been walking straight to the ATMs for the green dollar.

The impact on merchants in the CNP world will be minimal; certainly no more than a few numbers of credit cards but probably less. I do not think the CP merchants will feel it much either. Consumers, on the other hand, are going to take a huge hit. As you probably know, credit card holder's liability is limited to $50 under FTC regulations but I do not think there is any such limit for debit cards. The card holder is responsible for keeping the PIN private and shame on him if it gets out and he does not report the card stolen.

And yes the banks will almost certainly do what they can to keep their card holding customers happy, particularly if the cleaned out account can be traced to a compromised PIN by whoever it shakes out is accountable. Will that responsibility always be traceable? I do not know. But even if the banks in the end cover those losses, the cardholder has to deal with his account being cleaned out and all that goes with it.

Fraud Protection on the long term

The big concern for the merchant, on line and off, is if the consumer confidence disappear. We already have confirmation that confidence in online transactions has been falling a bit. This first debit/PIN compromise by itself is survivable, but if it turns out that it was not a one-time thing and we have all of a sudden discovered that PIN transactions are not as safe as we thought. Well, then on line merchants are in trouble and brick & mortar could be in trouble as well.

And I wonder how long the banks are able to calm down their debit card holders. When will they begin to pass the losses to the cardholders like they already pass them on to the online merchants now? It could become a matter of continued existence.