Shopster's Dropshippers, eCommerce, and Selling Online Blog

Handling Problems of Fulfillment

Dropshipping offers online retailers an opportunity to streamline their supply management methods. Its effective in that retailers only need to worry about the sale, while the fulfillment of the order is up to the dropshipping company.

The biggest risk to dropshipping is that part -- the fulfillment. There are many factors that could affect this. One, your chosen dropshipper could run out of stock when you’ve already made the sale. Delivery delays could also happen. While you can’t control all of these, you can prevent your customers from being all too disappointed in the way you handle the situation.

Here are some tips in handling fulfillment problems:

• Know your products. If you need to replace an item and have to tell the customer the bad news, at least be prepared to make the sale again. Recommend a product and tell them it’s benefits. Let the customer know how similar it is with the product you won’t be able to deliver and what are its advantages over their original choice.
• Be prepared to match the price of the original. This is the first thing they would ask for. As much as possible, the price of the new product should match the older one. If you cannot give a discount on the item price (ie if it will be a loss to you if you do), stand your ground and negotiate on other terms.
• Give early notice of shipment problems. Let your customers know about shipment problems as far in advance as possible. Accept any cancellations as a result of the delay and take it with grace. Thank the customer for their business and hope that bridges are not burned in the process.
• Unavailability or discontinuance of a product should be publicly announced. This is especially true for products that receive repeat orders, such as food or other consumables. They need time to adjust and find other suppliers or products that fill their needs.

Be realistic and straightforward about your communication to your clients. It also wouldn’t hurt to offer a sincere apology for any inconvenience for them. Problems will happen, so you need to accept it and deal with it properly.

Happy selling!

 

How to Use Banners for Online Marketing

There are several ways to effectively use banners on the web. Traditionally, a banner is displayed in an email, a newsletter or any form of media that has a wide audience. It aims to call attention to a specific product or an event – such as a sale or a promotion. It works similar to an ad you’d see in printed media such as newspapers and magazine due to its graphic nature.  They come in different shapes and sizes, from banner headers to skyscrapers and even smaller ones called buttons. For more information on sizes, you can check out the Internet Advertising Bureau site (http://www.iab.net/)

Over the years, banners have evolved in its use and is now seen more often in different forms of media as well as in the website itself. Today, we’ll discuss how to market your products using banners. This is particularly important for high-ticket items that you would want to move faster due to its high profitability.

On your ecommerce storefront

• A full or header banner is a great way to convey what your service is all about. These occupy the topmost part of your website, right after the logo and before (or after) your horizontal navigation bar. It could include anything from top products to animated text that speak to your service offerings.
•  Product banners are square banners found on the side bars that highlight top products you want to sell fast. It should include the price as well as compelling copy that would encourage visitors to visit the product page
• Promotional banners highlight items that are currently on sale or up-coming bargain events for your store.

On sites that allow advertising

• Some websites allow directly posting your banner on their site. They usually define what they charge you – either in CPM or cost per thousand impressions or CPC or cost per click. When choosing to directly advertise with banners on website, find one that matches your niche market.
• Affiliate programs are another way to get your banners to display in content publisher sites. This is a more cost-efficient way to use banners to advertise your site as it is paid on a cost per action. In other words, your affiliates only get paid when you make an actual sale. In most instances, for affiliate programs, you get to choose the commission you pay them. The only downside, the set up fee can be costly, depending on which affiliate networks you join. But choosing the right affiliate program platform gives you access to millions of publishers willing to put your banner up on their site and removes the hassle of tracking the performance yourself and issuing checks for performing affiliates.
• Google PPC  also allows advertising with banners. This goes in their content network with websites like About.com, SourceForge, New Your Times and so much more. Search networks are also evolving now to show a variety of advertisements other than the text links. Soon enough, they will probably be featuring banner ads on search results as well.

On forums and other social media websites

• Use a small banner as your profile picture to convey that you are running a business and you want people to take a look at your website.  
• Some forums also allow a small banner on the signature portion, which can link back to your website.

It may sound as if banner advertising has been around for a while people are already ignoring these. But don’t be deceived, banner  advertising can still bring in the dollars. All you need to do is be creative in the way you use it.

Speaking of banner ads, Shopster is currently offering a banner package for $99.99 where you can get as much as three banners for your homepage.

Understanding Your Niche Market Even More

We’ve created some blog entries before discussing the importance of choosing your niche market and how to go about it. Now, we delve deeper into the online selling woods to discuss how to understand your niche better.

First, it’s advisable to look at the numbers. Find out how your niche is growing. This would help you determine if it’s worth growing your online store or staying at the size you’re in now. Let’s focus on something more specific, a personal interest of mine is gaming. Nintendo, WII, Playstation, PC games – you name it, I’ve played it. So, it’s only natural that it’s the niche I chose.

So on to the first part, tracking growth of your niche. You need to visit websites of organizations that are related to your market. For gaming, there are two websites to look at: The Entertainment Software Association (http://www.theesa.com/) and the Entertainment Software Rating Board (http://www.esrb.org/). Then there’s the NPD Group (http://www.npd.com/) , which offers more than just data on games . In the ESA website, I can find out about the industry fact such as the growth of sales – 22.9 percent in 2008 amounting to $11.7 billion, which tells me the potential for sales. It also offers demographics data, for example: the average game player is 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years. This last fact will help me design the online store for a more mature audience.

Meanwhile, the ESRB website which shows the rating of particular games will help me further expand my categories with ratings such as E (for everyone), T (for teens), E10+ (everyone 10 years and up) and more.  While the NPD group offers a listing of the top ten monthly video games based on sales, which can help me construct a “best sellers” or “most popular” category.

Next thing to look at would be the individual news bits from major suppliers in your niche. Subscribe to their feed, or if you can afford it, attend industry expos and conferences. Again, for our gaming market, we have the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Here, future releases are discussed. Did you know that Nintendo is coming with a 3D handheld platform in 2010? If you’re targeting the gaming niche, you should know. For instance, for PlayStation the next big thing is the motion-sensing Move, similarly Xbox has Kinect. Those are important data that you should watch out for and include in your list of items to stock up on once they’re released. The earlier you have it in your store, the faster you can move fresh inventory. 

Next look at pricing. Some suppliers will start by selling a new product in their own website, setting the price point for the rest of the retailers. Microsoft did it with Kinect a few days ago by offering it at pre-order for $149.99. You can’t possible sell it higher than that, so you need to find out how low you can get it at wholesale and how much you can push the profit margin to the suggested retail price.

While foresight is certainly an advantage and can be done with proper research, you also need to stay grounded and find out what your potential buyers feel about certain products. Once all the hype for a new product dies down, what you’ll be left with are buyer reviews. Get a head start by studying what the market is saying in terms of product quality. This should help you limit or increase the stock that you need to get for a certain new product.

Sound complicated? It’ll all seem more natural once you get the hang of it.

Happy Selling!

AIDA: Mixing Marketing and Design

The schooled marketer will tell you that the most basic element in marketing is the AIDA principle. Here, there are four main points to concentrate on to sell your product: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. The same concept can apply to the design of your online store.

Let’s discuss this more in detail, going through each of the elements and connecting them to web design:

Attention – Grab the attention of your audience early on and get your product noticed right away. In web design, you can get the visitors attention through strong images. Use it in your banner or header and draw them in. You can also use strong background colors as your attention-grabber.

Interest – This keeps your audience engaged and prevents the from leaving your site. Gain their interest by creating compelling copy that will let them understand the benefits of your product/services.

Desire – An offshoot of interest, keep them still in your website by making them want your product. Here, comparative elements are a good way to have them desire your item.  Display how competitive your product is with a features matrix or add testimonials from your customers.

Action – The final step in the marketing model, you must point your user to the direction or action that you want them to take. The best way to do this is by creating an effective call to action. We’ve written a whole article on call to actions as this is one of the most important parts of your online store design.

Let’s put this more into context by  applying it to your online store. Start with the attention, add a featured item that grabs their attention upfront. Apple does a good job in their site, featuring a huge picture of an iPad when you open up the Apple page. Interest can easily be attained by having varied categories that your audience is looking for.  Desire can be in the form of promotions or discount offers which you can present as banners on your home page. Finally, don’t forget the call to action in your product page: the ever-dependable “Buy Now”.

Look through some of the more famous retail sites online to benchmark your site against. Most of them practice AIDA in their design.

Happy Selling!

Calculating for Return on Investment (ROI)

To understand the long-term viability of your business, one of the most important things you need to do is calculate the Return on Investment or ROI. This is expressed in percentage and is based on a specific time period.

While you can generally use a simple formula to do the calculation, it’s not always easy. Many things factor into the ROI calculation that don’t necessarily equate to a specific dollar value. The most simple formula to use is ROI = [(Revenue – Investment)/Investment] x 100. Where revenue is the total money earned from investments, also called “gains,” “payback” or sometimes “profit”. Meanwhile, investments refer to the cost to acquire products/service to generate the revenue.

There’s also the Du Pont formula, a more complex approach to getting the ROI numbers where (Net profit after taxes/ total assets) = (net profit after taxes / sales) x sales / total assets. Here, you can derive the profit on sales as well as the asset efficiency.

As the ROI is calculated over a period of time, it can be done on a monthly basis, quarterly and annually. You can even do it for the lifetime of your business from inception to date.

The most difficult part about calculating ROI is figuring in the dollar amount of efforts exerted to generate a product/service, such as manpower and production days. This should be added on top of any cost of acquisition (ie purchase of equipment and raw materials).

Calculating the ROI of your investments let’s you stay on top of your costs and would help give you a broader picture about your business. It will help you find out if you are losing money on certain product lines and if it time to discontinue offering those. ROI can also help you examine the real value of one investment over the other.

To get a good feel of your profitability as a business, find your ROI trend for the next six months (basing it on the numbers of the previous six months) and check the difference of how the real numbers are performing against the trend lines. Doing so would help you track the potential to earn, how you’re actually doing and what your targets are for your company.

SEO: Code Optimization for your Online Store

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content is still the best way to rank for given keywords for your online store. However, if you’re lacking copywriting skills, but are familiar with web development, then you can start by optimizing the code.

Here are some things you can tweak on the back-end:

• Meta Data:  This is one of the more important things that you can optimize. Meta data is everything after the <header> tags and before the <body> tags. You’ll find the following:
•  Title: These are crawled by the search engines and actually have a big impact on your ranking, it is best to include keywords in the first 30 characters of the title, while limiting it to just 60 letters.
• Meta Description: Not just an area to optimize for keywords, you can also use the meta descriptions to increase visitors to your website. Make the copy relevant and compelling to encourage more people to click on the listing on through to your website.
• Meta Keywords: Though this doesn’t bear as much weight as it did 3 or 4 years ago, it won’t hurt to still add your keywords here. Some search engines still look at it.
• Headers: You should also utilize the header tags <h1> to <h6> to highlight the keywords. The search engines are going to see these as the most important words to focus on in the body of your webpage.
• Fonts: Enhancement options such as bold, italics and underline also make the search engines pay more attention to your keywords.
• Alt Tags: Search Engines don’t translate images, but one way for you to have them “read” it is by adding  keyword alt tags. Plus, it will help you comply better with usability standards.
• Link Anchor Text: Use keywords in anchor text you use for internal linking. While it may not serve as optimization for the page that you are currently working on, it can help optimize your deeper pages. 

Those are just some examples of how you can optimize your code. In the wider perspective, we also recommend using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. This reduces your content-to-code ratio, giving you the ability to put in more text than coded lines in your page source. Additionally, CSS can also help you place your content higher in the code than other elements, making it seem more important to search engines.

Upgrading Your Shopster Account

When is the right time to do it? There really is no right or wrong time when deciding on paying for a service or working with the free version. To be more particular, for Shopster, everyone can try it out for free. It’s Shopster’s way of showing you how effective the product is.

Simply by signing up for free, you can get access to 1.5 million products, a online storefront and a powerful inventory management tool that helps you stay on top of sales. There are limits to the items you can add to your network or list to the store. But nonetheless, the free account is a good way to understand how the system works and if dropshipping really is for you.

Give a try first. If it’s your first time to explore the Shopster eCommerce environment, I suggest you do the following:

1.  Look for items you want to sell in the virtual warehouse and decide on your niche.
2. Set up your store. By default it is named as Storenumber - <number>, change that immediately. Give your store a name and start working on the branding – from logo to color scheme.
3. Work on your store’s content and select the items you want to sell from the virtual warehouse.
4. Add suppliers to your network. This is a must for some suppliers before you can see their network prices.
5. When orders start rolling in, all you have to do is receive the order, place it with the supplier and they’re the ones who send it out (that’s the beauty of dropshipping!)

Voila! You’re done with your first sale. The rest is history. If you start earning more and you think it’s enough to really make Shopster a viable source of income, then I suggest you start considering paid options. Shopster offers three paid package levels which you can find here: http://www.shopster.com/pricing.html

Find out what the benefits are for you. For instance, with a Power package, you can add your own products, get additional product space, have access to more store templates, lower transaction fees on orders, get custom domain hosting and even get free credit to market your store on Google.  In other words, you experience the full power of Shopster’s  network.

Upgrading to a paid account is charged monthly but for that minimal cost (starting at $19.95), the ROI can be exponential if you continue to work on building your store.

Happy Selling!

What’s a Wiki and Why Should I Care?

Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast”.  In the web, it means much more than that. A wiki is a website that allows social content building  and easy publishing/editing among members. It often uses a WYSIWYG editor or a simplified markup language.

The first recognized wiki software is WikiWikiWeb developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Because of its social nature, wikis were also widely used as collaborative software in the enterprise level.

Posting to WikiSites is a good example of an offpage activity that offers the benefits of increase your website’s ranking and bringing in traffic as a referral source. These authority pages hosted on a community-edited site are a good source of backlinks often associated with high trust rankings or high PageRanks. At the same time, it allows users to tap a market with inherent interest in the subject.

One of the most popular wiki sites today is Wikipedia.org  It hosts billions of pages in different languages. It’s easy to add relevant content to Wikipedia, and if it is well-written and factual, chances are it’ll stay there for a while. However, it is quiet hard to use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. Some SEOs have tried adding their links to the reference section of related products and there are often edited out within days. Some have even created wikipages specific to brands they sell. These usually stay in Wikipedia longer if they are well-known brands or companies.

If you are going to write about your own brand for Wikipedia, make sure it’s based on facts and is not written like an advertising piece.

The better way to use wiki for your business is by finding ones that are relevant to your product. For instance, if you are selling hotel rooms or tour packages, then you may want to check out WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org) . Those who are in retail can explore ProductWiki (http://www.productwiki.com/ ). Don’t expect too much staying power in a wiki site, simply because a community is often behind it, working to keep it clean. 

Explore the world of wikis today and find out how you can tell more people about your product simply by sharing information.

Going Online: The Next Step for Small Businesses

All giant corporations that you know of today started out as a small business. To get where they are, they took risks. They thought out of the box and took the competition head-on. In today’s evolving eCommerce world, small businesses can take the next step by working with technology. It is only then that they can become globally competitive.

Some small businesses still see “going online” or simply establishing their presence on the web as a non-essential part of their business. That is a big mistake. Selling on the web can streamline your costs, increase operational efficiency and bring you more revenue opportunities.

It opens up new markets and expands your reach to global proportions. You can also explore new ways of doing business – such as accepting credit card payments anytime, anywhere. This means you can take full advantage of impulse buying.

Going online isn’t just a matter of adding a sales channel. It is actually a way to make your brand more accessible. Even if there is little viability for running your business on the internet, simply providing information and a venue where you can display your products and services goes a long way.
 
Now is the right time to do it. In the E-Stats report of the U.S. Census Bureau published on May 28, 2009, eCommerce sales for merchant wholesalers accounted for 21.2 percent of total sales or $1,266 billion.  Meanwhile, for retailers, sales increased by 18.4 percent from 2006 to 2007, even at only 3.2 percent of total sales it amounted to a total of $127 billion. E-tail has been experiencing rapid growth since 2002, with an average annual growth rate of 23.1 percent.

With the numbers on the rise, small businesses should start exploring the latest technologies that would help them get their business online. Shopster is one of the companies that enable small business to get their products to market via the web.

Understanding Landing Pages

A landing page is where your visitors “land” when they click on an ad banner (as in for Pay Per Click or PPC advertising), a search engine result, an email link or a promotional URL. So it’s basically the first thing a potential buyers sees of your site.

For organic listings, the landing page is usually your site’s homepage. A landing page is particularly important when you are running paid campaigns. First, it can help you track the performance of a particular ad. But more importantly, landing pages are designed to convert better – meaning more sales and better profit for you. 

Most website visitors skip information that is not relevant to them. As with any website, you are only give a few seconds to attract the visitors’ attention and have him or her stay on the page. Otherwise, it will result in a bounce – or the visitor leaving the page and not moving to any other part of the site.

Visitors want to get the information they need upfront. Structuring a page so that it is highly relevant to your ads can improve your conversions tenfold. Additionally, your Pay Per Click ads in search engines like Google will rank better because the landing page’s relevance contributes to the Quality Score.

Aside from relevance to the ad or any other online pull campaign you may have, you can also design a landing page based on visitor segmentation. This is a great method to use if you are well-aware of your market segments and how they behave online. You would need an excellent web analytics software to help you understand this data.

Not all visitors or markets behave the same way. Some look for information and product reviews first before they consider buying anything online. Others are more concerned with the price. If you already know these customer requirements, it would be best to structure both your ad and your landing page to cater to those specific needs.

As a last tip on landing pages: measure, test, measure, test. It’s important to find out how your landing pages are performing. You can test different elements of the landing page and see what works better. Google offers tools like Website Optimizer, which allows multi-variate testing. You can also do a simpler A-B test when comparing just two variables. As always, measure results and find out which page converts better.

Online Marketing: Meta Descriptions

One of the more important meta data that goes into a webpage is the meta description. This is a special tag that can be placed in the source code of a webpage. Aside from being displayed on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, it also helps with your rankings.

If you look at your webpage’s code, it goes after the header tags <head>and right before the body <body>. It should look something like this:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”text goes here”>

In its webmaster guidelines, Google advises that a unique meta description be used for each page in the website. It should be easy to read and compelling.  Most of all, the descriptions should match the content of your page.

For the purpose of online marketing, particularly for on-page optimization, you can actually include target keywords on your descriptions. When the searcher types in a particular keyword in the search engine and your results show up, the keywords that are an exact match show in boldface in the results – highlighting your listing even more.

But the real purpose of a meta description is for your target audience. Seeing an accurate description of what the page is about can entice them to click on your search engine listing. It somewhat serves as a short advertisement for your site that users may find relevant to their search.

When writing your meta descriptions, be mindful of the character limits. Google displays up to 160 characters, 165 for Yahoo and about 200 for Bing. Keep within Google’s limit (which includes spaces) to ensure that your descriptions are not truncated.

I would also advise on using a call to action on your meta description (ie visit the site today). Remember that what entices the organic searchers to click is not the same as what would entice those who click on paid ads. So, be informative and descriptive.

Finally, for websites without a meta description, Google will pull the results from your DMOZ listing or will take snippets of text from your site. So, as much as possible have a meta description for each page of your site.

The Art of Up-selling and Cross-Selling

“Would you like fries with that?”

It may surprise you to know that the oft said line at burger joints is actually a very effective marketing/sales technique. Cross-selling encourages the buyer to purchase a complementary or related product or service. A related concept, up-selling, incentivizes the buyer to get a bigger portion or suggests a more expensive item than that which was originally intended for purchase.

Anyone can be a good prospect for cross-selling and up-selling, but those who already know your brand have a better chance of converting. In most cases, it’s just a matter of asking if the person is interested in what else you have to offer.

The  same principle should be applied in designing a retail website.  You can do this by offering promotions, “two for the price of one” or discounts on bulk purchases are the easiest way to target for up-sells. You can also design your site such that when a particular product is selected, others that are related show below it. For instance, a person intending to buy a phone should also be showed carrying cases or extra batteries.

For one-off purchases such as furniture or computers, it would be a good idea to design your product page to ensure they spend as much as possible in one sitting. You can do this by offering bundles. You can also use the up-selling strategy to ensure loyalty to your brand. Visitors who go to your site for random purchases such as books or music should be given an incentive to come back for more. You can do this by offering them club memberships for discounts on future purchases or you could also highlight the lower price of volume purchases.

The real success of up-selling and cross-selling relies on product knowledge. In an actual sales scenario, you would need to pair this with great timing. But whether it’s for the web or in real life, up-to-date product knowledge is critical for cross-selling and up-selling. Offering an irrelevant product would alienate your client and might even cost you the sale.

So the next time you try to sell something to your client or when you design your webstore, try asking yourself first “would you like fries with that?”

Happy selling!