An interesting thing happened to (me and) one of my Internet dropshipping businesses this morning, and I want to talk about it, in hopes of helping those who read this blog never make this "rookie" mistake.  I have been doing business online since 1999, and should not be making rookie mistakes on any level of business by now.  Mistakes happen, yes and probably will again, but mistakes like I am going to be talking about should never happen.

When I woke up, I usually have a certain ritual of checking out certain sites etc., well one of my sites was down.  After doing a little research I found out it was nothing technical, or taken down by anybody or anything malice in nature.   I took it down.  Thats right, I took it down.  How am I responsible for this you ask?  About a month ago the business credit card I use for the site had expired.  I got the new credit card in the mail and have been using it with no problem, but I never went and updated it inside the payment options inside our hosting account.

Long story short here folks is to make sure that you are always up to date on all of your accounts - ALL of them.  Domain names, hosting accounts, merchant, dropshippers, all business addresses etc. 

A site being down even for a few hours could be devastating for several reasons:

• Your website could get crawled (this is where they index you or include you in their database) by the search engines when it is down (and you could lose all rankings)
• You can lose credibility with dropshippers (because of down time) if they happen to be checking up on their clients websites.
  
• Loss of potential revenue from sales.  If someone finds you via a search engine, and clicks on your website and goes to a blank page, well you are not making any money that way.
• Loss of marketing money if you are running PPC (pay per click) ads.

So this site that I am talking about was down this morning for a couple of hours, and it seems that we have averted any disaster with lost rankings and indexing issues with the search engiens, but who knows if we lost any sales during that two hour period.  Just save yourself the stress of all of this and always make sure you are up to date with all of your account info 100% of the time.

If you are looking for more information on setting up a dropshipping business, The Shipper is offering a FREE 7 day trial membership to their product sourcing catalog.  Join today and start setting up your online business this week!