When building a website for your online business, the first obstacle that people have to figure out is the homepage.  The homepage provides a critical role in your business structure because it is the first thing that people see when they click on your web address and it can set the tone for not only your business, but people can decide based from the structure of your homepage if they can trust you, your products, and doing business with you as a whole in a matter of seconds. Here are seven tips that can help anyone who is building their own website homepage, and how these helpful hints can keep customers from feeling nervous about clicking on your url.

7 Dropship / Wholesale Business Homepage Tips

1. Identify Your Business Purpose

The purpose of your business is not what you’re selling, or what you have to offer, but it’s what you’re trying to accomplish with your website. For example, if you’re selling custom animal feeders for example, your purpose might be to provide high quality animal feeders at low costs. If you’re selling memberships to your wildlife conservation efforts, your purpose might be to educate the public about wildlife conservation and provide effective means to protect our planet.

2. Avoid Sales Outright

If you have tangible items that you’re selling on your website, it’s a good idea to try not to make a sale on your homepage. You can have a small area for promotional offers, but don’t have a line of skirts that are on sale, a line of discontinued items, or clearance, right on your homepage. It’s a good idea to have easy navigation for your site, so that customers can find the products that you’re selling, but try to keep them off the front page.

3. Change It Up For New And Returning Visitors

Customer traffic is what generates the income with online companies. It’s important to always encourage both new and returning customers and one of the ways to do that is by setting up an RSS feed to remind visitors to come back to your site, create newsletters, or any kind of incentive for returning. If you have the programming ability, you can to do something similar to amazon.com, where customers who aren’t logged in can see popular items, and customers who do log in can see suggested items based from things that they previous purchased.

4. Prioritize Content

You only have so much space on your homepage to put information in without making it seem cramped. Figure out the main things you want on your homepage, and prioritze them accordingly. If there is something that you would like to have more attention drawn to, highlight it with boxes, larger – but not excessively larger – font, or anything else that would work with your page layout. Keep in mind that customers usually see websites in the “f pattern” style. Their eyes usually hit the top left corner first, then go right, then down. The more they scroll down the less interested they become in the content, to build accordingly.

5. Have Contrast

It’s important to remember not to have a noisy background or something that is going to mix your content in with the back of your screen. If you’re putting together two colors that clash, or are too dark together, then it could have a negative effect on your website’s success.  Keep in mind relevant sizing when it comes to font sizes and images, and to avoid “shouting” at people with all capital letters. One thing I had a hard time learning when I was getting my BA in Communications Design was white space. I always wanted to get everything I could into a page, but white space is much more classy, less suffocating, and more effective than clutter, so be sure to use plenty of it.

6. Maximize Page Response Times

If you are importing pictures that are 3mb a piece, it’s going to take a while to have the page load with all the content. Make sure to have your files downsized accordingly so your customers don’t instantly click off your page once they realize it will take more than five seconds to load. Customers have very short attention spans, so don’t lose them even before they get to your homepage.

7. Pick Graphics Carefully

Graphics and photos are one of those things that can make or break your homepage. If you want to use graphics, make sure they are relevant and applicable to what your overall design of your website is, and what your company is selling. If you found a cute picture of a cat and wanted to share it – putting it on your homepage is probably not the best place to put it.

There are many things you can learn to take a wonderful picture for your online wholesale business. Yesterday, I made a list of seven things that would help any seller take a commendable picture for their eBay auctions or their storefront. Here is are six more methods you might want to try out before taking pictures of your latest merchandise.

Six More Photo Skills For Your Wholesale Business

1. Make Your Backgrounds Nice

Yesterday, I wrote about how it could be a good idea to shoot darker things against lighter backgrounds, and lighter objects against darker backgrounds. If your items are small enough to fit on a chair, you can drape it with a sheet, or a solid piece of fabric. Make sure that your materials are free from wrinkles though – they can be distracting from the object. If your items are small, you can place them on a table and use nice paper from an art supply store, or something similar to create an appealing background.

2. Learn To Use The Macro Setting

On most cameras there’s a little flower icon that most people notice, like the one above, but never know what is it or why use it. The flower icon represents the macro setting on a camera – a setting that will allow you to get up close to an item and the camera will be able to focus on it’s small details. If you’re selling something small, this little button is important with your pictures. It will help your camera focus, instead of having a hard time when you go in close.

3. Keep Focused

It’s more important to have a focused picture than something that is close but out of focus. One way to get around this if your camera can’t handle being super close to your objects is to shoot in the biggest size your camera will allow, or just larger than the 800 x 600 standard photo, and then once you import it into a photo editing program, you can crop the extra space out, and hopefully will be left with just the details in focus.

4. Have Models

If you are selling clothing or jewerly, it might be a good idea to invest in a mannequin head or body to put your items on. If you don’t want to do that, you can find a friend that would be willing to model whatever you have. Keep in mind, it’s always good to focus on the clothing rather than the model, so feel free to cut their heads out of the picture to not only protect privacy of your models but to keep the sellers focused on the products rather than the models.

5. Use Size Comparisons

If you are selling something that you aren’t sure the customers will realize how small it is, or how big it is, you could throw in a common object in the photo for size comparison like the picture above. To illustrate how small this particular iPod shuffle was, it was put against a common household key. It provides quick and easy comparisons for customers so they don’t have to whip out their measuring stick right away. This also applies to objects that you don’t want anyone to wear before the customer gets it, like earrings. If you put the earrings or the hair clip against something to show how large or small they are, customers will know quickly if it’s something they’re interested in or not.

6. Experiment A Little

For some abstract items like jewelry, you can use backgrounds that vary from traditional solid colors. Things like books, metals, wood, and textured cloth can turn a plain picture into something a little more professional and appealing. This might not work for all kinds of products sold, but it might be something to experiment with.

When you go online to buy something, what is the first thing you want to know about the item? What it looks like. Pictures can let us know within seconds if what is for sale is something we are interested in or not interested in. However, the type of picture and the quality of it can also play a big part in the selling process. For example, if you’re selling a nice vase that has a beautiful sparkle and color to it, but the picture you put online of it shows it to be a different color and doesn’t accent the best parts, people aren’t going to be interested in it, even though they would have been if they saw it in person. The point of having pictures is to accurately show people online what your product would look like if they were able to see it in person, and here are seven tips to help get the best picture of your wholesale products.

Taking The Best Pictures For Your EBay Wholesale Business

1. Don’t Use Stock Photographs

If you have something generic, it might be tempting to use stock photography. Usually, when someone goes on an eBay auction they can tell when something is clearly a stock photograph compared to something the seller shot. It’s important to have pictures of your actual items – stock photos almost always are different than the products you have, even if it’s only a minor difference.

2. Use Natural Lighting When Possible

As a photographer, I learned a couple tricks of the trade when it comes to photography. One of the first things that was engraved in my mind is direct flash is a bad thing. Not only does it give you a dark shadow on the outside, it also doesn’t let products have their true colors shine through because the flash causes highlights and bright points that flush out any color. Try to take pictures in natural lighting, like by a window for example, to get the best quality of color and avoid shadows.

3. Choose Good Backgrounds

If your product is a light color, it might be a good idea to shoot it against a dark background like a chair draped in a dark colored sheet, or visa versa if the product is light colored. The contrast will make the product stand out instead of blending.

4. Fill Up The Frame

Make sure you get the picture close enough to the product so that it fills up the frame. You should have a little wiggle room on the outside, just to avoid chopping off part of the product. There’s nothing worse than having a frame where customers can see your couch, kitchen table, the top of your oven, and then the little product in the middle. It looks less professional.

5. Make Sure The Pictures Are Big Enough

Have you ever received an e-mail from a friend with pictures that they took of your last outing together, or something funny they took a picture of and when you opened it up it was so small you didn’t even know what was in the picture? The same thing goes with pictures for your products – they need to be big enough to see every aspect of the product, but not so big that they have to wait fifteen minutes for it to load. I would suggest keeping your pictures between 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768. These sizes are big enough that people can see your products, but they won’t take forever to load.

6. Edit A Little

If your pictures need a little bit of help with the brightness, contrast, or sharpening, it’s a good idea to run them through some sort of photo-editing program. Keep in mind that you don’t want to go overboard so that the products’ pictures don’t look like how the product really looks. One of the most popular editing programs is Photoshop, but there are other alternatives like free Piscasa and my personal favorite, Photoscape. If you’re not someone who is very experienced with cameras and editing programs, many times they have auto brightness, auto contrast, auto sharpen buttons that you can click and the programs will do the fixing themselves.

7. Have Multiple Views

If your product has different designs, colors, or styles depending on the side its on, like anything clothing, hand bags, blankets, etc., it’s important to add those pictures to the listing too. For example, for my purse business, we always take a picture of the front, back, side, any embellishments / hardware that are signature to the kind of brand – like the Fossil keys that say Fossil, as well as inside the purse showing the serial number and the kind of pockets it has, and inside any sort of compartment. Customers won’t be able to handle the objects themselves, so think to yourself, if I was going to look at this in the store, what would I look at? and then take a picture of those different parts.

A couple weeks ago, I did a series on how to use Facebook as a social networking advertisement for your business. If you’re familiar with Facebook, or an active user, then you might also be involved with Twitter, a social networking microblog type of system. Users have only 140 characters to write a sentence or two about anything they wish to say, and if you subscribe to that person, you can see their “tweets” whenever they write one. So, how do you use this networking to promote your business?

Twitter Promoted Tweets For Your Dropship Business

The Background

Twitter Promoted Tweets are pretty simple. Keep in mind that these are not ads, but tweets, so they work a little differently. Unlike an ad, a promoted tweet will stay posted or “promoted” as long as people are responding / replying / engaged in  it. Once people are no longer interested in the promoted tweet, it disappears. Also, unlike an ad that decides whether something applies to someone, Twitter Promotion Tweets have user decide if it is applicable to them by replying, adding, or retweeting what they read.

How It Works

When people search for a particular keyword, only one promoted tweet will show up at the top of the search results page. As the advertiser, you reserve a certain keyword and set a budget, similar to Facebook ads, and then you create a tweet to promote. These promoted tweets will look just like any other tweet, except it will be a little more distinctive with a background shade and the phrase promoted by Twitter. Anyone who follows your company on Twitter will also receive this tweet.

As people interact with the promoted tweet, it will stay place in the search results. Once it no longer has interactions, you as the advertiser will have to go to another tweet you want until your budget is spent. Keep in mind that there’s a small stipulation with this method of advertising – if no one interacts with your promoted tweet then Twitter will refund whatever is left of your budget and let some other company have a shot at the keyword you reserved, so this method is something to try once you build a good amount of followers and do some research on how to entice people to react to your advertisements.

Is This A Method For Your Business?

Like I mentioned in my Facebook series, social networking might not work for everyone’s business. Here are some points to think about before spending the money on promotional tweets:

• Your niche demographic is between the ages of 18-34: Most studies done about social networking is that it is most used by people ages 18-34, and this age group is also one that is the most likely to shop online the most. They also are the people who are passing what they find to their friends.
• You already know how to use Twitter effectively: If you have somewhat of a group following your tweets and responding, then this method could work for you because you already have an audience. If you don’t have an audience on Twitter, or are just trying to figure out the way Twitter works, then you might consider holding off with promotional tweets until you get the hang of things.

With all the talk about pollution, global warming, and other eco-concerns, many businesses are opting to “go green”. While some companies take this notion to the extreme, there are some things that you can do with your personal business to reduce waste and create a better work environment.

5 Easy “Go Green” Changes

1. Encourage E-mails Rather Than Letters

With online businesses, this is something that might not be hard to do – most already encourage only e-mails. E-mails are not only quicker, they don’t need paper to read and respond to them. If there is something you need to print out from an e-mail, if your printer has two-side printing, utilize that feature.

2. Use Recycled Packing Supplies

Some products made now have “made from x percent recycled material”. Sure, sometimes these boxes and envelopes don’t look as nice as their white plastic-esque counterparts, but they serve the same purpose – they get your products where they need to go,

3. Reduce Fax Waste

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about essentially eliminating faxes, which can be viewed here. There are alternatives to the modern fax machine, like online fax services, which allows you to see whatever faxes you receive without having to print all 20 pages when you only need two of them.

4. Turn Off Your Equipment

When you leave your office, whether it’s in a building or in your home, it’s important to not leave all your machines up and running all day and night. If you’re going to bed, you can turn your computer off or simply put it into sleep mode. The same thing goes with all other electronics like your fax machine. Some machines, like the one we use in this office, have an energy saver mode. This not only can help out the environment by using less power, but it also helps your electricity bill.

5. Buy Some Plants

Plants are not only esthetically pleasing, but they can help with the air quality around your work area. Plants can take in some of the pollutants that might be floating around your computer, and they emit oxygen.

One of the most important parts about building your website, is figuring out a way to have your customers pay you. There’s the slow way and sometimes unsafe, through snail mail via checks and money orders – which, if you decide to do this method, make sure to never send the products until the payments clear, you don’t want to be stuck with a bounced check and x amount of dollars gone in merchandise! Then there’s the more popular, faster, alternative – online credit card processing. When most people check their items out on eBay and other websites that have third-party credit processors, opposed to building a system yourself, they use PayPal. As it’s nature, Google developed a PayPal competitor called Google Checkout which is becoming more popular among websites as people turn away from PayPal.

How Does Third-Party Processing Work?

PayPal:

With PayPal, sellers have to create an account with them – that’s free – and then you design the kind of button you want. For single items, you can chose the “buy item” button or for multiple items, they have an “add to cart” button. Once your customers add their products to their cart / decide to purchase an item, they’re brought to a screen that lets them put in their personal information. Once they confirm their payment, you are notified with their shipping address, the products they paid for, and the amount that they paid. This gives you the heads up that you can ship their products. Once your payments are dispersed into your PayPal account (with fees deduced, see below for percentages), then you can transfer them to a checking account or you can simply use your available balance towards online purchases you make. To find out about their options, video demonstrations, etc., please click here.

Google Checkout:

Google checkout is getting more popular as it grows within the online business world. Like PayPal, you sign up with a Google Checkout Account – again free – and they will ask you a couple questions like the primary type of products you sell, what your business website address is,  and a few other questions. Once your account is set up, you have access to things like customized buttons – like PayPal – and other things like a Google Checkout Cart, a customized cart, and a store gadget, all of which can be found here. Unlike PayPal, Google notifies you via e-mail when someone makes a purchase and you have to authorize it, or put the order through. This extra step helps with typos, errors, and other things that could complicate an order and reduces chance of error.

The Cost Breakdown

Like any credit card transaction done by a third-party, the cost of the processing from the third-party takes a little bit of money from your sale. However, between PayPal and Google Checkouts, they both have free accounts, and their processing fees are identical; it’s simply a matter of figuring out which processor will work best for you and your business type. Both are listed below and are based on your monthly income:

PayPal

Google Checkout

In an article in the New York Times, a new restaurant called 4food is using social networking a little bit differently than most people would think. Social networking is one of the tools we have written on, and how it’s a good method for advertising your business, and this restaurant takes that advertising and turns it into a game. The customers can get onto their website and pick what kind of burger they want  – veggie, salmon, beef, turkey, etc. and the kind of bun they want, as well as a “scoop”. The restuarant gives their burgers out on a doughnut shaped bun that allows customers to put another ingredient in the middle like avacado, chili, mac and cheese, and baked beans.

Customers can totally customize their order online with condiments, etc., and when they’re done placing their order, they give their masterpiece a name, like in the case of the NY Times Reporter, “The Bits Burger”. This new burger then gets broadcasted across his Twitter and Facebook accounts to his friends. Everytime that someone comes in and orders his “Bits Burger” he gets 25 cents in store credit and his burger get points among the other burgers. The restaurant keeps a score board of all the top-selling creations, creating a sort of social networking game out of it.

This example shows how innovative people can get with social networking sites. If you’re just starting out your business, a simple glance at these blog posts might help you figure out if and what kind of social networking advertising you can use to entice your customers to not only try your products, but use the networking side of the deal and get all of their friends to check you out as well.

When starting out in the online business world, you have to first figure out what to sell / your niche market, and then after that is established, the next question is whether you buy your products wholesale or use a dropshipper. For those who might be unfamiliar with these terms and what they could mean to your business, we’re going to go over them quickly, their pros and cons, and whether one or the other is a better decision for your company.

Pros, Cons, And Which Method Is Right For You

Wholesale

When someone buys wholesale, they’re essentially getting a lot of one product for a discounted price – think Costco. When you buy thinks from Costco, you buy them in larger quantities, so essentially you’re spending more money, but at a per-product ratio, the cost is less. The same thing is applicable when you buy wholesale from suppliers. Sometimes they will require you to buy five of something if the cost is higher, like beauty pageant crowns, or they might require a minimum purchase of 50 to 100 if the product is less expensive like t-shirts. You will receive the products, stock them yourself, and resell them at a marked up price. Once your products sell, you’re responsible to send them to the customer.

The Pros:

1. Higher Profit Margin

Because you get all your products up front at a low cost, you don’t need anything additional from the wholesale supplier after that point. You will be the one who takes care of storing, maintaining, selling, and shipping the products yourself. You can mark the products at whatever price you would like and keep all the earnings.

2. Control

The items will physically be with you, so you have more control over every aspect of the business process. If you notice a defect in a product like a mark or a smudge, you’re able to make a note of it when you list the product to sell. If customers have detailed questions about the products, you are able to check it out and let them know more quickly what they need to know. You also have control over when the products are shipped to the customer, the method of shipment, and whether or not you want to wrap them a certain way – for example, my mom always wraps the purses she sells online in bright tissue paper.

3. Easier Promotionals

If you decide to run promotionals with your products – ie: buy one get one free, free shipping on orders over $25, buy a shirt and get a mini perfume free – you will be able to keep track of those things and change them whenever you want.

4. Easier Returns

When a customer decides they need to send a product back, there’s only one place it will go to – you. You would simply have to put it back into your inventory and everything would be settled. With items that might have a high return rate, like jeans, this could be an easy fix.

Cons:

1. Expensive Up Front

With wholesale, you’re essentially stocking your inventory and then starting your business. So, before you can get any income you have to put down a lot of money up front to get your products.

2. Expensive If Product Flops

If you buy 100 rubber duckies that are all different colors because you think they’re wonderful, then find out that no one else thinks so, you’re stuck with 100 multi-colored rubber ducks.

3. Requires Lots Of Labor / Management

All of your company’s stock is going to be in your possession and you’re the one who is going to manage the inventory and ship all your items. Taking care of a lot of products, especially if you have a high demand for your products and a high volume of sales, can take a lot of man-power and may be a little stressful.

Drop Shipping

The alternative to buying wholesale is to go through a dropship supplier. You would find a company that has the products that you would like to sell to the public at a marked up price, and then simply notify the dropship company when something sells. The company then sends the customer the product the customer believed they bought from you, but you don’t ever have the physical item in your possession.

Pros:

1. Cheap To Start Up

The dropship method is a more start business, build inventory kind of structure, which is the complete opposite of buying wholesale. You find what products you want to offer to people, and as they pay for the products, you’re able to pay part of the fees and get the leftovers as your income.

2. More Space / Less Hassle

Dropshipping allows your inventory to never physically come to you. The company that handles all your products will be the ones who are storing, keeping track of qualities, and shipping your products. Once you tell them which products you need sent to whom, they take care of the rest.

3. Not Stuck With Items

If you decide to offer an item to sell, and you find out that no one is interested in that item, it’s okay. You won’t be stuck with 100 rubber ducks since you never purchased them in the first place.

Cons:

1. No Quality Control

Because you don’t physically have the products with you, the only thing you can rely on is what the dropship suppliers tell you about the product. If the dropship company sends them something that might be missing a button, or has a detail to be overlooked, the customer will be looking at you for explanations.

2. Might Be Hard For Returns

If a customer wants to return an item, it could get complicated. They might not like the idea of sending their return to someone other than the person who sold it to them, you. Sometimes, dropship companies might require you to receive the return and then send it to them.

3. Harder For Promotionals and Shipping Control

If you wanted to run a promotional, it would be hard to put them together because you don’t have the physical inventory with you. Since you won’t be the one shipping the products, you won’t be able to do things that you might normally want to do because the company is taking care of all of that for you.  You don’t have any control of when the company sends out the products, the type of mail they decide to use, and what kind of packaging they do for their products.

4. Less Profit Margin

Like mentioned in wholesale, you first buy the products and then get to keep everything you gain from it. Since a dropship company is doing a lot of the work for you and is saving you that potential “flop product” and loss of revenue, you have to give them a slice of all your earnings.
Overall, when you start up your business, it might be worthwhile to begin through a dropship supplier so you can figure out what products your customers / market is interested in and what they aren’t even batting an eyelash at. This way, you will avoid spending a lot of money up front on products you’re not positive will be sellers. Once your business is more established and you know what products work and what doesn’t work, you can buy them at wholesale and manage things on a more personal level without the risk of losing a huge fortune.

As an added measure of information, I decided to do a part two on what things to avoid when you are trying to figure out your ideal niche market. Although some of these points might simply be the opposite of the things you should do when finding a niche in the previous post, sometimes people have an easier time seeing what not to do than a list of what you should do.

Avoiding Common Niche Mistakes

1. Becoming Infatuated With Your Product

If you have a hobby or an interest and one day think, this would be an awesome product to sell! I should start selling it! thus spending the next few weeks completely insterested in selling this product that you just love only to find out there’s absolutely no market for it. You need to make sure that if you love your product, that others actually love it too and there’s a market for it.

2. Not Doing Your Research

Like mentioned in the previous article, it’s very important to do keyword searches to see if there are people actually typing in what you want to sell. If people simply don’t have any interest in what you want to sell, they won’t be typing it in, and it won’t show up. A product with a consistent amount of hits is something worth considering.

Another aspect of not doing research is trying to sell something that people could easily get for free. This example is most common with recipe books and some sheet music. If you want to sell your cookbook online, you have to have something additional to convince your potential customers that your book is so much better than what they can get for free from the five websites surrounding yours on Google.

3. Selling Just Products

It’s important to remember to have a niche market / idea like bathroom soaps and supplies and then have various sub-categories in your niche like custom soap molds, cute toothbrush holders, etc. If you are only selling one product like bath rugs and people aren’t interested in bath rugs, it won’t matter if you have fifteen different colors, textures, and shapes, they won’t buy your product.

4. Competing With The Big Dogs

Like mentioned in the previous post, it’s important to go where the customers are, but don’t think it’s a good idea to compete with big name suppliers. Like our example with Bath and Body Works, The Body Shop, and Bed Bath and Beyond, if you don’t have something unique or different about your product, customers will most likely just stick to their big department stores.

5. Selling What You Don’t Know

Yesterday, I commented on how it’s important to know what you’re selling about, not only for the customer’s sake, but also for the sake of building content. If you were selling makeup for example and didn’t know the first thing about it, you wouldn’t be able to make interesting video tutorials about how to create a certain look – and especially in the case of makeup, people with a lot of experience will most likely buy their stuff online and might not trust the quality of your products if they think you don’t know what you’re selling.

6. No Passion For Your Niche

It’s important that you find something that you not only know about but that you have a passion with. Just because you know a lot about lawn supplies doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re interested in things related to the outdoors. You’re going to be spending a lot of time, effort, and money building up your business so it’s a good idea to be passionate about your products.

If you look through the archives of our blog, there are many mentions to the word niche and finding your niche market. So, what exactly is a niche? According to the dictionary one of the meanings of the word niche means a distinct segment of a market. When figuring out what you want to sell online, you want to find something that fits a certain niche. Your niche will allow you to zero in on a certain audience / market of people and instead of being a generalist, you become a specialist in your products.

Deciding Your Wholesale / Dropship Niche

1. Find Products You Are Passionate About

This will help you the most in your search to finding a niche. What kind of things are you interested in? Do you like things that involve the outdoors, indoors, crafts, do-it-yourself projects, lights, frames, customized clothing, or in the case of our picture, vinyl family car stickers? It’s important to first figure out what things you like and are interested in because once you have that down, you’re going to be able to commit the time and effort it takes to create a website and build up your business because you’re actually interested in what you’re doing.

2. Find Products You Know Something About

When your customers write to you asking about the products you’re selling, you’re going to want to have a little more in-depth knowledge of the products than the average consumer. Think about what kind of skills you have or hobbies you enjoy doing and what kind of materials are used to do those hobbies or what kind of materials can come out from those activities. If there’s a product or niche you’re really passionate about but you don’t really know much about it – expert knowledge – then do the research before you get into promoting those products, or promote others while figuring that product out. For example, if you wanted to do high fashion makeup – bright colors, thick pigments, etc. – but want to also get into the mineral makeup lines, you might want to just stick to what you know – the high-fashion products, but sell the mineral while you learn about it.

3. Make Sure Your Products Have a Market

Sometimes you could have an absolute passion for something, but not everything is perfect for the online marketplace. You need to do your research to find if there’s even a niche market for your products. You need to find out a couple things before deciding to base your whole business around the particular products you have chosen. In the case of our picture, I know that the family vinyl car sticker has a demand due to the large families in this area, and not a lot of places sell vinyl products with customizable family members on them. So, ask yourself these questions:

Is There A Demand For It?

If you choose a product that every store is selling, it might be too general to stand out from the crowd. For example, if you wanted to sell only camping equipment, someone would go to google and type that very phrase in and come up with about 9,330,000 results. If you have something a little more specific though like eco-friendly camping equipment, the results go down to about 261,000 results. You might want to ask your friends if you started selling a certain item if they would be interested in it, or if it will sink under the big chain stores who sell the same products. For example, if you wanted to sell soaps and shampoos and things like that, you would have to compete with Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Bath & Body Works, The Body Shop, just to name a few. However, if you sold custom soap molds, you wouldn’t really have to worry about those big name chain stores.

What Are People Typing In For My Products?

There are websites out there like wordtracker.com that will show you what people are typing in most often for your products. You also could look at eBay Pulse which will not only show what products are selling the most from each category but what people are typing in most often. Knowing this kind of information can show you how to create search engine optimization – SEO – when you begin to build your website.