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.

Education, home based business, online business, website design / help

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.

Education, Uncategorized, eBay, selling products online

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.

Education, Uncategorized, home based business, internet marketing, make money online, product research

As an eBay powerseller, I thought it was interesting when I logged in to my account the other day the information that eBay wanted to share with me. Usually, eBay has messages for sellers regarding things they’re promoting, what they plan on doing, and the like. The message this time however, was about updating their system for the holiday rush. As online retailers know, around September to January is the busiest time of the year due to the holiday season. One might think that September would be too early to even think about holidays like Christmas – I myself won’t listen to Christmas music until the second week of December -but it’s never too early to get your website in top condition for the holiday rush.

Preparing For The Holiday Rush

1. Give Customers Incentives

Previously, we have gone over the benefits of incentives for customers and what it means for your business. With the holiday rush, there’s going to be people shopping online for things that might not necessarily be frequent online shoppers. During the holiday season when everyone is holding some sort of a promotion, try not to miss that opportunity. If a customer comes to your site and finds a sweater they want to buy, and then find a similar sweater on another site for about the same price, which will they choose? Your site that didn’t do any promotion like free shipping, or the site that is offering free shipping. Depending on some other factors of course, people will go for the free shipping.

One of the new things eBay is implementing is free listing starting on September 20th for items like iPod / MP3 players, global positioning device systems (GPS), and DVDs, HD DVDs & Blu-ray. As long as you are selling in those particular categories (popular items during the holidays) eBay will waive your listing fees, which, if you’re selling a lot of items, could really amount to something.

Note: I’m not completely positive if these kind of promotions are solely for Power Sellers or if they are available to all eBay sellers. But for your own website purposes, these examples still apply.

2. Keep Your Listings Up-To-Date

Another feature that eBay is implementing is the ability to edit more items in bulk. They’re adding things like find and replace options, and even the ability to change shipping costs for several items at a time. Not only is this ability going to help you keep on top of the price game against competitors, but it will make editing a lot more effective and simple. In reference to your website, it’s important to always have the most current information listed – if that includes the price of the item, the shipping prices – sometimes you might want to hold a promotional for a flat rate for your items – and most importantly the availability of your items. No one wants to buy something for Christmas, just to have it showing up on their doorstep when you’re putting away your stockings two weeks later.

3. Keep A Good Amount In Your Inventory

If you have a great customer base or your advertising skills get people coming to your site and buying your products like hot cakes, make sure to not get behind on the game. The third interesting thing that eBay is starting – this one actually in August – is the Unpaid Item Assistant. As an eBay Power Seller, nothing is more frustrating than having someone win an auction and not pay for their item. It’s a pain to have to report, relist, and do the whole process over again with your item that the second place person wanted and was willing to pay for it. With the new Unpaid Item Assistant if sellers don’t pay within 16 days – still a long period to pay – then the item is automatically relisted. You can change the amount of time people have to pay, my specific policy is only 24 hours, but we do usually keep it under 3 days if possible, and you can add exceptions if the buyer contacts you.

With your own inventory, if you have an item that’s selling out, make sure to get maybe a little more from your wholesaler or keep your dropshipper close during the holiday months. It would be awful to not get the revenue that your company can build because you didn’t plan enough extra items. But also remember that while buying something wholesale, you really don’t know how much people are going to love it so don’t buy a lot of one thing, just to find out your customers want something else.

Education, dropshipping, eBay, online business, selling products online

Recently, I had to buy some vinyl for a project I was doing, and I noticed that a lot of the websites I visited to get what I needed had three ways to place an order. The first was through an online shopping cart where you found what kind of vinyl you wanted, selected the amount of yards, put it in your cart and checked it out. The second method was to call the company and place the order over a phone, and the third was to fax your order in. As an administrative assistant, I receive a lot of faxes, and there are some faxes that I get that are dark, hard to read, or just complicated. This brings me to our topic today: why you should avoid using faxes, or how to build a system where fax orders are actually effective.

Steering Clear Or Embracing Your Wholesale Fax Orders The Right Way

Why Fax Orders Are Detremental

1. They’re Expensive

In the case of actual dollars and cents, faxed orders cost paper, labor, etc., as well as other expenses like low customer service or losing a customer all together. Studies have shown that a faxed order, due to it’s manual nature, can cost up to $60, whereas the typical online order can cost a mere $1-$3 to process.

2. They Could Lead To Errors

When people fax things in, they sometimes are typed documents, but my experience has shown that most are either one of thee categories. Some people will type something out, but then write on the paper they fax it, others will have something completely typed, and there’s the completely written faxes. Depending on the quality of your fax and their fax, their message could turn into a dark mess of things that are partially clear and legible, but that’s not something you want when trying to process an order for someone – you need to know exactly what they want and how they want it. Aside from the actual receiving of the fax, there’s also the amount of handling, or the number of hands that touch the one order, that could cause error. For every person that touches the fax, there’s a possibility for error and it also makes it hard to keep track of the status of the order.

3. Limit Productivity

Because faxed order take longer to process, they limit your productivity levels.

How To Make Faxed Orders Actually Worthwhile

1. Avoid These Programs

Some companies opt for electronic faxing systems that turn the faxes into an image or places the information into a template. However, these can also have their downsides. When it comes to things that are hand-written, a system software could have a hard time figuring out an s and a 5, an I and a 1, etc. Also, if you have to change something in your system, it could possibly make all your previous templates / orders in the system change which could corrupt your possibility of looking for something in the archives for a repeat order or an audit. In general, these kind of systems have a hard time distinguishing between handwriting as well – if people have a hard time figuring it out, the computer might as well.

2. Get Something To Do It All

If having faxed orders is something that you would like to have with your business, make sure to invest in a software that covers basically what an automated order would cover – the ability to handle document routing, data capture, automatic archiving, prioritizing orders, and will keep track of when an order was received in case that customer calls soon after to change something.

Education, Uncategorized, make money online, pricing and profits

Wholesale Match has recently added six new videos to our education section.  The instructional videos walk you step by step through researching products on eBay, calculating the profit margins of potential products, ordering from dropshippers, and more.

The new e-commerce education videos are titled as follows:

Research Products on eBay

The Retailer’s Site

The Profit Calculator

Completing an Order

Sales and Coupons

and

Saving Images and Descriptions

All Wholesale Match members have full access to our educational materials including the videos, articles, blog posts, and Daily Deals products.  If you are not currently a Wholesale Match member but would like to try our services free for one week, simply sign up for a free 7 day trial on the homepage.  In addition to the educational resources, you will have access to our extensive database of dropshippers and wholesalers so you can find a supplier for your online business.

If you have any questions, or if you have any difficulty in signing up for the trial or viewing the videos, please email the customer service team at support@wholesalematch.com or call 801-938-4718.

Education, finding suppliers

Wholesale Match is diving into social media, establishing a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Our purpose is twofold: first, to improve communication with our members, and second, to continue to educate people about selling products online.  Through Facebook we hope to establish a community where our members can connect with dropshippers and wholesalers and share business tips with other e-commerce entrepreneurs.  We plan to use Twitter to Tweet hot deals on products.  Finally, on YouTube we will provide educational videos to help people sell products from personal websites and on eBay.

Wholesale Match is committed to online business education.  Many people enter the e-commerce world unprepared, and waste time and money trying to establish an online business.  We hope that our social media campaign will provide the knowledge, skills, and connections to help people run successful online businesses.

We encourage our members to use all Wholesale Match resources, including those we will post on social media outlets.  As we add new features on these sites, we will post updates in the news section of the Wholesale Match website.

If you have any suggestions for educational videos you would like to see, products you would like us to find for the Daily Deals, or any other information you would like us to include in our social media campaign, please post your comments below or email them to support@wholesalematch.com.  We welcome your feedback.

Education, internet marketing