| |
| |
|
Ecommerce Information |
|
|
|
Eleven Things You Must Know About A Drop Shipping Directory And Its Company
1. Balance - You want to find a directory rich in many different categories of products rather than the quantity of products available. Many of the directories try to advertise how many products are available in their directory (i.e. 500,000 products). Why is the number of categories important? A directory will not serve you well if it has hundreds of thousands of products, and none of them are in your product interest category. A directory with a good balance has focused on their categories of drop shipper products rather than the quantity. This gives you a better chance of finding something for your line of business. 2. Uniqueness - You will want a directory with uniqueness amongst it's drop shippers. The drop shippers should offer a wide array of unique products that are not necessarily mass marketed. Why? Web sites offering unique and unusual products often do well on the Web versus sites trying to sell big brand name products that you can find with a mega retailer such as Wal-Mart. A directory offering a bunch of big brand name product drop shippers could land you in the highly competitive commodity market against the mega retailers. 3. Selection - A directory with a good selection of drop ship categories is important. The number of drop shippers or the number of products a directory carries should not be the goal. The goal and question should be, "Do they have a drop shipper that would fit my line of business?" A common mistake for many folks is getting fixated on the quantity of products a directory might offer with it's drop shippers. The question they start to ask is, "A directory with over 1,000,000 products ought to have something for me to sell." Wrong! Be sure to remember the first parameter we mentioned. Balance. 4. Search Method - The directory must explain the methods they use to find drop shippers. Be careful of directories that do not publish their search methods. If they do not explain their search methods, they may not have a solid search methodology. The directory could be full of a bunch of middlemen. At that point, the directory would be worthless to you. Directories using search methods such as trade show searches and foreign government agency searches are preferred over directories only focused on Internet searches. Why? Not all drop shippers and importers have a Web presence. A directory based on a bunch of Web searches could be missing some of the best hard-to-find drop shippers. 5. Sample - A sample of the directory should be made available to give an idea of format and information provided. The actual names of the drop shippers will not be given in a sample, but you will get an understanding of the type of information provided. 6. Price - This is a subjective parameter but there is something to consider. As an observation, most legitimate directories on the Web today are sold between the $60 and $100 price mark without any markdown. If you find one good drop shipper in a directory and you sell their products on your site, you could find your directory investment paid off quickly with just a sale or two. 7. Education - The company selling the directory should have a website fairly resourceful with FAQ's and articles written by it's own research staff or owner. Topics should include drop shipping, ecommerce, importing and general FAQ's about drop shipping. Watch out for directory sites only containing FAQ's about their directory and not drop shipping. 8. Custom Search - Find out if the company offering the directory will do a custom search for a drop shipped product. A custom search can sometimes be done under certain conditions with the directory's parent company. As of this writing, Hienote is the only directory company advertising this type of service. 9. Toll Free Number - You should be able to talk to the folk's offering the directory without paying for the call. Contact by email only is not acceptable! Also, be leery of directory sites without a toll free numbers or only a cell phone number given as this could be a suspicious con artist. 10. Customer Service - Any online business that cares about its customers should have a section dedicated to customer service. A company that offers a drop ship directory is no exception. It should have a section of it's site dedicated to customer service. At a minimum it should have a toll free number, mailing address (not just a P.O. Box number!), email address, hours of operation, and a phone number for calls outside of the country. 11. Money Back Guarantee - A money back guarantee is always important to have with a directory. You want a way of getting your money back if the directory does not live up to it's promise. Be sure to examine the guarantee policy. With these eleven parameters you should now have have enough knowledge to get you started in the right direction for evaluating a drop ship directory. In addition, hopefully this has given some food for thought in terms of considering a drop ship directory for your online business. Brad Beiermann Ph.D., is President of Hienote Inc., Crystal Lake, IL 60039. Dr. Beiermann is one of the leading experts in business technology and e-commerce. Hienote Inc. specializes in assisting businesses locate unique wholesale drop shipping companies. You can visit their site at http://www.hienote.com, or call 1-800-342-0386.
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
What Are The Barriers of Implementing E-Commerce Solutions What is electronic commerce?"Electronic commerce is about doing business electronically. It is based on the electronic processing and transmission of data, including text, sound and video. Rules for Achieving Online Success The Internet brought a great deal of benefits to our life. Access to a lot of free and useful information is, probably, one of the most important out of them. Shopping Carts and the E-Aisles Have you ever gone to the store and thought you only needed a few things so you didn't grab a cart? The next thing you know your hands are full and groceries are crashing everywhere making a big mess. If only you had gotten a cart. eCommerce Software Solutions All of the long, grueling nights and an unknown number of working weekends spent converting your dream into reality finally paid off-in a big way! Affiliates are signing up every single day and the clicks have really turned into cash. Your success is not limited to a lonely website but several and all of them are helping you move very diverse product lines. Your Site is all Direct Marketing This may not be a popular view, but I think writing a web site is very similar to writing a piece of direct mail. I'm not talking about smash-and-grab fliers. Getting Started in ECommerce - Part Two In Part One we talked a little bit about what Ecommerce is, getting a domain name and setting up a merchant account. Ecommerce is more than that, much more. Distinguishing Features of E-Commerce E-commerce offers customers the chance to eliminate many stages in the sales/distribution chain. The mark-ups that occur between manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and consumers can add the cost of goods purchased by consumers. How To Start An Internet Business - Content, Content, Content When it comes to e-commerce, the time-tested cliché is, "Content is king." In this case, the cliché is correct. Google Catalogs - Old Gashioned Mail Order Meets High Tech Search In addition to Google's Froogle shopping service (still in beta), which features a searchable database of online merchants, Google is also beta-testing their Google Catalog service. Google Catalogs provides a searchable central repository of hundreds of mail-order catalogs. Starting An E-Commerce Business The development and expansion of the Internet has made business opportunities, once only available to the wealthy, available to nearly everyone. In the past, opening a business was a huge commitment in terms of finances and risk. Web advertising e-Marketing Places! Overview:What is web advertising?Internet Advertising is popularly known as web advertising. Internet webadvertising giving Opportunity to the advertiser to target geographic country wise, subject wise, targeted Customers only from more than 200 countries worldwide. Succeed With Your Own Home Based Business An internet business is by far the best way to support yourself if you just cannot stand working for others for less money than you need to survive. It's also the best way to get out of a good paying job that just takes up too much of your precious short life working for someone else. Paypal Primer To conduct business on the Internet, whether informal, one-time only transactions between two friends, or a full-fledged business selling products or services, payment arrangements have to be made. Before 1998, this often meant either checks sent through snail-mail, or very expensive, and often hard-to-obtain, merchant accounts for online credit card processing. How Measuring Key Performance Indicators Can Improve E-Commerce Strategy - Part One The problem with most e-commerce marketing strategy today is that companies don't understand how they use things like web analytics. Most e-commerce directors or web marketers are given a budget and told to stick to it, and good analytics don't usually come cheap. 10 Reasons To Survey Your Visitors, Subscribers And Customers 1. To find out what type of content visitors want to see on your web site. 7 Must Have Scripts to Look for When Shopping for E-commerce Hosting When shopping for e-commerce hosting there are a lot of things you need to keep and mind. When you know what to look for it is a lot easier to ensure you get exactly what you need and not leave any important information out. Selling From Your Website Greetings!Friends and relitives ask us all the time " How do sell from your website?" and no doubt you want to know as well. Over the next two issues we will be covering this very thing! We decided to divide it into two camps - tangibles and non-tangibles. How to Gain Your Visitors Trust If you are serious about selling on the world wide web and being successful, your number one priority must be gaining your visitor's trust. Without trust you won't sale much and that's really being optimistic. Doing Business Online - Private B2B Exchanges Business processes are the building blocks of an enterprise. If one of these processes fails to live up to its expectation, business starts to flounder. Credit Card Merchant Account Basics Knowing which credit card merchant account to get can be very confusing. There are thousands and thousands of banks, merchant account providers and third party sales teams that can offer you all kinds of incentives.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
