Ecommerce

The new face of Ecommerce

Drop ship directories, Amazon Web services...all plugging away to find real estate on any site that will have them. Is this the new face of ecommerce... everyone selling content-related items from a Super-catalog in the sky? You bet!

Dr. Beiermann does an excellent job in the following article describing the components of Drop Ship Directories as a viable ecommerce route for many site owners

Are Drop Ship Directories Really Worth The Money? Here Is A Guide...

This question is often asked by many people hoping to start a new ecommerce site or simply adding to an existing one. The answer to the question can be simply answered with another question: How much is your time and online business worth to you? The more experienced ecommerce site owners will often ask the question a little differently: How do I find a useful, and legitimate, drop ship directory? The answer to this question is not immediately straight forward without doing a little homework. However, when you find a great directory, it can be worth the price of admission a thousand times over. So, in this article we are going to present a couple of important pieces of information that can help you answer some of these questions and guide you through the forest.

First, let's get on the same page together and define what a drop ship directory is supposed to do (or contain). These directories are supposed to contain the names and contact information for companies that drop ship their products to your customers for you. They offer you the lowest wholesale pricing. They are able to ship single quantity items to your customers. They do not require minimum orders and the drop shipper will not ask you to pay any association fees. The drop shippers in the directory are usually one of two types: 1) They are the manufacturer, or 2) They are an import distributor with a warehouse. So, these folks are a key business ingredient when it comes to supplying and shipping product to your customers without you carrying the inventory.

How hard can it be to actually find a drop shipper?

The best way to answer this question is to try and find one yourself. If you have actually tried this in the past, then you know this can be a very time consuming task that requires some research. This is particularly true if you are trying to find a specific niche of products the general public has not seen often. These products typically do very well on the Web with a niche type of ecommerce business. So, finding the wholesale supplier to drop ship the items can be a very time consuming challenge, and sometimes you might not find anyone. One of the biggest values a drop ship directory brings is the ability to save you all the time searching for a drop shipper. The time saved can let you concentrate on other parts of your business. Another value a directory can bring is the possibility of finding new product ideas for your business.

What should I be evaluating?

Let's now turn our attention towards what you should be looking for in a drop ship directory. The drop ship directory business has been plagued in the past by many scam artists. Today, there are still some directory scams out there, which is to be expected. Virtually any line of business has, or has had, it's share of scams. A little bit of education is key in spotting the real directory companies from the not so real directory companies. With a little bit of knowledge and a trained eye, you can spot them fairly easily. For purposes of this article, we are going to focus on evaluating a directory and the company offering it. Again, this should help guide you through the forest.

There are ten key parameters you should consider when considering a drop ship directory:

• 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 its 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. 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 its drop shippers. The question they start to ask is, " A directory with over 700,000 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 $80 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 its 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 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 its 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, money back guarantee, and a phone number for calls outside of the country.

With these ten parameters you should now have enough knowledge to get 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.

About The Author:

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 www.hienote.com or call 1-800-342-0386.

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The Q's

Ask yourself the following questions

• 1. What is the objective of my site?
• 2. Who is my competition, if anybody, and what are they doing?
• 3. Where is this going in the next 5 years?
• 4. What type of maintenance will the site require?
• 5. Who is my audience, how will I obtain and retain them?

Getting to the A's

Okay it's really more like 8 questions, but the title sounded better at 5

What is the objective of my site?

This may seem like a silly question... the answer usually being "to sell my product" or "to let people know about this or that", but in my line of work it's one that often goes overlooked

Clients are usually in such a rush to "Get On The Internet", I am usually the first one to define for them the objective.

Determining this is really a simple process. If you purpose is to sell products decide the following:

• How do I plan to accept payment?
• How will I deliver the merchandise? UPS? FedEx? USPS?
• Are there limiting factors to a website? And should I limit my inventory?

In the end your objective should be something like the following:

Who is my competition, if anybody, and what are they doing?

The competition you find on the internet may differ greatly from the competition in the real world... In order to find your "virtual" competition simply fire up your favorite search engine and search for phrases a consumer might use when looking for your business.

Look over the competitions' websites, look for similarities, strengths, weaknesses... Even go so far as to order a small item from them. Get the full experience of what's already out there. Then figure out if you can do it better.

Where is this going in the next 5 years?

Trying to foresee the inevitable changes to an ecommerce application is quite difficult.

However, we can deduce one thing... change will come.

A long term plan should have an overall objective and a success criteria. Meaning, where would we like to be and how do we measure our progress?

If you sell widgets and in your first quarter of online retailing you sell 10 widgets, in your second quarter 20 widgets, you then have some meaningful data which will help provide a roadmap for future plans.

You may plan to sell 100 widgets during the fourth quarter. Did we sell 100 widgets in the fourth quarter becomes your success criteria.

In addition to simply applying the logic that dictates how to get from point A to point B, you also need to consider the technical requirements of scaling up quickly or slowly. do we have access to the appropriate hardware? Is bandwidth going to become an issue in the near future? Can we increase the performance of our application?

In addition to hardware and programming concerns, modifying you virtual store should be approached from a user-focused point of view as well. are people finding the items they want? Quickly? Could the ordering process be easier?

An online ecommerce application can be prove to be your best marketing tool, but the pitfalls can be very different from those in the real world.

What type of maintenance will the site require?

Managing an online ecommerce application can become very time consuming.

Establishing bot a schedule and a responsible party or parties for regular updates and maintenance is vital

Keeping content fresh on your site is how we gain repeat customers in the virtual world.

Who is my audience, how will I obtain and retain them?

As in the real world, your virtual customers will have similarities.

Age ranges, sex, tax bracket...

Inviting your customers to interact with your site in the form of Newsletters, Forums, Chat rooms, Classified Ads... will greatly improve your relationship with them and their relationship with your products. but you must know who they are first.

As a web developer/designer this is one of the first questions I ask each and every client. while the owner of the company maybe a weekend biker, if his clients are soccer moms we wont be throwing the GHarley logo and flames all over the website. We need to convey a look and a feel for the customer. If your customers are not internet savvy, keep it as simple as possible. General rule of thumb: Keep It Simple. If they are computer geeks, like myself, keep it as simple as possible.

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So if you've attempted to make a PayPal button based on the data from PayPal you have something like this.

Now if you attempted to validate this for XHTML 1.0 you'd get this message:

So, what's the solution?

A very simple one here:

Simply change all the & symbols to "&" like this:

Now, when you try to validate you code you'll get this(as long as you remember to reference the correct doctype)

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