My online experience started with selling odds and ends on eBay. It seemed like a good way to make some extra money, and so many people were doing it. After a while I started to look at what my actual costs were including time to package, mail, and list items. Was it worth the cost? So I decided there had to be a better way, and I came across a friend who asked if I had tried using a Dropshipper. ( For those unfamiliar with this, it is where a company houses and then ships the goods to your customers. Your customer makes a purchase through you. You then turnaround and place the order with the Dropshipper, and they ship out on your behalf)
WOW! To have no inventory cost, someone else to package and send the goods with your name on it, what could be better?
As I found out there were hundreds of dropshippers, and they all had different policies, so I narrowed the list down.
Now that I had these dropshippers with literally thousands of products, how can I list them, and get them sold. eBay was not option, because every item would cost me a listing fee. So I found similar sites, with good traffic, that did not charge a listing fee, but charged on the actual sale.
Here are two of the ones I use:
iOffer
Live Deal
As my story continues: I was looking for drop shippers (these are companies that will stock the products and then ship to your customers, for a small fee) to help in my online business. I was able to come across Free Store Club. They are actually a business opportunity to have your own online store for free, and then you get a chance to earn additional dollars, if you give away free stores, and those members upgrade. You can also purchase the items at the wholesale costs and resell them. Not a bad way to get started! I signed up for free and listed some of the items, on iOffer, and sold some. Had them shipped and made a little bit of money. Then as I was trying to upload inventory every other week, I thought it would be great if I could just get people to my Rogers eMall store. Then they could see the entire inventory, they would make the purchase, and then I would get paid on the difference between the wholesale cost, and the cost I had listed on my site. The question was how do you get traffic and visibility without spending a lot of money initially? Plus how can I create a secure payment gateway for my customer to pay that was cost effective and secure. Stay tuned for how I found the Traffic Exchange and Banner Exchange business, and actually started my own.
For high-volume sales, an e-commerce merchant account plus a payment gateway will meet your needs. A merchant account provider authorizes the transfer of payments to your account, and a payment gateway transfers the information from your customers’ financial institutions to yours.
Step 5: Generate traffic
This can be done through Pay Per Click advertising, link exchanges, and blogging.
Add A Comment