Ask me anything about eCommerce (2012)

[biophase]

Out of the three sites in your sig, which is most successful? Which is least successful?

Sorry, not gonna answer that.

 

[wade1mil]

For drop shipping, do we contact suppliers first before setting a website? What do we do when they ask for website URL? If I were to have several suppliers for one type of product (let's say bags), do we use one website or different ones? It's the same niche, but do suppliers mind that we have different brands in one site?
Thanks all! I wish I had find you guys years ago!
By the way, why am I still PARKED?

I believe Bio said that dropshippers will sometimes ask you for your website or even a business license. If they ask for a website, put one up with products found on the internet. Just show a web presence. If they ask for a business license, go down and get a business license or find someone that doesn't require it. If they require it, you gotta have it so do what you gotta do. I think his response to that is in this thread somewhere.

You get out of PARKED by contributing a post that other members of the forum really value. They will click the SPEED POST below your post and it could either keep you at PARKED or catapult you to 10 mph depending on who liked your post. For instance, Biophase has probably got 200 SPEED POST's on this thread alone because of the value he's providing other members. A good way to get SPEED without having experience, not saying that you don't, is to show people that you are taking action toward something fastlane. Not like, "I read a book about ecommerce," but more like, "I built my purse website and added some products from the dropshipper. Can you critique it for me?"

Good luck!

 

[PatrickP]

Well when I say I had more time than money I was working 80 hours a week.

I cut my sleep back from 9 hours a day to 5. That left me with over 30 hours a week to work on my start up business.

 

[tincho1492]

First of all, to Biophase and the other guys, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!! You make a great community. Thank you, guys!

I've just read the whole 31 pages today and am excited as hell.

Right now I'm making some plans to start my first store. Will read other valuables threads (Vigilante's is one of them) and see how I can start importing some stuff from China.

Feels scary but exciting as well, you know what I mean

I think there are hundreds of niches out there geared toward women. I'd love to start one if I could find the right niche (and the time).

I'm starting to work on one right now

 

[PatrickP]

Biophase PLEASE do that lmgtfy : )

 

[karakoram]

no ssl?

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk 2

You can have SSL on your site. In fact, I strongly recommend it. I setup my eCommerce with with Wordpress and Woocommerce. I purchased an SSL cert for 1 year with Namecheap for like $10 or $15. I had to buy a dedicated IP from my host for an additional $25/yr. I use MDDhosting for all of my sites. I have many sites, but only a few hosting accounts, as you can host more than one site under an account.

They also support ROR if you prefer to use that (though I usually use wordpress). They also support OpenCart, Magento and a bunch of other open source and very popular eCommerce software packages. THey have 1 click installation of wordpress or any of the offered eCommerce packages. They have a LOT of other open source software available as well as a 1-click install. FOr example, I use Piwik analytics.

Thier tech support is very responsive and effective as well. Recently, they protected all of their customers' accounts (including mine) from the wordpress "admin" attack before we were attacked. THey sent us all an email to notify us of the actions they took to protect us, and so that we could log back into wordpress (I NEVER use "admin" for any of my installed open source software like Wordpress).

If you are planning on having a LOT of different products right away, I would setup a site like this: Install Wordpress as your front end, along with SEO plugins. PUt lots of seo optimized content (text, tagged images and video). Then install OpenCart or Magento (or your favorite eCommerce package), and link the main wordpress site to the shopping cart.

The reason for doing it this way are 2 fold:
1) Wordpress is a lot easier to SEO optimize for search terms. Its easier to get a wordpress site to rank well.

2) Dedicated open source shopping cart software is better at handling the eCommerce side of things but is harder to SEO optimize.

SEtting up a site this way gets you the best of both worlds.


If, instead, you are only doing a FEW products (this is my situation) then just install Wordpress then wooCommerce. wooCommerce is free, but you will also need a wooTheme and a couple of other smaller plugins that are not free. I bought the Stripe plugin for wooCommerce so I can take credit card directly on my site. WooCommerce supports Paypal out of the box, so I have both those options on my site. You might consider one of the shipping integration plugins (fedex, UPS, USPS) as well.

The other thing I bought was a WooTheme that works well with their wooCommerce plugin.

SSL or not is not dependent on using ROR or Wordpress or whatever you use. It is dependent on your host.

I will also add that if your business model is a SaaS (software as a service) and not eCommerce, and you are offering a pretty unique product, I would have that part built in Ruby, or Python. But if your business is eCommerce, I stand by my earlier comments-- WHy reinvent the wheel?

 

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[LibertyForMe]

He already told you his thoughts... get bigger margins.

 

[biophase]

What are your best traffic sources generally.. Of course, without revealing too much.

Are you doing social promotions to build your brands, and if so do they get attention. Or are you focused on more traditional things like SEO/SEM. Have you done any advertising in smaller niches or sponsored anything, if so has the ROI been worthwhile working at a smaller scale.

For new traffic I should say.

Also.. Is there anything you have noticed that will make a product sell or not sell. Or a store fail or grow. Is there any key to this aside from simply having a good design and product. Looking for hidden traps so I can prepare myself early.

Right now it's Google search, PPC and then Yahoo. I have FB and Twitter but I don't use them alot.

The main thing I noticed about products is that you need a product that will improve performance or enhance an activity. Other products like cases, bags, etc... that don't benefit the activity just aren't needed when money is tight.

 

[biophase]

Is starting an SEO company fastlane?

LOL, is this a real question?

 

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[biophase]

Well I think he means Amazon is 0 cost upfront to start selling on, but has potential for o-k profits. Of course it won't build your own website brand recognition but its the right strategy to get money coming in with minimum expenses at the start.. only down side is amazon.com is full of competing sellers, and takes a huge fee on most items - usually they will make more than you on the item if you're a reseller

Actually what I mean is sell your own product on Amazon, build a brand, it has potential for massive profits, then create your own online store, get customers to come to it through brand recognition in the future, then continuing building your brand.

 

[andviv]

sure, can you tell us your background, your experience/success in ecommerce?

Do a search for his posts, he has posted lots and lots of info.

Follow the links in his signature.

 

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[biophase]

Thank you for doing this! For finding dropshippers, do you use big eCommerce warehouses like world wide brands or do you contact companies in the niche that you're interested in and try to set up an agreement.

I've found WWB to be decent but it's better to just directly contact companies. If you have a niche, then you have no need for WWB. In fact, I don't dropship anymore so I would rather find companies that don't dropship.

 

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[Whole Paradigm]

Kenric,

When running multiple ecommerce sites, what types of systems do you have in place to help keep track of sales, emails from customers, etc? So that it's less overwhelming and easy to maintain...


Thanks for starting this thread,

Cory

 

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[puckman]

thanks.

1) Would you recommend using Magento for a 1 man shop? Magento was a giant pain when we rolled it out, across a team. Now that I am on my own, starting stores, I am wondering if its too much for a small operation like mine. I would initially build the store and back end, with occasional help. Most good Magento guys I know charge $90/hr, not cheap. From my experience Magento is a giant undertaking, not sure if its good for small operations.

2) Whats your POV on Wordpress ecommerce stores? Worth it? Again, I am a small operation, building a lot on my own.

3) At what point in an ecommerce company lifecycle do you introduce marketing(SEM, FB ads, Display ads, etc)? From my experience we were live and grew quickly for two years before we spent any money on marketing. We were in a high growth niche with lots of exposure from sponsorships and events. Now its our largest expense.

4) What do you do to identify new trends in retail? Example, in the next few years, wireless electrical charging is going to be huge. It will be in the iphone, and I imagine a cottage retail industry to be created. Do you have any voodoo to spot these quiet potential retail opportunities?

 

[Tronik]

Hey Kenric, hope you're doing well. I discovered your blog LiveLearnInvest yesterday and the sheer amount of info it had was awesome, I read about 37 pages yesterday, very inspirational. Im hoping to open my first Ebiz/E Commerce site soon, and I was wondering how much would having my SEO done for me would cost? I looked online and I found hundreds of different services, with some offering monthly subscription services for 500 a month, although Im not sure why SEO is a subscription service lol. Are there any SEO sites you could recommend that are cheap enough for a 16 year old to buy?

 

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[biophase]

Makes sense about the payment gateways.

How did you find your supplier in Asia? Website like alibaba? References?

Did you have any issues with customs being unreliable? I had lots of issues with customs either stealing stuff from my boxes or just not letting them pass at all anymore. After I hired a customs broker it got even worse.. For some samples I was supposed to be paying 100 dollars for their work and they charged 500 after they received the product.

My suppliers actually found me. But they are all listed on Alibaba. I didn't go looking for them or ask for references.

Customs is tricky. They've never stolen my stuff, but it's been delayed a few weeks. Then they tack on storage and handling charges and your whole shipment is $500 more than it's supposed to be. I use a customs broker for all my shipments.

You should look at the charges and see why they increased by so much.

 

[puckman]

Interesting comment...

What is your experience running ecommerce sites? How many stores do you own and run?

Based on this experience... how else are you dominating your niches?

What would be a better use of his time, if not learning SEO?

I prefer to stay anonymous, but this has been my lively hood for over 10 years, I have been employed by and involved in some of the largest portals and retail brands on the web.

Dominating your niches is not about price, trickery or marketing, but providing supreme value and becoming a solid fixture in the community. Tribes is a great book I would recommend. It would be active involvement in growing and promoting the industry/audience you play in, however YOU would define that.

SEO is fundamental for any web business, but not a be all end all. I would focus on creating solutions and value for my customers first.

Take a look at JC Penny;
JC Penny

Now you can look at this a few different ways; as a smaller store you can say "that will never happen to me because I am small" but that is wrong because the bulk of this policing by Google affects the smaller guys who solely rely on this. You can also say "JC Penny is clearly cheating" well.. they are just following a teetering industry practice that can tip in the worst direction without any given notice. There is another article out there on Inc about a smaller online flower shop who relied solely on SEO and when the algorithm changed, they lost 80% of their traffic overnight, and it never corrected(Cant find the link but it would have been perfect here)

All I am saying is; know how else you would survive without Google, if Google went away.

 

[StudyRx]

Good relevant article on Wayfair: Wayfair's Road to $1 Billion - Yahoo! Small Business Advisor

 

[biophase]

Usually, an agency or larger company(the buyer) will have a large account already and will just copy your campaigns into their accounts. Anytime you would use an SEM/SEO agency they would just do this anyways. This might work for the small time buyer with nothing active, but the larger acquirer or investor will likely have something running much larger, my two cents..

At this point a potential buyer could or could not use an agency. However, one thing overlooked is that with a single account, you can't have more than one ad show up for the same keyword. With multiple accounts, you can get around that.

 

[biophase]

Do you think it is better focus one one store and put everything in to it or open 100 little stores or something in between.

If you focus on a razor sharp niche you can get sales faster. The downside is that you have a limited ceiling.

If you go with one big store, you will be more diluted in the beginning and it will be harder to rank for everything, but your upside is greater.

Logistically, managing 100 little stores is alot harder than managing one big store.

I think that if you look into the future, you will always wish that you had one big store instead of a ton of tiny ones. However, if you look at now to 6 months from now, you will wish you had a tighter niched stores.

 

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[biophase]

Hi,

What percentage your sales are from the marketplaces, like Ebay and Amazon (if any)?

I don't sell on Amazon yet. I do sell on Ebay. I don't use it for sales. I use it for marketing. My prices are super high on Ebay. Therefore I don't expect many sales. What I do expect is people to see my auctions, see my products and see my brand. Then hopefully they search the brand and buy from someone else on Ebay or mine or somebody else's stores.

Ebay w/paypal takes up over 10% of your gross. Amazon takes 15%. That's alot of money.

I will be opening an Amazon store soon, again using it for mainly marketing.

 

[biophase]

Bio, i have a few questions if you can answer them.

1. If you setup a new store today, how much would your totaly budget be to setup and how much do you set aside for PPC?
2. Do you do all SEO yourself or do you buy link packages?
3. Once your site is setup and you have started SEO, how long does it take you to rank for it on page 1.
4. roughtly how many visitors would you attract in your second month.
5. Have you ever gone into a saturated market?

I don't do alot of PPC, I budget around $5-$10 a day. You can setup a new store for under $1000. Your 2nd store could be setup for $100 after that.
I do some SEO myself and buy link packages. Right now, due to penguin I'm not sure what the correct course of action would be.
It usually takes 4-6 months to get on page 1. But it really depends on your URL and keywords. Some of mine took a year. But I'd say that in 4-6 months you should be able to get a bunch of keywords (2 word) on page one.
I don't know how many visitors I'd get in the second month. Some of my sites still only get 50-60 visitors a day but are making good sales. A niche store usually attracts very specific customers looking for exactly what you sell.
I've tried some saturated markets, but have found the untapped ones are alot easier (obviously) to get sales. I can go into a saturated market but I would have to spend alot more time doing SEO.

 

[biophase]

I have a question about this. I am out of the country right now for at least another year and a half, although I want to sell in the USA. I have found a great product but not sure how I will handle the product fulfillment. The manufacturer I am using doesnt have a drop ship method. Is their some form of product fulfillment service that I can get my products to and have them ship my products once I send them the orders?

You can ship all your stuff to a fulfillment company. They will handle shipping all your orders and customer calls about tracking numbers and returns. You can also try Amazon fulfillment.

 

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[biophase]

This is a niche dependent question but for the sake of discussion I'll still ask: what are your thoughts on offering retailer-side warranties?

My industry dosen't have many products at high risk of wear or damage (like say electronics or car parts) so I'm thinking of adding warranty options for between 10-15% of the product price as an option in the cart. That extra margin would go a long way if the warranties are priced right.

I would love to add warranties onto products that I sell. I think it would be a great revenue generator. My products don't really need warranties as they get dirty and are used outdoors. I think if you have product that you can get 10-15% of it's cost for a warranty it could be worth looking into.

Better yet, I'd rather have a monthly subscription to a warranty which would be good for anything they buy.

 

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[Dan Da Man]

biophase, what's the best way to learn SEO?

Just doing some internet searches there is so much information out there to know what is any good.

Any advise on where to start?

Ill chime in since I have experience.. Start doing. That is the best way. You can't read what works because there is all here say garbage out there. You need to test yourself. Create a few sites for testing purposes. Start throwing mud at the wall and see if it sticks. Also, start reading www.BlackHatWorld.com if you are really serious about it. I know people give me crap for saying this, but those who do say that, no nothing about SEO.

Dan

 

[biophase]

Well, I don't know what kind of blackhat they were talking about. I am not talking about cloaking sites and refferal spam kind of stuff. And I disagree. I know many people who did exactly what google said and their sites are gone. I have sites that have lasted over 6 months to a year with spammy backlinks.

There are certain signs that google looks for. YOu have to be smart. I have friends in the insurance, attorney niches bringing in millions a year. Think they can compete doing manually white hat stuff? If you can rank and not do blackhat, sure go ahead. But for the most part, any site that is actually doing SEO is doing blackhat.

HEre is the thing. Everything that I do blackhat, is what you and other people are doing white hat. I just use an automated program which will create 10,000 times the efficiency. You wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. Google won't either. If you take projective measures to understand what signs google is looking for, you can be in the game a long time doing blackhat.

I think you said that your sites got hit in the last update? Were they all white hat? If so, then what does it matter?

I think you read my post wrong. What part are you disagreeing with?? I don't have anything against blackhat. In fact, I agree that all SEO is blackhat since Google doesn't like any SEO.

The blackhat stuff I'm talking about is nothing like you've mentioned. It's the kind of stuff where they say, ok cell phones off, no photos, videos or note taking for this part of the class. Unfortunately, I didn't retain hat was taught because I didn't have the resources to implement what they talked about in class. This wasn't manual stuff. It was super server intensive and they talked about generating 10,000 links a day and it wasn't the normal warrior/wicked fire stuff.

All I'm saying is that SEO companies that get paid the big bucks will do black hat to rank big companies for big keywords. They have massive server resources and huge private networks. Think about what a network must look like for an SEO company that has been in business for 5 years. What kind of domains have they gathered? How many servers do they have running all day? How many partnerships with other SEO companies do they have?

 

[biophase]

So rather than competing with price, you compete with? Sorry if i missed this jewel early on in the thread, I really came to the last page on this one to get your take on MAP policies.

Thanks, how've you been otherwise?

Dj

I compete by having a good looking store, customer service and being knowledgable in my field.

 

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[biophase]

I mean the actual packaging but I guess the issue is branding. I know you do the whole process yourself now, but say you were still dropshipping suits with the xxxxxxxx brand. Does the package say "suit warehouse" or "xxxxxxxxx"? If xxxxxxxx shipped it, I would think they would use their packing slips or whatever identifies the product unless you provided them with custom labels. Also it might be a little confusing for the customer if the return label says "xxxxxxxx" when they bought it from your store. I would think you would want to promote your site instead of theirs to increase repeat sales, even though you are selling their product....

It depends on your dropshipper. Some will put your packing slip inside the package. Some will generate their own but it should say something generic. Some will stick their own store catalog in there and f**k you.

If they use your Fedex or UPS account the return address on the label will have your name and address. If they use their account, it will have their address.

I doubt many people even look at the shipping label. Did you look at the last thing bought? Or did you just look at see your name on the box and open it to figure out what was in it?

 

[Dan Da Man]

Btw,

I have been getting tons of PMs recently regarding SEO and e-commerce. Don't want to steal the light from Biophase. He probably knows much more then I do. But, I have been doing this for over 3 years and learned everything by myself from trial and error. I don't hire anyone and I don't outsource anything but website creation.

Anyone who is interested in learning more about SEO or e-commerce please PM me and I will set you up on my list for an ebook that myself and another member on this forum have created. It is free and I don't require an email to sell you, just a written and video review. Ebook is already written just need to put some finishing touches on it.

What will be covered? Everything from finding a product, researching a niche, finding manufacturers, keywords research, SEO tools, building links, onpage SEO and pretty much every thing I have learned in the last 3 years.

I really think that anyone interested in SEO and or building their own e-commerce store will find value in this. I know how hard it was to find information about SEO and e-commerce and I lost a lot of money and a lot of time figuring it out on my own. If I can share my knowledge and help people out, I think those 3 years of sleepless nights will have been worth it.

P.S you will also have access to the membership site where we update content regular and weekly webinars, examples and test sites we practice new strategies etc..

Thnx

 

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[andviv]

It will cost me about $1500-3000 to get a store up and running (I can design the site, but need someone to integrate it into Big Commerce).

What if you use something like shopify to test the waters?

I think that runs like $30/mo for the basic one, enough to give it a try and find out what works... no?


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