This thread aims to warn you about the most common sales pitches used by middlemen drop shippers, to persuade you to sign up to their services. But first:

What is a middleman drop shipper? A middleman drop shipper is a fake drop shipper that stands between you and the real drop shipper. In doing so, the middleman drop shipper adds a mark up to the price of the products, and often wants a set up fee (usually in exchange for a website). These extra costs make you uncompetitive, especially if you are selling online. Soon you realize you were duped by their claims, and eventually come to the realization that you have to close down the website they sold you because it never was a viable business.

NOTE: Middlemen drop shippers have a canning ability to convince start ups to part from their money. Even if you read this thread in full, you are still at risk of falling for one of the following middleman drop shipper tricks.

If after reading this thread there is one thing in particular you want to remember, it should be this:

Before you pay any drop shipper a joining fee, first think about it 20 times. And then once more. And finally, don’t do it.

What follows is a list of sales pitches used by middlemen drop shippers to try to persuade you to pay them a joining fee.

Pitch No.1: “Don’t worry. Price doesn’t matter”

When communicating with a middleman drop shipper, you will often be presented with the following situation:

You: “Why are your prices higher than online retailers? Aren’t you supposed to supply at wholesale prices?”

Middleman Drop Shipper: “Don’t worry about prices, people don’t buy on price, they buy on perceived value”

So far so good, but they are just starting to hook you in.

You: “Ok that’s very true, but how do I compete if my prices are higher than everyone else?”

Middleman Drop Shipper: “Well look at NationalRetailerX, their prices are x% above market rate, yet they are still selling lots”

You: “Ah that’s a good point, I didn’t think of that!”

This is where the middleman has got you in their grasp.

The truth, Wholesale Forum friend, is that when you are small, and you don’t have hundreds of physical stores or tens of thousands of visitors to your site each month, you must offer additional incentives to your visitors before they will buy from you. And one of those incentives is price.

National retailers attract far more buyers than you will ever be able to as a small business. They can demand higher prices because they are conveniently positioned, you on the other hand have to fight hard to get people through your storefront or visitors to your site. And one way to fight hard and attract visitors is to offer good prices. You can advertise all your profits away, but if you are not convenient no one will buy from you.

Therefore the next time a drop shipper gives you this pitch, walk away. Price and desirability of a product are the two factors you want from your drop shipper. If a drop shipper gives you any sign that they are not satisfying either requirement, walk away, you’ll be richer for it.

While there are many services and programs available online that offer social media tools for ecommerce entrepreneurs, many of them require a paid subscription. That’s fine if you want to spend the money and it might be money well spent. But, if you are like many people with a home business, you prefer to save your hard earned cash as much as possible and appreciate freebies whenever and wherever you can find them.

Here are some great free tools to help you master social media marketing:

Blekko—This free service uses slash tags to help you slash in what you do want and slash out what you don’t want. What is a slash tag? Here’s the skinny on it from the Blekko website: “A slashtag is an easy-to-create custom search engine. It is a tool used to filter search results and helps you to search only high quality sites, without spam or content farms.” You can create your own slashtags for groups of URLs, your friends, experts and communities relevant to your niche. This could be a big help finding relevant others on the humongous World Wide Web.

Social Mention—Social Mention is similar to Google alerts except it’s for social media. The Realtime Buzz Widget is one free tool available from this site. It shows the latest realtime buzz about you, your blog, brand, product, or company. Social Media alerts allow you to receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a developing news story or a competitor.

Friend or Follow—This free tool tells you who isn’t following you back, who you are not following back and who your mutual friends are on Twitter. This is handy for you to keep up with your own followers but also handy to scope out what’s going on with the competition!

Use these FREE tools to make social marketing easier for your ecommerce dropship home business.

In many ways, the Google +1 button works in a similar fashion as the Facebook Like button. When an online user does a Google search, they are able to click the +1 button next to any of the search results. In much the same way as the Facebook Like button, any Google search results that you click the +1 button for will be shared with your immediate network of contacts within Google.

This helps your dropship business if someone clicks this +1 button next to your Google search result because it is shared with that person’s network of Google users. If that was the extent of it, it would be helpful to some extent. But, there’s more.

Here is what Google has to say about their Google Plus One:

“They can appear in Google search results, on ads, and sites across the web. You’ll always be able to see your own +1′s in a new tab on your Google Profile, and if you want, you can share this tab with the world.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, social Plus One buttons, similar to those of Digg, StumbleUpon, and Facebook Share buttons, will be coming to websites near you soon. Here is a quote from the article in the Wall Street Journal and their reference to Google’s Matt Cutts:

“Over the coming months, the project also will allow website publishers including news sites and blogs to install buttons with a “+1? logo on their Web pages so that Google users could click on them to signal that they liked a particular page and share that information with their social network inside of Google, Mr. Cutts said.”

Here is a very helpful video from Google that explains how to use the Plus One feature:

The idea behind Google Plus One is that it will provide more socially targeted ads.

Google Plus One will help your dropship home business!

Your website is crucial to your online success or failure! If it isn’t right, nothing else in your career as an ecommerce entrepreneur will be right, either.

When you are doing business online, your website has to be fully functional and optimized to make the user and buyer experience as effortless as possible.

Here are a few simple but very common website mistakes to avoid on your dropship website:

Having a Splash Screen Unless you have a very, very good reason for forcing your visitors to sit through a long flash intro when they land on your site don’t do it. Online shoppers are notoriously impatient with extremely short fuses. The majority of them want to get in, conduct their business and get out as quickly as possible. If you feel that you must have a Splash Screen, at least include a link to skip it.

Too much text—Fresh, relevant content on your website is exceedingly important because the search engines are always looking for exactly that and providing it will help boost your rank in the search results. But, don’t over do it. Too much text and you will lose your viewer’s attention and when that happens, it’s pretty much over. Do have relevant, updated content but keep it concise and to the point.

Off the wall colors—Pretty and unusual colors are nice, but not on your dropship website. If you choose some off the wall color for your background or font, there is a good possibility that some people won’t even have that color available on their computer and if that happens…who knows what colors they’ll see? Stick with web safe colors.

No browser compatibility—Different people use different browsers. It isn’t easy to be compatible with all of them, but make an effort to at least have cross compatibility with the major and most used browsers. Otherwise, you will lose a lot of potential customers!

Use these tips to avoid making common website mistakes on your ecommerce dropship website.

During the last few years, eBay has made a lot of changes and in order to stay up to date and keep your dropship sales high, you need to understand how things work on the new eBay.

Here are a few of the most significant changes and what you should do to go with the flow and keep your sales figures up to a reasonable level, adapting to the changes as best you can:

You are now being charged Final Value Fees on your shipping charges. This is great news for buyers who were being gouged by sellers trying to make all of their profit on outlandish shipping charges, but bad news if you are simply a small seller who was charging exact shipping cost or just a little more. The best way to work around this change is to offer free shipping. This works fairly well if your products are lightweight but not so well if you are selling heavier dropship products such as televisions. Either way, you’ll get more exposure in the eBay search and come out better with fees if you offer free shipping since eBay gives sellers who do offer free shipping a tiny break on Final Value Fees. Incorporate the shipping cost into your auction starting price of Fixed Price and you should be okay.

For the most part, eBay search is a total disaster. Don’t rely on it alone to have your products found. Instead, use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to help market your products. You should also seriously consider having a blog about your eBay niche and adding a post with fresh, relevant content daily if possible. This will help drive traffic to your eBay listings.

Consider switching to a Fixed Price format rather than auctions. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that auctions are waning in popularity. So, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to format. Run a few auctions if you think that might help generate sales to your Fixed Price listings, but try focusing most heavily on Fixed Price listings and see how it goes.

Have an eBay store. It’s cheap and you get a decent discount of Fixed Price listing fees. Of course, your Final Value Fees will be higher but a store is still a great deal and a good way to keep your sales up.

Try these tips to keep your dropship eBay sales high!

Besides making changes to various applications, including developer testing and insights, changes to the way Facebook Pages are displayed in news feeds may also be something you should be aware of in order to stay up to date.

Facebook is now showing a new sort of news feed story that will link to a Page when multiple friends post updates that mention the name of the Page, even if they don’t tag it. The story will read like this: (Friend’s name) and  other friends posted about (name of Page) and the Page’s name will be linked.

The “Posted About” news feed story tells us all that Facebook is using a natural language processing system on status updates to perform named entity recognition. It will help users to determine topics that are trending within their group of friends and help the Pages representing these topics gain more fans, as well.

Another change: Facebook has recently made improvements to insights for apps through a news feed. When you click on the app insights tab, you now see a news feed that contains a summary of both your positive and negative posts. This is helpful for developing applications because it lets you get feedback on the app in real time. Plus, you can see at a glance how many times the app has been reported as spam. When marketers are experimenting with new ways to win fans and create an app that will be shared, it’s vital to get real time feedback so you know how users are responding to it. You can access the feedback through the news feed for the application.

Keeping abreast of changes to Facebook that will affect your marketing efforts is essential to building your ecommerce dropship business!

After all, sales mean money and money is what it’s all about in a home dropship business! If you stopped making money, it wouldn’t be a business, it would be a hobby. If it’s a hobby you want, you could surely find better ways to entertain yourself than running a business for nothing.

So, you must always keep your eye on the ball and focus on increasing sales and making money!

Here are a few handy tips to help you increase sales in your ecommerce dropship home business:

Reward your repeat customers and keep buyers coming back with some kind of tokens of your appreciation for their business. It might be a free shipping code if that is feasible, or a percentage or dollar amount off coupon code, or something along that line. Repeat customers are worth their weight in gold and you should pursue them vigorously.

Your home page is vital and should contain relevant information about what you have to offer and why it benefit’s a visitor to buy from your dropship sales business. Remember, you only have one chance to make a good impression!

One of the most important things you can do to boost dropship website sales is to have a very user friendly search function. Use breadcrumb navigation so visitors can easily see where they are and where they have been. Have a great search menu and also be sure to allow visitors to enter a word or phrase into a search box. Your categories should be clearly defined so that shoppers know what to expect when they click on a particular category.

Keep the shopping cart user friendly and checkout as simple and fast as possible. This is the point in the sales funnel where many sales are lost, so if you can keep your checkout process running like a well oiled machine, your sales will improve.

These simple tips will help to increase sales in your ecommerce dropship home business!

Buying wholesale handbags is a necessity if you want to make any profits reselling them, and while you have to be careful where you get your products from there are many places to find quality handbags.

Finding a reputable Wholesale Handbag Supplier is of the utmost importance, and while there are many wholesalers who provide good prices and quality products, there are also many that sell shoddy merchandise, have inflated prices, or poor customer service.

Quality, price, reliability, and customer service are all things you should consider when choosing a handbag supplier to get your products from. The supplier you choose should have the best products at the lowest prices and should provide service that will meet your needs.

One of the best ways to determine if a Wholesale Supplier is reputable or not before you buy is to check their track record and reputation. You should always check on the suppliers business history including how long they have been in business, if there are any complaints lodged against the company, and what their business practices are like.

You will want to make sure that they care about the quality and workmanship of their products so that you are not selling low quality merchandise to your customers. You should always check the quality of the products you are considering before you start selling them by either ordering a sample or checking out the handbags at another retailer.

It is best to be discriminating when it comes to choosing your wholesale handbag supplier as choosing one with poor quality merchandise, high prices, or poor customer service can cost your business money in the long run. Buying cheaply made merchandise will tarnish the image of your business and paying too much for your products will greatly lower your profit margin.

There are thousands of hand bag sources in the market to choose from so you should not be in a hurry to pick a supplier, rather compare the products and business practices of many different suppliers before you choose the one, or ones, that will work the best for you.

There are many places to find handbag suppliers both locally and online. A quick internet search will give you thousands of results for wholesaler, although not all of these results will yield quality distributors, some will be for wholesale directories and others for websites that are basically scams and will not give you any type of useful information. If you cannot find wholesale sources directly, you can always look for a wholesale search engine or directory that will have specialized results in the product area you are looking for. You can also find wholesale handbag suppliers locally by going to local flea markets, swap meets, and trade shows. You can also subscribe to trade publications and printed wholesale directories that will list wholesale handbag suppliers.

In times like these, every wholesale online retailer, should be looking for ways to guard themselves against the effect of the current economic downturn.

It is virtually impossible to come away totally unaffected, but there are some measures that you can use to avoid the worst of the impact during these uncertain times to your dropship internet business. It’s in these gloomy economic times that dropshipping makes more sense than outlaying your hard earned cash on stock that may not sell.
In these hard times every online retailer should be making twice the effort to keep the wholesales coming in and the best tactics to employ do not necessarily cost much money, if any at all, just a bit of time.

The first recommendation we have for you is to spend more time to brush up on your search engine optimization. This means that you should keep up to date with any news about how search engines work. Basically, what happens in between the entering of search terms and the return of search results? Why are some pages placed earlier in the results list than others? Fundamentally, the results have to do with having words on your site content (especially in page, section, or picture titles) that match the searcher’s keywords, spaced fairly close together. You can perform many of the basic techniques yourself while designing your site, or if you haven’t got the time to learn for yourself, then you can hire an SEO consultant to help you raise your result rankings. Obviously this will incur a fee but may well be money well spent.

There is a certain element of unpredictability, since you cannot foresee the search terms input by absolutely every potential customer but there are plenty of free online tools that you can use and alot of hosting companies offer software that can give you the search terms used by your existing visitors.

Frequently-used search terms related to a certain topic may also change over time so regular checks to update your keyword list is a must. However, you can do research and find the latest statistical data from popular search engines, and revise your site accordingly.

Besides trying to design your site in accordance with the functioning of search engines, you can also try to ensure that customers find your site easy, or better yet, fun, to use. Try to go through your site as if you were a customer. Do you see any unnecessary distractions or difficult to navigate areas of your site on the way to the most important aspects of the shopping experience (i.e. finding, viewing and understanding products, and then making a purchase easily)? If so, give your site a good pruning, and then watch your profits blossom.

If you would like a deeper, more thorough overhaul, you might try hiring an analyst, again at some cost. A specialist will make a holistic examination of how your site appears and functions in a way that you may not see. Is it safe? Is it user-friendly? How might the overall site design be improved for better simplicity, attractiveness and accessibility? It is true that many online store owners can do some of the more basic aspects of this analysis themselves but in many instances site owners who hire analysts end up doubling their profits. In other words, expert advice can be a great investment.

Investing in help from search engine or general consultancy experts can provide a huge boost for your business, and in these time give you that cushion you from the recession. Making your site more user-friendly is also great measure at any time, so you can draw in those customers, even in these hard times.

If you have been in your online ecommerce business for a while and using email marketing, you are sitting on a goldmine of great SEO that will be extremely beneficial in getting your ranking improved with Google and the other search engines. Google, in particular, because since the changes to its algorithms, fresh, relevant content with great SEO is even more important to your ranking in SERPs (search engine results pages) than ever.

Just dig out all of those marketing emails and post them on your website! It’s that simple. Let each one have its very own page and of course be sure to title your pages with good SEO and your prime keywords.

If you need to change them up a bit, that’s okay. For instance, you wouldn’t want to advertise a sale or promotion that you aren’t having. But for future reference, when you send out marketing emails in the future—do post each one on your website.

Don’t use Flash, but do use some nice, eye catching visuals to rev up the visual appeal of your emails both past and future. Naturally, these images will give you more opportunities to use SEO in your image descriptions.

Your email marketing letters will be more effective when posted on your website if you tone down the calls to action. Edit to make the email more of an informational type thing…neutral instead of hard sell copy.

The search engines, especially Google, crawl the internet 24/7 in search of great content. If you supply that, they will be happy and you will be even happier because your rankings in the search pages will go up. This means that your traffic will increase and unless you have some serious problems on your website and are hemorrhaging potential customers—your sales will go up in relation to the boost ion visitors.

So, get those old, archived email marketing newsletters out and start editing and posting, then watch your dropship home business sales soar!