# Monetizing Your Store Based Web Site



## MoonRiver (Sep 2, 2007)

I'm not planning on an online store, but I know several HT'ers have stores, so post do's and don'ts here. What has worked for you? Ideas for minimizing returns? How do you build return business? etc.


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## katlupe (Nov 15, 2004)

The worst mistake I ever made was selling dropship merchandise in the past. My site has been up since 2002 and I feel like I wasted much time doing that. You cannot control anything about the sale and the products may be of poorer quality and may not have shipped on time or at all. Very bad. Most of the dropshippers will sell right alongside of you and come up in the listings on Google so you have to compete with them......and you can't. They put low prices on the merchandise that is way lower than what you can sell it at. 

Another bad thing was listing products for other sellers. Very bad idea since you cannot control their customer service and it reflects on you.

Since we are now selling a product that we buy outright and is in our house we have so much more control. Great customer service is what we provide and since our product has to be bought over and over by the same customers we get repeat customers. 

We use all open source software and my husband has done all our web work and is really good at search engine optimizing. So being in the top of the search engines is something that has been working very good for us. And so is using social media for advertising. 

I could probably think of more things but I am on my way out of here right now. 

katlupe


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## ErinP (Aug 23, 2007)

Minimizing returns: 
Get good pictures and describe everything. 
(And you'll _still_ have people who can't read or look at pictures and are incensed because they thought they were buying something else. lol)

Return business:
Keep your shipping rates as low as possible and ship _promptly_. After that, make sure whatever it is that you're selling is described carefully so that people know what they are getting is actually what they're after. 
(And you'll _still_ have people who can't read or look at pictures and are incensed because they thought they were buying something else.  )


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## paintlady (May 10, 2007)

I have a website but customers have to call me to order because I charge the cheapest shipping. Here in my area and the five surrounding states we have SpeeDee delivery. I can ship to people in those states for a fraction of what UPS,FEDEx and the USPS charges. I used to ship everything via FedEx but this year they started tacking on all kinds of hidden surcharges and I was losing money when I shipped something out. I now also ship with the USPS flat rate boxes when possible to save my customers money and save me the money I have to pay for boxes. 
This system seems to work well. I am the only person that sees the credit card info and I destroy it after the orders ship unless the customer wants me to keep it for repeat orders. 
www.organicwheatproducts.com


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## katlupe (Nov 15, 2004)

I wanted to add that I seem to have an edge over my competition by offering free shipping on my products. They are light and it does not cost that much to send them so I have incorporated that cost into my cost and price accordingly. Other stores may offer free shipping but only if the buyer spends a certain amount.

Another thing I do is to send a survey for the buyer to fill out after they have received the strings. This contribution alone has helped our business so much! 

We also contact would be buyers who have abandoned their shopping cart. Sometimes there was a problem with the transaction that had to do with the site and we did not know it. 

I know a lot of people do not care for Paypal but I use it and have used it for years now. Never had a problem with them yet. Even protected us twice dealing with people paying with stolen cards! Customers can pay with a credit card directly or can use their Paypal account. Worth it for the low cost.

I use a few of the social media sites. Twitter and Facebook. I have been working on String Baby's myspace page the last week or so. Many people have been adding me as a friend and what is great about them on myspace is they are all musicians or in the music industry and that is the people I want to reach. Send a bulletin, make a comment on their status, listen to their music and make a comment, put photos of my strings up, etc. It is an ongoing thing. 

Working with SCORE has helped me and I have things I am working on before I go back. Very helpful and I am so glad I contacted them.

I know the one place I am lacking is that I needed more brands. Just this past week I added S.I.T. Strings to my site. So that gives me two! I need more and am planning on adding more brands as soon as I can. It takes time to do the photos and write my copy but it is worth it to spend time on it. Oh yeah......takes the $$ to buy the inventory too. 

The other place I am lacking is in the marketing or should I say paid advertisements. So I am working on that aspect also. 

katlupe


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## CaveatTyrannis (Jan 21, 2010)

Been lurking on the board for awhile. I hope this question is relevant to the thread...

My wife and I have a couple of ideas for online stores, but before we can determine how valid they would be, we'd need to predict product pricing.

Seems there's a bit of a wall set up by wholesalers to prevent the public from getting info. I expect that getting ourselves set up with the state and obtaining a vendor license will help with that somewhat (although some want copies of customer orders and/or newspaper ads on top of your license). 

How do you surmount this when starting out - especially as a web-based business?

An even bigger obstacle seems to be that "real" wholesalers don't advertise on the web and very few are in the phonebook. The "directories" of wholesalers on the web appear to be a pseudo-scam. 

How do you find real wholesalers once you get a vendor license?


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## katlupe (Nov 15, 2004)

In the beginning the manufacturer contacted us to sell their strings in our store because we had signed up with a musical instrument distributor (does not sell to the public or allow them access to their site until you pay them and join). The second brand of strings we just added, we contacted them ourselves but the contact info came from the distributor. 

Can you find the manufacturer of the products you want to sell by Googling them? I have also found manufacturers on the Thomas Directory. Personally, I'd rather go directly to the manufacturer than the distributor as that cuts out the middle man. 

katlupe


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## CaveatTyrannis (Jan 21, 2010)

katlupe said:


> In the beginning the manufacturer contacted us to sell their strings in our store because we had signed up with a musical instrument distributor (does not sell to the public or allow them access to their site until you pay them and join). The second brand of strings we just added, we contacted them ourselves but the contact info came from the distributor.
> 
> Can you find the manufacturer of the products you want to sell by Googling them? I have also found manufacturers on the Thomas Directory. Personally, I'd rather go directly to the manufacturer than the distributor as that cuts out the middle man.
> 
> katlupe


I don't mean to be vague in the descriptions below. At this point, I don't want to post too much on a public forum until I've abadoned my personal attempts.

The first idea would be selling a particular subset of common products from major manufacturers that I find to be difficult to locate consistently. No one on the web or ebay is currently marketing to this niche that I could find. P&G would be one of the main suppliers, but I don't believe they sell direct in any quantities I could deal in. I have found some distributors for convenience stores, but they only deal in a few common products, not the full line, and I need to buy the oddballs. I think I need to find a grocery-store level distributor that is willing to deal with a small company, although the select products I would buy in case lots.

The other idea is selling a few key plant species (my wife is a gardener). We've had a little more success in finding some pricing. Went to the local home and garden show this weekend and a very small bare-bones vendor had some species for half what I paid at a good price, and still below any quantity-discounted vendor I could find on the web. One of them had a tag with the source grower, so we're pursuing that. 

Lastly, I rebuilt a travel trailer over the summer. I found prices for RV parts and accessories to be all over the place. Now, some people are selling small lots of surplus they bought at auction, but others consistently have very low prices. They have to be buying at even less in order to sell at a profit. I did quite a bit of research here, and that's where I experienced the "wall" where you can't get any info without a state vendor license, and most want further proof that you are an established business, which is kind of a chicken-or-egg situation starting out. I found most sellers to have terrible customer service and next-to-no knowledge. I think I could do better, if I could just buy from the same sources.

The key with all three ideas above is that they are areas where I or my wife (or both) already have an interest and experience. They are also areas where, worse case, we use the products ourselves so it isn't like we would go out of business with an inventory we had to unload (up to a point). And they are areas where we perceive that the market is not serviced well, at least in some niche aspect.

I have past experience in business management, but always as a wholly-owned distributor of a manufacturer, so I never had to worry about where my product came from. It's a little different working backwards from choosing the market and then sourcing the product.

Right now, my planned course of action is to get a business license with the state. That seems to be key to getting access to a lot of info.

My wife and I both have web design experience, so we can invest some time in the storefront with next to no cost (wife is a homemaker now and I'm a sys admin for a web-based organization).

Maybe we'll have to make up some ads and invoices, or "sell" some products to relatives with different last names in order to buid up some faux legitimacy.


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