Product selection advice for ebay sellers and drop shippers

The first step to picking your products involves identifying you niche. It has been proven again and again that Ebay sellers who focus on a niche market are much more successful both in sales from new traffic and sales from repeat customers. What is a niche market? It is basically a specialty store. To put it simply you focus on one group of related products. For example Children's Apparel, Cameras and Camera Accessories, Designer Handbags, Fragrances for Men and Women...etc....The point is to focus on a group of related products and if you explore the eBay stores you will notice most of the successful ones are all these types of specialty sites. Here's a breakdown of the benefits of a niche market approach: Initial set up is much easier. Since you are focusing on a group of similar products you can quickly and easily add all the available products in your chosen category to your Ebay listings. It has been proven that niche market Ebayers gain a significant increase in their up-sales (meaning a customer who views you listing for a digital camera sees that you are also selling the lens he wants and he buys that too). If you are selling unrelated items like cameras and belt buckles then you are not going to have much chance at the up-sell. You will generate repeat customers who have shopped with you before and had a positive experience. When you sell Joe Blow a printer and he later needs ink or paper he is more likely to return to you to make his purchase because he already trusts you and he assumes you will have the related products he wants, and if you have followed the niche model you will! Since you are selling printers your niche would include these accessories and you would pick up the sale. Ebay allows members to add sellers and Ebay stores to their favorites list so they can easily come back to the vendors they have used and trust. A niche market is much more manageable and logical. It doesn't really make sense to be selling power tools and wide screen t. v.'s....you see the point? And keeping up with your inventory is a very simple matter when you are working from a niche model. There are two invaluable FREE tools that can give you a great snapshot of the hottest products on eBay. Ebay Pop and Ebay Seller Resources. Access them through Ebay and make good use of the available tools to help you narrow your niche. So now lets suppose you have chosen Cookware as your niche market. You build your eBay listings using only products that fall into the Cookware category. You appropriately price your items, fine tune your listings and drive traffic to your listings. When you feel you have all your cookware products running smoothly you are ready to expand to a related category like blenders or microwaves. Each time you complete a category you move on to the next one and the list of items you are selling will grow and grow....and you will still have a niche market. There is no limit to how far you can go with this. With enough time and effort you could find yourself running on a department store type model. The key is one category at a time. Make sure every product in that category is 100% optimized before moving on to a new category. *Import Notes on Selection Criteria for Products* It is very easy to get overwhelmed by the many products you now have access to. Here are some crucial factors to keep in mind when choosing your niche market and the best products within your niche: Don't chose a niche that is already highly saturated on Ebay. You can easily determine the saturation level by doing a couple of ebay searches for products in the niche you are considering. For example if i go to eBay and search for "Cell Phones" thousands of listings are going to pop up. Your listing would get lost in the shuffle. Search for "Underwater Camera" and you will find it is a much less crowded category. If you check the completed listings you will find most listings sold telling you this is a good opportunity for a niche market. It is always a good idea to check the completed listings for a more accurate idea of how well the item is selling overall on Ebay and for how much. When choosing products avoid items that have a low quantity available. It may seem like an easy sell but when quantities are low you take a huge risk that the item will sell out before you sell it. In some cases products with a low quantity are actually already sold out and have not been updated yet. You can always contact customer service to get more information as to the availability. My general rule is not to sell products that have a quantity of less than 25 in stock. Do Ebay searches for any item you are interested in. You can see how much competition there is and also by checking the completed auctions you can get a picture of how much people are paying for the item. Prices can vary greatly and you may ask yourself why. It is all about the presentation which I discuss more in my in depth free guide. Don't get to caught up in how much the retail price of the items are. The important thing is what they are actually selling for and how steady the demand is. I have a product that I sell for $5.95 plus $3 shipping. I profit only $2.30 per sale but that adds up fast when you sell 50 or 100 a week. I discuss this topic and much more in my free online guide for Ebay drop-shippers which can be viewed at the link below

Start your home business to earn extra dollars

: Looking to start a home business? Thinking of selling products online from home and earn extra dollars on top of your normal working income? With the rapid growing of drop-shipping demand, more and more distributors and manufacturers start to provide drop-shipping service to boost their business. Hence, your can utilize the advantages of drop-shipping service to start your home business and earn your extra dollars while continuing your current job. To start your online home business and earn the extra dollars from it, you need to be able to:

1. Let your potential customers know what you are selling. Hence, your need a website site or an e-store that can display your products.


2. You need to be able to receive orders and process your customer's payment, normally by credit card, PayPal or e-Check. So, you online store should integrate with e-commerce features such as shopping cart and secure payment processing system.


3. You need to fulfill your customer's orders by packing & delivery the ordered products to your customers. So, you need to have your selling products ready any time to delivery to your customers when they paste orders.


4. You need to provide after sale support, handling refund and good returns for exchange.

Let see one by one what you need to have in order to get ready the above 4 items: Online E-Store With Shopping Cart Getting the online store up is pretty easy, you can utilize eBay to build your e-store and sell your products online through eBay network. Or you can purchase an e-commerce ready web hosting package, there are many web hosting package with site builder where you can get your e-commerce website up easily. Receive Payment Online If you want to sell your product online, then you need to be able to receive payment online. When talk about online payment system, PayPal is the most popular online payment processing tool. With PayPal integrated into your e-store, your customers can make payment either by using their credit card, e-check or pay with their PayPal account. Stock, Packaging & Delivery Home business is consider a small business and it might not be cost effective to stock your inventory and tie up your money for the stock and stuck with it if the product can't sell. Most home businesses are "one-man show" or "few-man show" that has least man power to handle package & delivery. If you start your home business as the part-time job, you definitely have no much time to handle packaging & delivery to fulfill your customer orders. Hence, drop-shipping is an extremely perfect business model for home business. With drop-shipping, you do not need to keep inventory, but instead passes your customer orders and shipment details to wholesalers. The wholesalers will handle the packaging and then dispatch the goods directly to your customers with your invoices. And you can make the profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price. After Sale Follow Up After sale service is important to retain your customers and make repeat sales to the same customers if they satisfy with your products and services. A satisfy customer will refer new customers to your online store and you can make more sales. Hence, you need to proactively ensure the wholesalers are shipping out your orders to your customers on time and you could do extra step to follow up with your customer to see whether they have received their order and any issue about the product, often your help to resolve the issue if it occur. In Summary Home business is a good option for you to earn extra dollars on top of your income and you even can convert it to your full time job once it gets success. With the enhancement of the ecommerce technology and the advantages of Drop-Shipping service provided by many manufacturers and wholesalers, you can start your online home business easily and without the need to big start up cost.

Christian message boards explained

Probably you’ve heard about Christian message boards, or perhaps you have participated in one of the most well-known Christian forums out there on the web. Well, on its most basic, the Christian message boards are by far the most active Christian discussion board on the internet these days. Its history dates back to the year 2001 when the said “first” Christian forum was developed. According to some resources, the first message board that carries the “Christian” label was developed by Erwin Loh, an Australian doctor and lawyer, on November 19, 2001. After two months of preparation and discussion, the Kings Tavern, which was created by a person named Ryan Swift, also known as Josephus, merged with Christian Forums for one particular purpose – to help establish it as the largest Christian message board community in the world. The new Christian Forums was then re-launched on February 5, 2002, the day of the merger, to promote the unity of all Christians as one body. The first Christian forums developed by Loh and Swift continue to grow. It grows even after Swift stepped down as co-admin. Along with its rise, the Christian message boards’ shared mission of promoting the unity of the Christian faith continues. Currently, the site has more than 130,000 registered users and serves members from almost every country in the world. This re-launched Christian message board has more than a hundred administrators and moderators who are divided into staff teams that are named after the fruit of the Spirit of Galatians 5:22-23. This message board has been maintaining its motto, which is “Uniting All Christians as One Body”. Swift and Loh’s Christian Forums actually has an extensive organization of forums. As far as I know, there are more than 400 Christian message boards today, many of which have their own sub-forums. It is further worth noting that some of these Christian message boards place limits on the users who can post on them. For instance, only teenagers have the chance to post in the Christian teen forum. It is important to note that many of these forums are only open to Christians. Another thing of interest is the large number of options available to the users. Typically, in most Christian message boards, there is a rather extensive profile that users can fill out for themselves. Some profile information, like the age and faith icon, is used to identify access to particular forums. It is also typical in most Christian message boards to have its own currency called “blessings”, which can be given by other users or earned from jobs. This currency is regularly earned by posting on the forums. Also, blessings are used to add features like avatars and pictures to profiles, as well as to purchase armor, pets and other features that can show up on the user’s post. Today, the Christian message boards developed by Swift and Loh are running a modified version of vBulletin. They also currently run on multiple separate web servers, a central database sever, a slave search server, a DNS server, a mail server, an IRC server and a static file server.

How to get directories to submit your site with this 5 steps guide

: How to get directories to submit your site - with this 5 steps guide ! Getting directories to list your site is easy ! Here are some steps which you can take to find directories: 1. Check out your competitions back links. Your competition is sure to have got links from some directories. Try to get into those first. 2. Do a search in Google (the most obvious one!) using keywords like 'submit+site+directory’. You will come up with many directories for your site. And you can use your imagination to come up with new combination of keywords for searching in Google. 3. Do a search in Google with "allintitle:webdirectory". I did a search with these keywords and came up with some good directories. Or you can use "allinurl:webdirectory" also. The command "allintitle:webdirectory" shows those sites which have "webdirectory" word in the site title. Similarly the command "allinurl:webdirectory" shows those sites which have "web-directory" in the site url. You can change "webdirectory" to "internetdirectory" or any other keyword of your choice. 4. Visit various Search Engine related forums. In almost every such forum you will find some threads discussing directory sub-missions. Follow such threads – dig deeper if needed! You will be aptly rewarded with lists of many directories posted by members of these forums. 5. Visit some good directories like dmoz. org, dir. yahoo, joeant, goguides. org and search for the ‘directories’ category. These prominent directories provides lists of other good directories on the net. Follow these simple 5 steps to get directories on your left, right, everywhere and set your promotion campaign rolling ! Some useful resources: hedir/groupthink/about29.html forums. digitalpoint/forumdisplay. php? f=25 Have fun hunting for directories!