After publishing my article on the best way to find vendors for your online store, I had a number of readers email me questions about traveling and dealing with overseas vendors. The tone of these emails were generally apprehensive and expressed a direct concern with being able to find and properly manage relations with foreign vendors.

I’ll admit it. It isn’t easy to travel to a foreign country and deal with a completely different culture. But you know what? You don’t want it to be easy. You don’t want the barriers to entry to be too low otherwise you’ll have a ton of competitors in your business niche.

Photo By Star

Running our online wedding linens business has required me to deal with several vendors across China, India and other parts of Asia. Here’s what to expect when dealing Asian vendors.
Expect A Language Barrier
Despite what you …

Starting and running any small business requires inspiration and constant dedication. But maintaining a high level of intensity can be extremely difficult at times especially when things don’t go as planned.

Whenever I’m down about my business, I always take a step back and look for outside sources of inspiration. Sometimes just talking to a friend can make me feel better. Sometimes I get fired up reading about someone else’s success story. In some cases, all it takes is a good ole collection of quotes to fire me back up.

It’s amazing what a few choice words can do to kick start your entrepreneurial spirit. Here are some of my favorite quotes and why they resonate with me. Thank you Trevor Crook for helping me find these.
“Success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity.”
- Sir Walter Scott
Sometimes I feel like I’m …

Once your business is up and running smoothly, it is surprising how easy it is to become complacent and allow your business to stagnate. Especially if you are already in the green and making a decent amount of profit, human nature inclines us to sit back, relax and just watch the money roll in.

On the flip side, your business can also stagnate even though you are working your butt off. One of the easiest traps to fall into when your business is extremely young is to work yourself to death just maintaining the business that you have no time to expand.

Our Story

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My wife and I fell into both of these traps in the course of running our online wedding linens business. Early on with our small business, my wife and I spent so much time trying to keep up with order fulfillment that …

We get a ton of calls on a regular basis from customers seeking discount pricing for bulk purchases. In most cases, their definition of a “bulk” purchase and our definition of “bulk” are miles apart. For example, just the other day we had a customer who demanded a “bulk” discount for purchasing 2 items valued at a whopping 40 dollars!

Very rarely though, we get a customer that truly meets our definition of bulk. This particular customer wanted to buy a large quantity of handkerchiefs and demanded a price that we weren’t willing to meet.

Customer: Yes I’m looking to purchase quite a few handkerchiefs and I was wondering if you offer discounts for large purchases?

Me: Why yes we do but it depends on the quantity of handkerchiefs that you need.

Customer: Actually I was looking to purchase around 50.

Me: Actually for just 50 hankies, the best …

My wife and I run an online wedding linens store and I absolutely love the products that we have to offer. I love weddings and the clientele I interact with on a day to day basis. I love helping customers make their weddings special.

But I’ll be honest with you. While I love our products, deep down in my gut the items that we sell don’t excite me. As far as our core offerings are concerned, wedding linens definitely aren’t my passion.

What!?! No passion??? Isn’t the number one rule of entrepreneurship that you have to be passionate about your products and your market segment?

Do You Need Passion?

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It depends on what your definition of passion is. I’m passionate about providing people with priceless keepsakes of their wedding day, but our products in and of itself do not excite me. I don’t live …

Perhaps it’s due to the bad economy, but many of my friends lately have become increasingly frustrated with their day jobs. Taking an informal poll, over 80% of them would much rather be working for themselves than for their current employers. Of these 80%, many of them are staying at their current positions because they are grateful just to have a job in this down economy.

As a result of their frustrations, more and more of my friends have been asking me about the details of our online business and how we found the courage and knowledge to begin. What did it feel like when you first opened up your store? How did you come up with the idea? What made you decide to act on it?

Photo By Martin

I’ve answered so many of these questions recently that I’ve decided to write this article with the …

Lately, a good number of phone calls that we’ve been receiving have been from customers asking whether or not we sell our products wholesale. I always tell them no, but that we can provide attractive discounts for bulk purchases. More often than not, these customers hear the words “no wholesale” and usually just hang up.

What these customers don’t realize is that the discounts we offer are competitive with many of the wholesalers in the US. This makes me wonder what is going on in the minds of some of these customers. Do they think that wholesale is synonymous with lowest price?

Photo By El Isma

I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people out there believe that buying “wholesale” magically means that they can sell their products lower than anyone else. They probably think that obtaining wholesale pricing means that they can undercut the entire …