I’ve been out sick for the past two weeks so I apologize if I haven’t responded to any of your emails. The fact is that I hate seeing the doctor and it was only after a week of unbearable headache pain that I finally buckled and decided to go to urgent care. It was there that I discovered that I had a bacterial sinus infection that required antibiotics to cure. If only I had known this earlier, I could have saved myself from a full week of illness. UGH!

In any case, I’ve been taking my medication for 3 days now and my head is starting to become lucid enough to resume writing. Here are a few email questions that I thought I’d answer in a blog post.

Question:
I encountered your blog last night when I did a Google search for ‘running an online …

[Continue Reading...]

I really hate getting nickel and dimed, especially when I believe that two items should come packaged together at no additional cost. For example, every time I go to McDonalds and order Chicken McNuggets, I get really annoyed. Back in the old days, McDonalds used to offer as many packets of sauce as you wanted for free whenever you ordered their Chicken McNuggets. But sometime within the last several years or so, they started charging you for extra sauce that exceeded their recommended quota.

Photo By Fr1zz

Now if you order 20 nuggets, you are only allocated 3 packages of sauce. For a 10 piece, you get 2 and for a 6 piece, you only get 1. For me when I order a 20 piece nuggets, I need at least 5 packets of sauce. No doubt someone at McDonalds calculated the sauce usage for the average …

[Continue Reading...]

A few people have emailed me lately asking questions about how much time we spend running our store on a day to day basis and I completely understand why. Running a business can be difficult and time consuming so it’s important to understand what one is getting into before taking the plunge. I even received one email from a reader who asked.

Why would I want to open an ecommerce site as opposed to something much more passive like affiliate marketing or blogging?

Passive Income?
First off, I just want to emphasize that no business is truly passive. No matter what, you have to put in a good amount of time and work upfront. In addition, there’s always some amount of effort involved to maintain your income stream once it has been established. The other thing I want to say is that if your purpose is to make …

[Continue Reading...]

A few weekends ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending the annual San Francisco Gift Fair held at the Moscone center. My mom was in town so we left the kids with her and took off to check out the latest gift wholesalers from across the US.

The SF wholesale gift show had the usual requirements to keep out casual shoppers. You needed to show at least 2 forms of id which could consist of any of the following: your business license, LLC or corporation paperwork, EIN number, business credit cards etc…

Young kids were not allowed in and you had to pay a hefty fee to bring in guests that did not have their own business. These rules were in place to make sure that only true buyers and business owners were allowed on the show floor.
Tradeshows Are A Great Place To Find Products To Sell
Tradeshows …

[Continue Reading...]

One of the pieces of entrepreneurial advice that I hear the most often is to start a business based on something you are passionate about. Pick a niche based on something you enjoy doing and turn it into a business.

Whenever I hear this advice, I start to roll my eyes because it’s not that simple. Sure, passion is important, but passion comes with the territory once you starting kicking butt. Passion comes naturally once you start seeing some traction and progress. The problem with picking a business idea based on what you enjoy doing during your leisure time is that you may not enjoy doing it anymore once you start charging for it.

Something fundamentally changes when you get paid and you have to cater to customers. All of a sudden, you are not acting on your own terms anymore. You must listen …

[Continue Reading...]

My wife and I have been busy training additional help for our business lately so things have been a little more hectic than usual. In addition to writing this blog, I’ve also been compiling a little handbook of all of the little day to day things we do to run our business in order to efficiently pass on the knowledge. I’ve also been placing more focus on my online store course and making slow but steady progress. In any case, it’s been a while since I’ve done a mailbag so here are a few questions from last week.

Question
I have just begun to read your blog and have found myself addicted to the content. I have read your e-book and have been thinking of doing an online store for years now…. well actually I was stuck for a while, it seemed as though I understood what I needed to …

[Continue Reading...]

In my previous article on My Latest Take On Hosted vs Non-Hosted Ecommerce Solutions, I recommended two hosted shopping cart solutions, Volusion and BigCommerce, that do not charge any transaction fees for using their service. Not being charged a percentage of your sales is nice because you can run your store at more or less a flat monthly rate(not taking into account credit card fees) that does not scale proportionally to your revenues.

A few weeks ago, I signed up for trial accounts with both Volusion and BigCommerce and decided to compare the two services. Before I get into the guts of the review, I’ll just tell you up front that you can’t really go wrong with either service and choosing between the two really depends on which features and factors you value more.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not going to really go into that much …

[Continue Reading...]

As long as I’ve been writing tutorials on how to open an online store, I’ve always advocated going with a free open source shopping cart and hosting it yourself as opposed to signing up for an all-in-one hosted ecommerce solution. After all, if you host your shopping cart yourself, you’re in charge of your own destiny. You have full control over the source and no one can suddenly raise prices on you. Plus, there are many cool things that you can do on your own that the big hosted solutions won’t allow you to do.

Photo By Kevin McShane

But after running this blog for a couple of years now and listening to reader feedback, I’ve come to realize that using an open source ecommerce solution and self-hosting may not be the right solution for everyone.

Some people are just completely tech averse and don’t want to deal anything remotely …

[Continue Reading...]