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 do but I got so caught up on little stuff that I gave up, I also think what attributed to my giving up at the time is that I was on information overload. I have recently been laid off and I am not interested in the corporate lifestyle. I want to pursue my own business…

finding my niche is where I got stuck in the past because I am interested in so many things. I feel as though I have grown and learned a lot more in the time that i have been dedicated to a job I truly dislike.

I am in the process of talking to manufacturers and would like your advice I have multiple questions. I want to set up an online store, however if i purchase a min. order from every supplier i am looking at then I will have spent thousands… do you have an recommendations on setting up shop for testing and marketing purposes before starting to order large min. orders?

Answer:
It really depends on what you are selling, but you can proceed in any of the following ways.

1. Stock some sample amounts of your product by paying a much higher price for them for testing purposes. Some distributors will sell you smaller quantities if you ask, but if they don’t? Just go ahead and pay full retail price for a few products and see if they’ll sell. If you want, you can even sell items you don’t have and then go out and buy the products as orders arrive.

2. Make some tradeoffs and sell less items. In the beginning, it helps to be focused with your product selection. Once you gain some traction with a particular product category (from both an SEO and customer standpoint), you can gradually expand your product line.

3. Drop ship your items. You can drop ship all of your goods first and if things work out, you can choose to stock them later at lower wholesale prices.

My wife and I did a combination of 1+2 when we first started out. We negotiated with our vendors to obtain sample quantities of everything at higher pricing.

Question:

I’m trying to figure out why Google is not indexing my site. And Yahoo is only indexing one page. My pages have unique title tags, keywords, and meta descriptions. There are keywords in products URLs, and I use a sitemap. One thing I know is that I have very few links from other sites. Could this be the problem? How do I change that?

Answer:
Is your site domain fairly new? If so, you may be stuck in what is called the Google sandbox. Before your site is let loose in the search engines, Google sometimes imposes a waiting period on your site.

To get out of the sandbox, you can either wait or get some quality backlinks pointing to your site. There are variety of ways to get backlinks through guest posting on blogs, writing for article directories, content sites etc…

Question:

Hi, I wanted to know your feelings about using “prostores” ? Thanks!

Answer:
I would shy away from any service that charges any sort of transaction fee. Pro Stores charges .5% which may not seem like much when you just start out. But hypothetically if your store were to make 100K in sales, that would amount to $500. I like Volusion or BigCommerce because they only charge a flat monthly fee.

The decision really depends on your store and you should calculate what makes the most economic sense for you. For example, if you run a low margin business, I would shy away from any platform that imposes a transaction fee. However, if you are just starting out and you carry thousands of products, prostores might be cheaper because their lowest plan allows you to sell more products than Volusion or BigCommerce.

Looking at the big picture, even if a service that imposes no transaction fees is slightly more expensive early on, I’d still pay the extra money. After all, it’s hard to switch platforms and once your business grows, you don’t want your fees to scale with revenues.

In any case, I know several shops that run on Prostores and the platform seems to be solid. Run the numbers to see what you are comfortable with.

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