Supplyant

Being in the online business, my friends always ask me how they can “do e-commerce”. If they have no experience of selling online my answer is always the same, “get yourself on eBay and have a go”.  eBay is a great place to start; it’s bootcamp for e-commerce with a tough set of rules to follow that will shape you up for retailing online.

Why should I start on eBay first?

• It teaches you retail discipline
  eBay forces you to provide good customer service; the feedback system demands you do nothing wrong.
• It teaches you good product choice
  If you can’t sell your product on eBay with all those ready made customers your chances of selling it from your own site aren’t so good.
• It teaches you how important a good product description and pictures are
  Look at the guys with huge feedback numbers and notice how they all have great descriptions. They do this for a reason; awesome long copy descriptions sell harder and show good intent.
• It teaches you how important pricing is online
  Selling on eBay is a reality check for traditional retailers as your normal margins often disappear in two seconds flat.
• It teaches you about e-commerce in a risk free environment
  You don’t have to invest in a shiny new web shop to retail online. With eBay, setup costs are tiny and the worst possible scenario is that you don’t sell anything.

If you can you go onto eBay and sell over 25 items in a month with 100% feedback & high DSR in shape then congratulations, you have passed basic training and it’s time for you to go-large.

Why eBay isn’t for Wimps….

Be prepared for eBay. If you’re going to get serious expect the following:

• It requires your time to maintain an eBay business
  Managing the eBay process is time consuming so you have to be prepared to devote time & effort to making it a success. 
  
• It requires exceptional Customer Service
  eBay never feels a particularly fair environment to deal in, particularly if you are a distributor not used to dealing with consumers directly. You will find yourself having to give away product or pick it up with no good reason other than to keep your feedback high. Poor feedback at the early stage could see you struggling to recover or being banned. Don’t blame eBay for this though – if you can’t cut it here then look in the mirror, not at eBay rules. And if you are thinking of doing Amazon instead, it’s tough x 2…. that’s another story.
• It requires you to understand pricing & salesmanship
  Do you have have descriptions that are only half as good as other eBayers? Look at yourself to see if you’re up to scratch. Good descriptions create happy customers and good feedback. They also create lots of social buzz. Want to know what we’re talking about? click here

Acceleration on and off eBay

Think you have mastered eBay? Great, now you’re ready to REALLY jump-start your online retailing. We would love to hear from you.

What’s your thoughts on eBay? Let us know by commenting below.

Every now and again a tool comes along that changes the way I work. Dropbox is one of those tools that has not only helped me but also helped my clients move projects forward more quickly. And best of all its FREE, yay!

A Dropbox is a very special folder on your desktop. While it looks  and feels like  a  normal folder its far cleverer.  The contents of the Dropbox folder are securely stored online and every time you drag something into your Dropbox it automatically uploads the contents. Once your files are uploaded they are automatically synchronised with your Dropbox on your home computer and available to share with other Dropbox users.

Heres my dropbox icon

Here’s the top 5 things I use my Dropbox for:

• Its a folder that’s the same at work and at home
  I work at home a lot and its great to be able to automatically keep my working folder the same wherever I am.
• Sharing project files with all people involved with a project
  When I am working with a client on a project I set up a folder which I share with them. Its the fastest and easiest way to share images and documents. Any changes to documents are audited so you can tell who’s changed them.
• Backing up my most important stuff
  Because you get  2 Gig of space for free you can backup your important files knowing they will be safe
• I can stop worrying about too big for my email programme attachments
  Lots of email servers will place a limit of 10 meg on an email, with your Dropbox you are OK all the way up to 2 gig
  
• I know I’m going to be working late and need some music from my collection at home to listen to.
  No probs, I just stick a couple of albums in my Dropbox and my work Dropbox automatically pulls them over for me to use.

Do any of you use Dropbox already? If you do click here and leave me a comment telling me what you think of it.

I’m a lucky man! I’m blessed with fantastic clients who all want to use there websites as more than just a plain old business card. I would like to thank Wendy at Shires Cookery School for being a great client and take  pleasure in announcing the launch of Shires Cookery School.

Please have a look at the site.  I’d love to hear you opinions and Shires would love to see you at one of their fantastic courses.

Wendy at Shires Cookery School organises cookery classes that are:

• Reasonably priced
• With great expert chefs
• At locations that are never too far away

The key objectives for this project were:

• Providing detailed information on the courses to maximise bookings
• Providing a simple way of booking and paying for the courses.
• Using the platform to generate a subscriber base.
• Speaking to customers regularly by email / twitter / facebook / rss
• Clearly defining the Shires Cookery School look and feel.

You can try the site now at www.shirescookeryschool.com
You can book up for fantastic fathers day  Sizzling Sausages course
or let us  know what you think of the site

Keeping in touch with your customers is paramount.  If you’re not talking to them then they just assume that you either don’t care or have disappeared. Traditionally newsletters have been a great way of keeping in touch but…

If you’re anything like most companies that have newsletters you are probably in this position:

• Nobody wants to write the company newsletter
• When it does get written, it’s about the company, rather than things that benefit the reader
• It gets sent to a bunch of people that haven’t asked for it.
• The newsletter gets sent once in a blue moon
• It’s posted or faxed
• It may, or may not, get looked at (you don’t know) and binned.

EPromo is a different, but simple approach.

You write articles on your blog, consistently.
Google lists your articles as ‘high importance’ and ranks them well.

New Suspects;

• find and read your article through Google, Yahoo etc and click to your site.
• look at other articles you have written of relevance to them.

Now Prospects;

• they now choose to subscribe to your free updates via email or RSS because your articles are useful to them.
• they have also subscribed to your article notifications on Facebook and Twitter.
• they have been impressed by your intent to delivery articles consistently and your obvious capability to get the job done.
• they think to call you when a job comes up. You get the job because they have learnt to trust you.

Now Customers,

• they appreciate you staying in touch, without appearing pushy.
• they think to call you when a new job comes up. You get the job because you keep on giving, even after the sale.

Now Fans;

• they confidently recommend your articles and you, to other colleagues and industry.

Analyse what’s been most successful for you, return to “Go” and collect more Suspects ……

The difference is not really in the news itself, but its ability for you to communicate more effectively, consistently and cheaply with your leads and customers.

Need help? Need a plan? Get in touch

Theres a golden rule when thinking about how your site should look or even when writing content for your site. Think about your customer tuning into WII FM (Whats In It For Me).

WII FM isnt a radio station but a smart reciever inside your customers head. Your customers WII FM reciever is a smart bit of technology:

It tunes out:

• Information about your company
• Your capabilities
• The services you provide

It tunes in:

• How does this help me
• Will it make me feel better
• Is it going to solve my problem

Sometimes its easy to forget this simple sales principle. People buy to meet needs or solve problems. To get them to buy from you we need to clearly address which of these two things matters most to them.

How about an example
Spax Competition Suspension is a great british brand in with an awesome history in  motor racing.  Its real race suspension that  has been modified to offer great performance for road cars too.

Pushing the message that Spax “gets you round corners quicker” resulted in sales increases of over 15%.  This change made  enough difference to sales that we actually decided to make it the biggest piece of text on the whole site, resulting in even bigger increases. Established in 1970 does not solve my problem.

Remember:
If your looking at your site, an advert or an article remember to picture youself as your customer, look at it and say  “Whats In It For Me?”

We did a new batch of user testing and found some issues with the way in which people used our checkout pages.

Tweaking them has made the checkout process clearer with less confusing options. Also we found that our users always wanted to click on the card logos at the top of the existing pages.

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