Christmas & New Years are over now! I hope you guys all had a successful Christmas sales this year. Also, the new E-Commerce retail spending for the holiday season (Nov, 1 - Dec, 24th) numbers from “comScore” are out again; and it seems like the industry shows to be somewhat bouncing back with an 5% increase in spending from last years 3% drop from 2007. The estimated total online spending this year’s holiday season is over 27 billion dollars! For more specific details, click here.

Anyways, the holidays have passed and now on with the new stuff. As you may have noticed, the “Plus Poll” above, we are going to try something new this week. Yes, we are going to let you vote on the topic that you want DT to dive into next. Below is a brief intro to each of the choices. The polls will not be open for long, so vote now while it counts.

Option 1 - World-Wide Brand: World-Wide Brand is an extensive dropshipping directory that helps you find the dropshippers and wholealers for you E-Commerce business. Vote for this if you want us to give you a brief look of what it is all about; and whether or not we think it is really worth it.

Option 2 - Cafepress vs Custom Dropshipper: Two of the dropshippers of personalized and customizable products that we have looked at in the past. Vote for this if you want to see an in depth comparison in their business opportunities and differences. This will also include a break down comparison of components that make a good dropshipper. We will most like also order some products to compare the quality, shipping time, and other things as well. Because of the length necessary to have an in depth comparsion, this review will be broken down into 2 separate parts.

Option 3 - Dropshipping Tips : This is a segment that we have created in past to provide little tips for dropshippers to keep in mind to improve their dropshipping business. Vote for this if you would like to see another “Dropshipping Tips” article.

Option 4 -Something Random:This one is pretty self-explanatory. Keep in mind that this may have nothing to do with dropshipping or E-Commerce. Because when I say random, I literally mean random.

NOTE:This poll will only be open for a week!

Well, it is not exactly new new, but it’s quite new… In comparison with Ebay, Ebid or OnlineAuction.com it is still a baby. A rather fast growing baby to say the least. For an auction site that has just started up in June of 2008 and already surpassed Ebid.net in traffic received is an incredible feat. Although, Alexa doesn’t give you entirely accurate traffic stats, but it does give you an idea; And when it is projecting “reach” twice the size of Ebid.net that says something.

What is so special about Bonanzle, you may be wondering that makes it differ from all those other Ebay Alternatives out there. So I decided to find out, and what I found intrigued me. Compared to my experience with Ebid.net and even Ebay, I have to say that Bonanzle is hands down the easiest site for you list products. It takes literally a couple of mins for you to list multiple products! Like other “Ebay Alternatives” they also have a generous pricing scheme. You don’t pay any fees unless you sell something and when you do, the fees are quite reasonable. Opening up store(booths is what they call it) are also free, but you do have the option to upgrade your store for some additional benefits. Aside from the great pricing and usability site, Bonanzle also have some unique ideas that they brought to the table. One of which is live communication between buyers and sellers. Yep, you can message sellers, if they are online at the same time and ask questions or just simply chat. In my opinion, Bonanzle could just be very well the new best contender for an “Ebay Alternative”.

I will however say though that Bonanzle has a long way to go, if it ever wants to get even close to being a rival to Ebay. They are still comparable much smaller, which is a huge disadvantage when it comes to an auction site. Chances is that you will probably be able to make more money on Ebay than on Bonanzle given that you are selling products that sell well and give you a decent profit to cover those expensive Ebay fees. With that said, I still encourage people to give Bonanzle a try, whether if you are selling on Ebay or not. It is always good to explore new avenues to access the possibility of additional opportunities that lie ahead. If you are not completely persuaded due your busy nature, I invite you to at least take a look. Bonanzle awaits!

If you have been a long time reader of DsT, you might recall that an Shopster Review had been done already. Well, it’s been over 2 years since then, and lots have changed since then, so here’s a review update. And if there is one dropshipper that changed the most in last 2 years, I’d say it was Shopster. In this review I’m going to give you a little insight on my perspective of it’s pricing, products, usability, and service.

First and foremost, the membership pricing is completely different. They no longer have the 14 day Free-Trial that they used to have; instead they have a free membership that is limited. With the free membership you will are only able to list up to 25 products on your shop, however I believe this is enough for you to get an idea of what you are getting into, and that’s pretty much the point. Overall, the free membership is much better than the 14 Day-Trial they used to have. For the paid membership plans, they now have 2 packages: Power Merchant(Starter) & Power Merchant(Pro) which are $19.95/month & $69.95/month respectively. They also got an annual subscription for the Pro package($549.95) which is a bit cheaper. The difference between the packages is basically lower transaction fee and higher inventory limit as you move up. Quite the price hike compared to the $329.99/yr in the past. But I guess you can’t expect the price to be exactly the same, considering the improvements they have made since then.

First improvement, is the number of products available for you to choose from. Since the time of the first Shopster Review article, they now have over 1 million products available from 900,000 before. Sadly though, they still got issues sometimes when it comes to product availability, so just like before I highly do not recommend you sell on Ebay with them regardless of what they say about being eBay Certified Provider. Just don’t do it, because chances is that you will eventually cause damage to your feedback score. Improvements in the near future in this area is highly unlikely in my opinion. I just don’t see it happening anytime soon, so my recommendation is just to stay away from it all together.
With regards to product pricing, unfortunately it has not shown much of a decrease. Do not expect Shopster product pricing to be wholesale prices, because for most products they are not! They are only slightly cheaper than retail prices you find elsewhere on the net and some products are even more expensive than retail prices. This is however, not to say that you can’t find some good products with good prices, just a heads up, on what to expect.

Now we come to usability which is the best part! Like before Shopster usability is great, for both beginners and experienced users. You can pick rather nicely designed templates, which is great for beginners. But at the same time the templates are quite customizable for experience users to tweak to their preference. And of course they still got the cool coupon creater, newsletter and other marketing tools. But the best of all, they give you the ability to sell your own products! This means that you can sell products that you supply yourself or your other dropshippers products through your Shopster store. On top of that you can also list your product to other Shopster Users, which can choose to sell your products as well. So in if anything, Shopster is a great E-Commerce solution for you to build a turn-key E-Commerce website if not a dropshipper.

In terms of service & support, Shopster is on top of it’s game. I have submitted an inquiry and it took 14hrs for me to get my response which is pretty good. However, the forum which they used to have for members is now gone. I wonder why they decided to remove the forum. It was a great place for people to hang around and learn things from one another.

That’s about it for this update review. Ironically, my opinion of Shopster is pretty much the same as it was 2 years ago. Yes, you definitely can make money here and it is a legit business. However, what this the likelihood you are going to see the big bucks coming in? Not very likely. To be successful, you will have to put effort into it, and have a bit of luck. Make sure you do research into what you choose to sell before building your store. It is a great place for people that are new to dropshipping, because you can learn a lot, not because you will make a lot of money. My guess is that most people, don’t make money with Shopster but it’s possibly the one best place for you to get your feet wet in this business.

But don’t take my word for it, give it a try! Shopster has a Free Membership after all.

Here’s a usual question when it comes to deciding to start a business online. How do we as individuals compete with Internet Giants with thousands of employees that could offer lower prices and probably more professional service than any individual ever could. The theme of this article is going to be based on the 3 generic strategic approaches that can lead a business to outperform it’s competitor according to many experts. The three strategic approaches are Cost Leadership, Differentiation, and Focus/Niche. Most if not all company has their strategic approaches along the lines of one or more of these. But there is always one approach that is emphasizes on one than the rest, which becomes the company’s main strategic approach. I will go through each of them individually and quickly describe what they are how they play into our E-Commerce world today.

The first is “Cost Leadership”, which is when a company tries to offer low prices which their competitors can not. In other words they want to be the price leader of the market, offering prices so low that their competitors can’t make a decent profit if they try to undercut them. An example of a company that employees this strategy is WalMart. Sadly, most of us will not be able to employ this type of strategy and be successful when it comes to dropshipping. Simply because a key to being successful in being a price leader is to have strong purchasing power. The concept can be as simple as, if you buy a lot, you get a good deal. And Walmart, can buy a lot!

The second is “Differentiation”, which is when a company tries to give the impression that they are unique and different. In which they can charge a higher price and customers will still to pay for it. This in many cases is also difficult to do for individuals, because it usually requires a significant amount of resources to employee. So unless you are dropshipping custom products from places like Cafepress, Custom Dropshipper or selling a unique product that you make yourself chances is that you will not be employing this as your main strategy. An example of a company that employs this strategy is Apple Computers, which are not exactly the cheapest computers, but are unique.

The last is “Focus/Niche”, which is when a company tries to target a very small a specific niche. They focus a lot of their energy on providing customers of that the niche is looking for. They outperform their broader competitors through paying attention to detail that their target market cares about which their broader competitor misses out on. This is an ideal strategy to employ for small businesses and the primary strategy that most successful dropshippers use. The most important thing when it comes to integrating this strategy into your dropship business is that you understand the niche and your target customers well. This usually means that you need to have exceptional knowledge in the field, and in most cases the dropshipper is also a fan of the niche himself. For example a successful dropshipper that sells car parts, is probably a car fanatic himself.

To conclude, I want to emphasize that all businesses should have a focus to have one strategy as their primary focus. But all three factors should still come into play when it comes to managing a successful business. For example when employing Focus/Niche as your primary strategic approach, you can also provide great customer service(Differentiation). Such as responding to concerns on a timely manner and adding some friendliness to it, so it doesn’t seem like they are talking to a robot. This is one strategy that Ebid.net uses to differ themselves from Ebay. Having a primary strategy, doesn’t mean you can’t utilize the others at the same time! Although this is still rather basic and you can go much more in depth with this if you wanted to. Knowing just the basics of it can still help you decide what can potentially work and what probably would not, in terms of competition on the internet. I hope this has shed some light or made the picture more clear for you, when it comes to being a successful dropshipper today.

Optimizing your site to get better organic search results. This is one of the most important marketing stragtery to an longterm successful dropshipping site yet I find it’s one of the most neglected form of advertising many beginners put effort into. In my experience I have noticed that there are lots dropshippers out there that think. “Hey, I’ll just find some cool products, put them out research on some nice keywords and use Google Adword pay per click program.” A person that thinks like this is most likely dreaming. In most cases PPC program will not be able to generate the sales needed for your business. When you are paying like 30 cents per click, there’s only so much traffic you can afford. And most of the time due to inexpierence I see dropshippers just throwing away money with Google Adwords. How do you determine if your Adwords program are worth the money, I will go into that some other day but today lets talk about SEO basics.

Now, optmizing your site to get a better Organic Search result on search engines is one of the best way to advertise since its free and its long term. How do you do this? Well, Search Engine Optimization is a very complicated issue and there are lots of debates going on in different aspects of this even amongst experienced SEO experts. But there are some basic things you can do to better optimize your site that is generally agreed upon by all SEO experts. I will now list a few things you can make sure you do to improve your chances for success. If you don’t understand what is listed below because you are a beginner you can research elsewhere to find out. I will not be explaining every single thing listed below in detail today because the article would be too long, but I will eventually explain each one in further detail in future articles, so keep updated. This list below will simply act as a basic checklist for things you can and should do whether now or in the future to improve the chances of success of your business.

1.)Carefully select the keywords of your HTML Title
2.)Selet relevent targeted keywords for your metatags
3.)Submit your site to all major search engines. (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
4.)List your site in niche directories
5.)Build up more backlinks from other related sites
6.)Build quailty content on webpages that reflect the keywords of yoru HTML Title

If you have been around as a webmaster or dropshipper, you’ll probably see this stuff as pretty basic but it is still good reviewing this list. On the other hand, if you are just a beginner than check out our other articles on optimizing your site for further in depth detail on how you can do this.

If Cafepress is to be considered as a dropshipper, it is probably the biggest dropshipper company out there. If you by any chance, never heard of cafepress before. It is basically a website that allows you to create your own customizable products which you can buy or sell to other people. It’s basically like Custom Dropshipper which I have mention in the article “Dropshipping for the Creative Mind“. Before I go and give you guys my opinion on whether or not Cafepress is a money maker or not. I must to make a point, about why I think Cafepress can be considered a dropshipper to justify the appropriateness of this article. Even though some people may argue that Cafepress prices are too high for resale, making themselves the retailer and not a dropshipper. Another point is that you don’t have enough control over your own store for it to be considering dropshipping. However, in my opinion dropshipping, to put it down plain and simple is basically a supply chain management technique where the retailer doesn’t carry the inventory, but the manufacturer ships the product directly the the end consumer. Under these definitions Cafepress can indeed be considered dropshipper, but I will admit that there is a very fine line in the distinction that I don’t think either interpretations are necessary wrong.

Now, moving on to the main topic “Is Cafepress really a money maker?” Considering the size of Cafepress, I am not surprised how many times I have seen this time of question been asked on the web. My answer has been and is still “Yes a few people do make money, and even less make anything decent or a fortune.” I hope this doesn’t sound a bit contradictory to my previous statement, but Cafepress prices aren’t exactly wholesale prices. Anything you mark up and sell, will not give you a huge profit; you are supplying your design to a large retail company that will compensate you a little if your product sells. You will have to get pretty lucky and sell hundreds of products on a regular basis to make anything decent. And if your wondering why I used the word luck, it is basically because with Cafepress you have much less control over your products and website than with most dropshippers. This isn’t necessary a bad, thing because it also means that Cafepress taking over more of the business functions such as marketing of the product. If I can sum up my answer to this question about Cafepress.

I would say for the majority, Cafepress is a great place designers who love to design stuff as a hobby with no business intentions, and shoppers who are looking for unique designs. Maybe you’ll even get lucky and sell something. But it is not really a place for dropshippers who are looking to make it a successful business out of it. The percentage of successful people in respect to people that try is just too small to recommend as a money making business venture.

Domains are the location to your website. The importance of having a good domain name is similar to having your convenient store on the right side of the block. You know how people they say, “Location, Location, Location” when it comes to a retail business. Similarly, you can say, “Domain Domain Domain” when it comes to a starting a website. Choosing the right domain names can make or break your business; which is why some companies are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for them or in some cases even millions.

Of course you are probably not prepared to spend that kind of money, but it still a good idea to know what want to look for when it comes to registering your $10 domain name. As a rule of thumb I say there is about 5 major things you could at least consider when choosing the best domain name for your your website.

1.)Generic Top-Level Domains(gTLD)

Ideally, you would want to get an .com considering that it is the most popular one by far. Benefits of having .coms instead of any other gLTD includes:

Unfortunately, a lot of people will find that the .com of their desired domain name is already taken. And unless your website is intended to only target audience from a certain region, you will probably want to rule out regional domains(.ca, .cn, .in, …) out of your consideration. In which case, it may be a good idea to consider other of the more universally popular gLTD such as .net or .org. Other alternative options include finding another domain name that is available or purchasing it from the person that is holding the .com.

2.)Keywords

You will want to pick keywords that has many searches on search engines and also be well related to the topic of your site. Other things that you will want to consider is the competition of the keyword and how brandable it is. Most of the time, they will these things will conflict each other, so you will have to look at your options and choose accordingly to your site you want to have.

For Example - Doka.com may be more brandable and easier to remember than canadausedkidbookssale.com, however canadausedkidbookssale.com may have more keywords related to your site if your selling used kid books in Canada.

3.)Length

Having lots of well related keywords in your domain is a good thing, but not if your domain ends up being like 20 characters. In general the shorter it is the better, for the primary fact that it will probably be easier to remember.

4.)Word Relations

You want to keep in mind the phases or order of words in your domain. Having a descriptive and phase that makes sense will get more hits from search engines and also be easier to remember.

For Example - CoolRedCars.com is better that CarRedCool.com.

5.)Age

you may want to consider to buy domains from other people who have registered the domain already. Aside from the fact that, good domains may already been taken by domainers; the domain will be older. And on the internet, old is gold. Search engines tend to prefer older domains meaning domains that have been registered and held for a while than domains that are just registered recently.

For the continuation of our “Dropshipping Tip” segment, today we’ll be talking about Customer Service. If you are a online shopper yourself, you will know how important that actually is. If you have and issue and the seller was impolite and slow in response. You will probably not buy from that person or company again. Customer Service is one of the most important thing in getting an returning customer. Buyers will usually have a bond to the people they buy from and will naturally want to buy from the same place in the future. It’s called customer loyalty. Maybe it’s because they can’t be bother to try out something else, when they already found something that works for them or maybe it’s just human nature to bond to things we interacted with before already. Whatever it is, it exist and it’s important to keep in mind to maximize the chances of success of your dropshipping business.

As a rule of thumb, ideally you will want to respond to your customers within 24hrs or less; this will give assurance to customer that you are there to resolve their problems or concerns. If response time is too long, it may result in perception that your unprofessional company or dodging their questions. And as you know, being unprofessional leads to many other negative speculations, including scams.

Remember that if your the average dropshipper out there; you mostly likely won’t be able to offer cut-throat prices and still make a profit like those internet superstore giants out there. This is why it is vital that you pay attention to the little things including customers service to give yourself the leverage to compete. As I always say “Price isn’t everything”.

Ebid.net, the Ebay Alternative!!!!! Ok, well… maybe not exactly unless you live in the UK then Ebid.net can be considered a sizable competitor. First of all, for those of you that don’t know, Ebid.net is a established Online Auction company since 1988.

Although, Ebid.net has been in business for quite a while now and operates in over a dozen countries it is still relative tiny compared to Ebay. So if you are currently selling on Ebay, you can’t expect to do a switchover and expect the get the same amount of sales you got on Ebay. However, Ebid.net may still be something you may want to consider to take a look at. It may very well serve as secondary source of traffic of many auction sellers. And if you were suspended from Ebay for no apparent reason, or just fed up with Ebay fees; then all the more reason for you to take a good look into Ebid.net.

Before I finish, I don’t want to leave the impression that Ebid is Ebay but a a lot smaller. There are differences besides the sizes of the companies. Ebid gives sellers free listing, a lower final value fee, and also lower subscription fee on their seller storefronts. On top of this they also got some little other features like Buddy Points, Happy Hour Auctions and such. I’m not saying that Ebid is right for everyone, since I know some of you are extremely busy and can’t be bothered to spend your time on something that has significantly lower traffic than Ebay. But for those of you with time on your hands, I definite recommend taking at least a peak of into this to see if it is right for you.

Yep, the online spending during this Christmas holiday(Nov, 1st - Dec, 23th) is estimated to be a whoopin 25.5 billion dollars. This however is a 3% decrease compared to last year according to a report done by ComScore. This is the first drop in online spendings during the Christmas since the 2001 where they first started to track E-Commerce. Not a surprise considering the the Economical difficulties that they world in general has been faced with. However with that said, internet spending is still going strong and is bound to increase as long as the Economy recovers. There is very bright futures ahead for internet retailers in the coming years as more and more people are starting to feel more comfortable spending money on the internet.

On a side note, I myself have experienced an increase in sales this Christmas compared to the prior year. So this is probably due primary to natural growth and reach my site has been experiencing. I hope you guys all had a great Christmas and Happy New Years. Also hopefully you dropshippers out there have been able to grasp this Christmas holiday to make a couple extra bucks. If not hopefully next year ^_^.