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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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 ^_^.

However, Christmas nevertheless is still a boost. Luckily though, some have claimed that this economic crisis may not hit internet businesses such as dropshipping as much. In fact, because of the economic crisis more people may be looking to the internet to find gifts instead of heading down the mall, eating out, wasting gas money and such to do their shopping. Whether this is true for sure or not. It’s still a possibility. Maybe we just have to wait and see, I myself seems to be doing pretty good so that it’s a good sign so far.

Whatever the case, it’s still Christmas, so Cheers!
Merry Christmas!