Forum Moderators: buckworks
do people here who sell widgets - do you most often have lower prices than the rest of the competition, or, you rely on people finding you first than the lower priced competition (assuming everything else the same).
Well, I was hoping for some pointers on how to get a widget selling site going. Currently I'm working on a marketplace site, so there's no inventory to carry.
The makers contact details or very often on the back.
You do need to carry stock, unavoidable, dont buy anything until you know what sells and what doesnt and then buy only the smallest amounts possible.
ALWAYS visit your suppliers, youll be surprised at HOW surprised they are to see you - the deals I have received because of this is ureal. End of lines at half wholesale price - demo products that never went in to production etc etc. The last category sell for fortunes on ebay.
Another source I use are big trade fairs for your products, again ring the suppliers and ask what shows they attend.
Its pretty easy to find a product if you look long enough.
Good luck!
This works along the lines of wholesale/retail. You set up the site selling the goods at retail price, a customer places an order. you forward the delivery address to the supplier and they bill you at wholesale price, and forward the gods to your custmer. The diference between wholesale and retail is your margin.
The main problems are finding suppliers who are reliable and perhaps loosing some control of the later stages of the process, but it does eliminate the need to carry stock.
Mack.
I did consider that myself, but could not find any one that would do it. Where would I find one of those?
Stock is dead money (you can't spend it), has the risk of theft (both external and internal), and usually depreciates in value. We let the wholesalers carry as much of the risk as possible.
If you are sure you can shift stock fast it is worth buying in bulk, or if you get a significant discount for large orders, or if it is limited availibilty stock. Otherwise buy little and often.
You may want to try finding brokers as well. There are people out there that do nothing but set up deals between people for goods and drop shipping. I know a lot of the ASOTV stuff is handled through brokers.
Using myself as an example, our online store sells goods that we manufacturer. We would be willing to provide those goods to other online vendors (and _perhaps_ dropship under some limited circumstances) if we believed that our overall sales would go up.
If we believed that the net effect would be just pushing sales from our site to someone elses, that would probably not be of interest to us.
But, therein lies the trick to a lot of the ecommerce game. If the best you can hope for is stealing someone elses sales, rather than finding a way to appeal to new/more/different buyers - then you are setting up for a price war. And, small guys pretty much never win price wars.
Not necessarily true, however if your a small guy planning on becoming the big guy through a price war, then you have an unrealistic expectation. Small guys can always win the price war because they can have much lower overhead. But in the end, you will have set the customers expectation of what they want to pay and thus the profit will not be there to foster your businesses growth. So I would agree that it is not really the way you want to go. My suggestion is make your pricing competitive and then focus on what the real key to any successful business .......good solid marketing.
One thing I think we can all agree on is that those that are successful with e-commerce on the net are good at marketing. How sucessful they are depends on just how good they are at marketing.
It's even better if you can find something in high demand in South Africa, for example, but is only available in Australia - then you can start to print your own currency! ;-)
No one wants to reveal their sources that they spent many hours researching. If you find it online or easily, it also means that other sellers can get it on it easily.
You can try a search for widget conference, widget event, widget expo - or other similar keywords to see what professional events are available for the industry you plan on selling in. Visit the vendors at these events and make contacts. I go to one every year and end up with hundreds of new contacts.
Frank Vollono
