Getting Started

In starting an ecommerce business, you need to get the basis right in order to avoid an unpleasant experience in doing business.

Our core objectives are to help you understand the act of setting up and running a small effective online business that you can grow into an empire.

Here we will be looking on how to easily connect with dropship wholesale suppliers for products you could easily sell on your Estore or some other marketplaces.

We will be looking at some B2B Marketplaces like World Wide Brand, Wholesale2b and Doba.

For An Estore Startup, when you are sourcing for your products it is recommended that you do the following step by step.

Search for new products from your desired categories (You could build your Niche name around the category you are interested in) and negotiate for a wholesale discount that suits you well. Build an Inventory of your products. This is usually a virtual inventory of products you have chosen. Thereafter you are to obtain the Data Feed of all your Virtual Inventory Products seamlessly so that you can put them up for sale. Manage and track your business orders. It is advised that this should be done in one unified place. Carry out order fulfillment in respect to your customers’ requests.

The major advantage of using any of the B2B Marketplace assistance is that for the model we are looking at, the Dropship Wholesale Suppliers provide you assistance in inventory and order fulfillment.

Care should be taken to provide accurate details about yourself and your Ecommerce Business Setup. This ensures smooth flow of dealings between the Dropship Wholesale Suppliers, the B2B Marketplace and yourself.

Finding Dropship Products

As we partner with some of these major players in the industry, we help you find products and genuine suppliers that you could work with and build your online business

With most of our suppliers, you could sort or browse for products using product categories and their sub-categories.

If you prefer, you could search for and discover products from the brand name they are under.

Another important way to search for products, which we use often is by keywords. Input the keywords in the Product Catelog Search and search for products according to your Niche.

There are lots of ways to find out products from the directories of these wholesale suppliers in our access. One important fact is that as you continue on it you discover your own preferred way of searching out product.

The advantage you are having right now over the average online surfer is that lots of reliable dropship wholesale suppliers are arranged in these directories for you to choose products from.

Listing your Products

Once you have gotten enough products in your virtual inventory list, you then need to place them in the marketplace you intend to sell them. This could either be on your website or in an online marketplace like eBay or Amazon.

In our model we are using an Estore, eBay and Facebook as our selling places.

We believe that no matter which marketplace works best for you, it is always advisable to have your own retail online store to supplement any ecommerce retail business you do.

To put up your product list, you can do it in any of the following ways

By manually downloading product images and descriptions from the individual product page. By using Data Export option to export the required data from the product source. You could use the FTP or API Integration to transfer all related files of the products to your website or marketplace.

Whatever options are made available by the product supplier should be okay as we do know they usually provide very easy to use product listing methods.

Your Estore Best Practices

• A Well Organized Inventory List
• Your inventory list should be well organized in order to have a smooth flow in the way you sell your products.
• The norm is that businesses usually organize their product list by categories, by suppliers, by brands etc.
• Whatever way you choose to organize your product inventory list, let it correspond to the way you do manage your business. This is because it plays a major part in streamlining the products management process.
• Search Out New Products Always
• Do your best to as often as possible search out new products and best deals and include them.
• Featuring fresh items and great deals will definitely boost your sales efforts.

Regular Product List Updating

Just like the point itemized above, you need to always update your product list. Things like your inventory count and availability of products, current prices and any other relevant information should be updated and accurate. You will need to build a good working relationship with all your suppliers and set your inventory list notification at a date that works well for you.

Note and abide with Suppliers’ Fulfillment and Return Policies

As an operator of an ecommerce business, you have to fully understand your wholesale suppliers’ policies as they affect your operations.

This is necessary for you to be able to adequately relate with your customers and fulfill their orders taking into consideration the Suppliers’ fulfillment and return policies.

Always Place Your Products Order Quickly

Make it a habit to place your order to your supplier as close to your customer’s. This will hasten the time the customer gets his product.

Also the time it takes to get products to your customers affects your rating in any marketplace.

Be Accessible To Customers

One of the major turn off in ecommerce transactions is when you are not accessible to your customers to listen to their issues before, during and after sales. Make sure your customers are getting answers about their orders addressed as quickly as possible.

Provide All Necessary Support To Your Customers

No matter which marketplace you are using (your website Estore or other online marketplace like Amazon and Esty) you need to always be ready to provide necessary support to your customers like Order Tracking Services.

You get the Order Tracking information for your customer from the supplier. Always ensure your customers are in the know of their product movement.

Always Handle Returns Professionally.

You should fully understand the suppliers’ return policies so as to be able to address

Starting ecommerce business at home requires that individuals have a good workable model to use and not just be found roaming through the internet.

Here we present some useful tips to help you hit the ground running when it comes to online business.

There is a rapid shift of doing business offline locally with your immediate community to doing business online with the vast global community.

Online business marketing strategies are a sure way of boosting your sales margin and also to grow your business. there are various ways to market your small business online if you already do have one or you could simple create one and grow it using the following methods.

Online marketing has taken over 70% of all online activities and it is the hottest place to advertise and grow your business.

How will you go about this?

Build a website

I keep saying the fundamental step in online business creation is building a unique website-this should be niche related and it should target keywords that best expressed the target customers that you are aiming to attract to your website.

Before you even build the website, you need to determine exactly what you want to achieve.

Is it to create an online presence of an already existing business or is it because you want to provide your existing customers with your business profile and contact information? Whatever the initial reason, you will definitely want your site to generate more leads to your goods and services.

The major advantage of a website is that it creates a medium for your existing and new customers to easily assess your business and not go over to your competitor.

Shopify makes it easy to open an online store by providing all the tools and help you need. Click here to try it for free!

Good Content Creation

Whatever your business is about, ‘it is only when you can get very rich and compelling relevant information across to your clients that you can influence their desirous.

You just have to deliver great content to your potential clients.

Usually these information are free, relevant and of value to you and your website visitors. Doing this also helps in ranking your website pages well with the major search engines

You could create good website content by blogging, creating training videos, e- manuals or free webinars. These are useful in engaging your websites visitors. People are constantly on the lookout for information that can answer their engines online.

Utilize Various Marketing Tools.

Using the various marketing media online to promote your business is one of the best ways to build traffic to your website and ultimately to the goods and services that you are promoting.

This is also the concept of affiliate marketing. The major difference there is that in affiliate marketing, you might not be the owner of the goods and services you are promoting.

In this case, you are paid commissions for every completed transaction.

Media for promoting your website includes the use of social networking media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest.

You could also use You-tube and Article Writing among others. Usually, you can combine writing articles, making videos, social networking and email marketing to reach a large number of individuals.

Product Branding

One of the ways to grow your business is to build a strong brand name for your business and products. With this, you can create a strong relationship with your customers based on quality and trust.

Once you are able to build a brand name, your online presence is seriously enhanced and it will definitely boost your business growth. One of the major sites we partner with on this is world wide brand

This is another way of increasing your online presence and it is best if you join a relevant community where you can learn more ways to increase your sales and grow your business. The more you participate and contribute on your niche related topics, the more you get to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

People will tend to trust your judgment and recommendations.

There are lots of benefits associated with joining an online community or partner with successful ecommerce businesses.

How do I come about writing about making money with blog on a starting ecommerce business website?

Simple! Most online business will definitely involve you passing certain information to a target group of people on your website products and services

How can you go about doing this?

The model of ecommerce which I will be talking about due to its relative easy and practicable approach is building an Estore with dropshipping products and then blogging about the Estore.

Search out the niche that will suit your ecommerce business Buy your domain name and Register your company Contact dropshipping wholesale suppliers online Open your Estore using any good platform Start blogging on your Estore blog Also market some related products and service on your blog as an affiliate Blog some more using related keywords

Ensure that you do carry out a detail research to discover what is in demand in any niche you are interested in.

• This is crucial as every ideal product or services must be a solution to a problem that exist.
• Using a keyword search tool will easily show you what questions or queries are going on online.
• Using your selected Keywords, you should buy a domain name in line with your keywords.
• A very good example is that of this website using my main keywords as my domain name.
• Having gotten to this stage, you then need to contact dropshipping wholesale suppliers who will be willing to partner with you in order to sell their products on your Estore as though the products are yours.
• You could easily get genuine wholesale suppliers from any of the dropshipping directories recommended.
• Starting ecommerce business uses both worldwide brand and wholesale2b directories.
• Starting up your Estore will only take a couple of minutes making use of any good ecommerce platform like Shopify, 3d Cart or BigCommerce.
• Once all this have been achieved, it is now time to start blogging.
• Using keywords related to your niche and web products, give out information and useful advise to the public in respect to your Estore.
• As you blog, you should also market other products and services of websites that you have registered as their affiliate.

Do this only after you have ensured that their products and services are genuine and within your niche.

As you keep blogging on your website using ideal keywords in your niche (High traffic with low competitive webpages), you will generate organic traffic to your site easily.

Finding & Contacting Suppliers

In finding and contracting suppliers, let us use a practical example for easy understanding.

Let us use the product “xxxx” as our example for finding and contracting some suppliers.

Just as we searched for product on the Alibaba website, the search for the product suppliers will have us changing the search filter. Check “Suppliers” rather than “Products” and also check “Gold Suppliers” then search for our product. Keep clicking “Onsite Checked”, “Assessed Supplier”, and “Escrow” until you have filtered the suppliers to 10-20 of the very best that you could contact.

Write the Supplier for the Product Information

At this point, the next step is to write a general mail that will serve as a template of what you will be sending to suppliers. You could have this on notepad if you so desire. Do ask for the product specifics and features that will appeal to customers.

The Template I usually made use of is given here for your own modification.

Good day, we are starting an e-commerce business and we may be needing a large supply of your product “XXXX”.

I would like you to send me your price list for this item, along with any shipping and payment information you can give me.

Also, could we work something out regarding a sample being sent to me?

The Products will be going to Abuja, Nigeria.

I also would like to know what the Minimum Order Quantity would be after approving of the samples?

Thanks,

Andrew Francis

Once your message is ready, all you need to do is scroll down and click on “Contact Suppliers”, after which you should copy and paste the modified message in the box. Click send and thereafter wait for responses from all the suppliers.

Time to choose your Supplier

Within 24 hour you ought to have gotten some responses from the emails you sent earlier. It is advisable to deal with those that are quick to respond and also to “dry-run” each of the suppliers in order to get a feel of how doing business with them will be like.

From their answers to your questions, the product spec they sent and the price quotes they sent you will be able to analysis the high/low prices of your product. It is recommended to reduce your choice of suppliers to at least two to safeguard against running out of stock. From the last two suppliers that made your selection, do buy samples from them and test to see if you can actually make money from the product sales.

Buying Product Samples

From the two suppliers that you have narrowed your conversations to, request via mail for samples. It is either you are given the samples free or you buy them. We suggest outright buying especial as it is the first time you will be doing business with them. You’ll tell them what products you want and what address is the product been sent to.

The Shipping cost of the sample will usually depend on your location.

It is advised to tailor in the Shipping and other logistics into the selling price in order to be able to make profit. When using express carriers, note if their quotes typically will be added in the customs tariffs and if there be other unexpected charges to be incurred when the products arrive in your location?

Also we usually do business with companies that accept payment through PayPal or Escrow. We advise that you stick to one payment merchant until you are internet wise. This is to avoid the risk of been scammed or having no financial protection on your transaction.

Testing your Suppliers

Having found products that you are interested in, the next phase is finding and testing suppliers of such products. This is usually by buying the products as a customer so that you could check out their services firsthand

After placing your order you will need to wait for a couple of days or weeks depending on your location and the suppliers’ response time.

Be sure to note the period it takes for delivery and also find out firsthand what their minimum order quantity is as this might be different from that show in the marketplace.

The minimum order suppliers list on Alibaba website is generally not concrete.

Most often we do find out all we need from a minimum of ten suppliers before narrowing our choice to two suppliers.

If you are concentrating on Alibaba, you might also want to use the AliExpress which is the site option for smaller orders.

It is always best when they are delivering directly to your location. The method with which you receive the sample most often indicates what method of delivery will be used for the supply of further orders.

An important aspect of searching out and comparing products from marketplace like Amazon and Alibaba is to ensure that it is the same brand. However you could also get a similar product to a brand that is already selling and market it very well from the World Wide Brands Products.

Paying your Supplier

Individuals starting an ecommerce business should be careful while paying money to supplier for products. In order to minimize the risk of be defrauded it is highly recommended to use Paypal or Alibaba Escrow. They already have strong reputation in ecommerce business.

The way it works is that payment for the order is made to a merchant who holds the money until you have received the products ordered and is satisfied. Thereafter they release the funds to the supplier. This is a common practice with Alibaba Escrow

Selling your Products

With the products in your custody and you have carefully examined them to your satisfaction, it is now time to sell at a margin to earn profit.

In selling your products, it is very crucial that you get feedback from individuals that made use of your samples. This is to ensure high customers satisfaction getting products from your site. If after this process you decide that your samples have enough quality to be sold, then you can start buying in bulk for resell.

To sell our samples, we have usually do list them on eBay, Amazon, and/or Etsy having set