Archive for February, 2009

eBay and Drop Shipping – Delivering the Product to The Consumer

Posted in Ebay by Imran Qureshi on February 28th, 2009

If you would like to earn a full time salary with an eBay business, you can easily make that dream a reality. It even doesn’t matter whether you have your own product to sell. eBay offers those who want to quit their corporate nine-to-five jobs with a means of earning a good living, without much start up capital. This can happen with the assistance of drop shipping companies. A drop shipping company sends out items to the people who purchased them from a business owner. Your eBay business is a real business to own. You store should offer a lot of different products for sale on eBay, and you will not need to stock all of these items.

All that is required is for you to start your auction and then have the product sell. Next, send the customer’s information forward to the drop shipping business. Everything else is completed by the drop shipper, and they can even use your company information and your logo if you provide it. The purchaser will have no idea when the item arrives that you did not send it out yourself. The packaging, labeling, and shipping of the products is done by the drop shipper, this way you will have more time to concentrate on setting up more auctions and making bigger profits.

To succeed, begin working with several different drop shipping businesses. Initially, the majority of companies will ask you to pay for the goods that your clients order before they are dispatched. You must complete customer orders in a timely manner; therefore, you should pay for the goods with a credit card to guarantee immediate service. At some point, you will have a drop shipper that trusts you enough to send your order out and then send you an invoice.

Ensure that the price you charge in your eBay auctions is higher than what the drop shipper is charging you. The idea here is to earn money. Depending on what you are selling, a markup of about 10% is about right, but you will want to research other eBay auctions and other online sources to see if the item is selling for less.

To begin an eBay business with drop shipping, there is no money ventured. You have already sold the item before paying the drop shipper for it. You can actually earn profits can before you have any expenses!

Advertising on Craigslist

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Posted in Advertising by Imran Qureshi on February 8th, 2009

Placing an advertisement on Craiglist is a good idea for practically any business that offers goods or services. Businesses who place advertisements on Craigslist will see financial increases, whether they sell online or in actual stores. Posting an advertisement on Craigslist carries very little risk, unlike other methods of advertising. Advertising is free, accept for job and housing postings. Users must accept the conditions of service of the community and also must comply with particular rules while placing ads, but there are no costs to individuals inserting ads on Craigslist. People who place ads here should not be be worried about whether or not their ad will meet any sales expectations.

Reaching Potential Customers on Craigslist: An additional fact about the value of posting ads on Craigslist is the fact that you will potentially reach a large group of customers. The Craigslist fact sheet shows important data about the traffic to the website. This sheet shows that nearly four billion people look at Craigslist every month, and ten million people are using Craigslist every month. With the help of these figures, it is obvious that ads positioned on Craiglist will probably been seen by some potential customers.

Even though there are many visitors to Craigslist each month, and the advertising potential is nearly endless, that is no guarantee that they will be looking for your particular product or service. Advertisements on Craigslist must appeal to a reader’s interests and be informative, just like an advertising campaign that will be read by your potential customers.

Reaching Your Target Market on Craigslist: Finding a way to augment your advertising by using Craigslist is fine, but not to the point where you expose all audiences to your message rather than just your target market. It is far more valuable to reach a small number of viewers with an interest in your products or services than to reach a large number of readers who are not interested. A target audience consists of those who are interested in what you are selling.

The secret to attracting your intended viewers on Craigslist is inserting your ad in the most suitable spots. Craigslist has certain areas for companies to get the word out about the services they offer. This section is further separated into several different classifications. Individuals who are offering computer repair should place their ads in the computer section instead of the car repair section, the reason being people looking for computer repair services will go the the computer section first. There are times when it makes sense to place your advertisement in multiple sections. That is satisfactory to the extent that it does not become a spamming technique.

If you can’t find a specific section for the goods or services that your business provides, there are several options available. The owners of businesses can place an ad in the small business section, where it could be readily found by people searching this section. As another option, the owner of the business can contact Craigslist and suggest adding a new category. The moderators of the site might be inclined to add a category if they think it is helpful.

Spamming versus advertising: Spamming is different from advertising in varying ways. Inserting an ad in a suitable section of Craigslist is fine, but putting a similar ad in almost every portion of Craigslist for different geographical regions is spam. There are several reasons why spam is not effective. Spamming techniques may lead to potential customers getting sick of an advertisement and avoiding this business altogether in the future. Spamming, if detected by Craiglist, may lead to the banishment of this poster’s advertisements in the future.