Advantages of Buying Promotional Products Online
By Rick Shedon
Advantages of Buying Promotional Products Online
Buying your promotional products and corporate apparel online provides five major advantages: a greater selection, better pricing, convenience, customer service, and faster ordering time.
Manufacturers often display their entire line of products on the internet, providing you with a greater selection of products. With all of these manufacturers online, you gain the opportunity to compare pricing and quality in a simple and accessible online format, instead of wasting time flipping through endless catalogs that crowd your workspace.
Better pricing is readily available online, but you have to search for it. Type any promotional product related keywords into your favorite search engine and sift through the results until you find a company with discount pricing. Another great trick is to choose an item and have a few companies give you a quote with the price of freight included. This will get you a number much closer to the total cost.
How do these online companies afford to sell the exact same product for less than other distributors? Traditionally, promotional items are sold by a distributor who has outside sales people that will go to your place of business, show you samples, and walk you through the process of placing an order. These outside sales people are the primary expense of an off-line distributor. This expense is then factored into the price of the promotional item, thus raising your total cost. When purchasing discount promotional products online, you can eliminate this huge cost and save considerable amounts of money.
Convenience comes with the capability of placing your entire order online. All successful online companies offer this service with encrypted order forms to secure your purchasing information. It is always a necessary hassle to send the artwork to your promotional products company. This is made easy with the online form. With online ordering you gain the convenience of placing your order anytime, twenty-four hours a day.
A few of these online companies also provide customer service departments with long hours. They are set up primarily to take your calls, handle rush orders, and to answer your questions promptly. If you prefer to communicate through e-mail, this is a great way to document your order from start to finish. You can e-mail a question to your distributor, leave for lunch, and have it answered by the time you return.
A faster ordering time is the fifth major result of the online purchase. I have personally visited hundreds of clients. This obviously requires an appointment, which naturally must fit into both parties' schedules. An off-line salesperson is forced to interpret your needs prior to your meeting. They bring what samples and catalogs they have on hand, but these may not meet your needs and thus your ordering time will be extended for a second meeting. If you have any questions about product availability, turn around time, or any other factory sensitive inquiries, the salesperson will have to return to his office in order to contact the factory, in order to answer your question. When you order from an online company, the customer service team is already in their office, so they can contact the factory with your questions and call you back immediately.
I have given you five great reasons to buy promotional products online, but I must also remind you that there is always a trade-off. Online promotional products companies work very hard to cut all possible costs and to pass the savings on to you. You will find that this results in a charge for samples and pre-payment requirements. The charge for samples insures that the company will not give away products to non-customers, as this would considerably raise the real customers' costs. Paying in advance is very common among internet purchasing in general, and necessary for almost every online company to insure payment. Pre-payment is nothing to worry about. You still have the right to a quality product, and you gain an enormous savings.
One other tip, select an online company that has in-house embroidery or screen printing facilities. It has been my experience that these companies have much better control of expediting your orders, a stronger knowledge of branding, experience which allows them to better monitor quality control, and a great tendency to complete rush orders faster.
You will find that many more successful businesses are now placing their promotional product and corporate apparel needs in the hands of these qualified online distributors. The advantages are numerous; convenience, speed, selection, accountability, service, and above all, savings.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author: Rick Sheldon has 18 years experience in the Promotional Products Industry and is currently CEO of Save on Promotional Products Inc. a Discount Online Promotional Products Company. He can be contacted at 1-800-826-8706;
email: rick@saveonpromotionalproducts.com;
or visit www.saveonpromotionalproducts.com.
About the Author
Currently CEO of Save on Promotional Products Inc. a internet discount promotional products company. 17 years in the Promotional Products industry and 10 years as an owner of a contract embroidery business.
|
What Everyone Should Know About How To Buy Wholesale
By: Melanie Burns
Finding a supplier for the product you want to sell, at a price that you can profit from, can be a big task. The best suppliers for your online sales or auctions do not advertise their services and often cannot be found online.
Those that you can find online tend to be middle-men. It is often difficult to get a good enough price to make any real profit online.
Let me tell you about my simple 2 step system to find an untapped source for wholesale suppliers. This is so simple that it's often overlooked as a source for product. This system involves thinking outside the box and not letting policy stop you. (continued below)
The First Step to find a supplier is to find someone that already sells or has access to what you want to sell. This could be a website, an eBay seller, a manufacturer, a wholesale outlet, or a regular store in your city. This is the easy step. You know what you are looking for and you can search on the internet, not for a wholesale source, but for anyone already selling what you want to sell.
Another valuable source for a local supplier is your local phone book. The yellow pages are the best way to find local sources. This should be the first place you look. Doing business locally with someone that you can meet face to face is a big plus for your business.
Another potential source for your product is to find a distributor who would be willing to private label a product for you. You could get a very high quality product for a much lower price than if it had the name brand label.
The Second and Key Step is to convince the source you found to become your supplier.
Manufacturers and wholesale sources often have minimum orders that might be beyond your reach if you are just starting out. Online retailers, eBay merchants, and retail stores may be your best bet. Try to find a small store who is looking to expand.
But remember, you are dealing with a human being and they can be convinced to do business with you. Just be sure to sweeten the deal for them. One way is to offer the person you are dealing with at your new found source, a percentage of your profits from the products he supplies you.
Be sure to project it out for him. If he can see the benefit of working with you even though it causes extra work for him, you can be successful in making a deal.
You could offer him 20% of the profit from sales of his products. For example you could show him that you project to make at least $100 profit from each product, and you expect to sell 40 of them per month. The $4000 a month means an extra $800 per month in his pocket. You still make a nice $3200 profit for the month in this example.
On top of that, he will be ordering more products from his supplier and may be eligible for a higher price break from them. This way, his reward for the effort to work with you, is making money on both sides.
There are many benefits you can offer your potential supplier, but no matter how you look at it, the main thing it comes down to is MONEY. What's in it for your potential supplier to do business with you? If can you show him that, you have a better chance of making a deal with him and starting your online sales.
NOTE: When looking for suppliers around your city, don't go trying to impress the big stores with your $800 or even $3,000 extra income per month proposal. Try going to the little stores that are looking to expand their business, they are the ones that are usually more open to new opportunities.
The big stores are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in profits, so an extra couple of thousand would probably not impress them the least bit.
So now you see that by thinking outside the box, you open the door to many possibilities and increase your ability to make money online with your products.
About the Author:
Copyright © Melanie Burns
This article is free for reproduction but must be reproducted in its entirety including live links and this copyright statement. Subscribe to the iBusiness How2 Newsletter to receive hot tips, how to's, internet business tools, and relevant product reviews by sending an email to: newsletter@internet-business-how-to.com
|
|