We English - a nation of (RSS) shopkeepers
By Steve Hawker
We English are a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon Bonaparte said so.
As just such a shopkeeper, I have to say that I do love my work. I get up early every morning to check how sales went overnight. How many customers came in? What did they buy? Did they ask for anything that I haven’t got in stock? I then check the money ‘take’ to confirm what’s selling well and what’s not. My shop, by the way, is a ‘open all hours’ Internet enterprise.
My next joys are to replenish the shelves of my shop with fresh products and remove any old stock. This isn’t a manual labour of love though. It’s just a matter of visiting several wholesalers on the ‘net (the affiliate network sites) and ordering stock. These sites offer shopkeepers like me a growing number of RSS product feeds.
I simply select the merchants I want to do business with and the products I want to stock. The degree of product selection available to me depends on the way the RSS feeds have been set-up. Sometimes, I must take every product a merchant offers me (or none at all); often I can take a group of products from various merchants; usually, I can opt for a specific product with high value to my customers.
Having made my selections (of merchant and product), I download the RSS feeds. This is an elegant process, whereby the software checks to see if I already have the ordered products in stock at the desired levels, fills my shelves if I haven’t, and removes any stock that’s past its ‘sell-by’ date. There are no delivery drivers to monitor; no pallet trucks to push; no returns documentation to fill in. What’s more, my merchants do most of the merchandising for me: offering me up-to-date photographs, product descriptions, prices and so on, as part of their feeds.
Within an hour, I’ve re-stocked my shop with fresh, desirable produce. Of course, that’s not the end of my joy. Oh no, the rest of my day is spent in gleeful bookkeeping, marketing and so on; the kind of pleasures undertaken elsewhere in retail management. Thankfully, my wholesalers do much of the data management for me, which makes bookkeeping easier. The suppliers meanwhile send me special offers by email, which is akin to entertaining sales reps. in real world shopping, I suppose.
I’ve just painted a very rosy picture of the modern English shopkeeper. It sounds like an idyllic way to earn a living. Yet, being an English shopkeeper largely reliant on RSS feeds does have its frustrations.
First, too few of the big merchants have understood the power of marketing via RSS feed and affiliation. These sluggish retail giants, many with a long-standing presence on English high streets, are missed by those of us with neighbourhood corner shops. We want to pass business their way, for a small commission. So, take note please big merchants, the costs of setting-up and maintaining RSS feeds, and paying us small commissions, are far outweighed by the value of increased sales.
It seems that some of the ‘giants’ have been caught off-guard by the cost-effectiveness of this new technology and approach to marketing in combination. It’s simply a matter of them re-writing their product lists in XML and offering the coded feeds to affiliate networks. When they do so, I suggest humbly that they seek out networks offering small shopkeepers like me an unlimited number of feeds at no cost, and that they avoid studiously any ‘exclusive’ deals.
Some merchants are quicker to exploit new technologies than others; that’s the way markets work. The most agile survive: the least agile suffer. This creates an opportunity for small and medium sized merchants who are inherently more agile than larger competitors. We English shopkeepers, need them to master RSS technology and affiliation quickly, to plug the gaps in the market left by big merchants.
Recently, for example, I’ve been hunting English merchants who can offer me affiliated RSS feeds for used and new cars. I have also been hunting merchants capable of offering me regularly updated RSS feeds for package holidays, jobs and real estate. Cars, holidays, jobs and houses are just the sort of products that would sell well in my shop, yet there are big gaps in the market there right now.
To conclude, Napoleon was right: we English are a nation of shopkeepers. Many, like me, love our work. To continue the tradition, what this particular English shopkeeper needs is two things. Additional, big merchants offering affiliated RSS feeds with broad appeal and smaller merchants offering narrower, deeper feeds that cater for niche interests.
About the Author
Steve Hawker is a partner at http://www.ehawker.co.uk E-mail him at: info@ehawker.co.uk © Steve Hawker 2005. All rights reserved. This article must be reproduced in its entirity.
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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
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