Drop Ship News

eCommerce: Social Media Marketing Goes to Work

Madison Claire — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:57:00 GMT

The hottest thing going right now for ecommerce is social media marketing.

However, we are beginning to see a new trend, which is this: Not only are ecommerce entrepreneurs combining social media with marketing, they are hiring others to help them with it.

This is spawning new positions in the workforce world of ecommerce, as companies have begun hiring people specifically to create and maintain a presence for them on various social community sites.

These jobs usually pay quite well, as nobody wants to render their services for nothing.

If your online business is smallish and you would like to defray the cost of hiring outside help to tend your social media presence by taking care of it yourself, there are ways to do that.

But, understand that you will have to make an investment in time and effort!

If you can’t spare the time it takes to effectively build your brand, interact with others in the community, respond to comments and questions, track effectiveness of each social media site as regards your marketing campaign, and so on and so forth---you might be well advised to bite the bullet and simply pay somebody else to do it for you.

After all, your stress level counts for quite a lot. If you’re stressing yourself to the max trying to juggle a bunch of different tasks and projects, and can’t keep it all up without a rise in your blood pressure…then you might be wearing too many hats and should delegate some of the work.

However, if you feel you have sufficient time to devote to doing a good job of maintaining your social media presence, then roll up your sleeves and wade on in!

There are various free tools available to help you manage your social media marketing.

Proceed with caution! If you don’t take the time to learn how to go about engaging in social media marketing the right way, or don’t have the necessary time to take care of it properly….and blunder in doing things the wrong way, besides causing yourself undue stress; you could wind up doing more harm than good to your business.

In which case, it might be cheaper to hire someone and pay them a couple of hours a day to do it for you.

The choice is up to you.

But this is a critical area in the future growth of your ecommerce business, so do give the matter some serious thought and honestly determine whether or not you should endeavor to take care of every aspect of your social media marketing yourself, or pay someone else to do it.

Either way, somebody needs to be doing it!

Start your own online dropship business today!

eCommerce Time Management 101: Maximize Work Hours for Optimal Productivity

Greg Scott — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:39:00 GMT

While anyone who works at home in ecommerce will quickly agree that the benefits far outweigh the few disadvantages, there are some stumbling blocks that can cripple an unwary online entrepreneur.

Among the perils and pitfalls of working from home and being your own boss is time management.

Despite our resolution and promises to make the most of working hours instead of being distracted by other, unprofitable things---most of us have a problem keeping to the straight and narrow when working at home.

It’s all too easy to be seduced away from work by the phone, or the TV, or friends and/or family dropping in, or any number of other tempting things that seem to crop up at least a dozen times a day while you are trying to buckle down and work.

As the great author, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

And that’s about the size of it for many of us.

But there are a few little tips and tricks you can try to help you keep your nose to the grindstone while working at home.

Here are a few that might prove beneficial to you if you have some problems in managing your time efficiently:

Plan each day: Make a plan, make a list, make a habit of planning what you are going to do each day! If you wait until it’s time to start to work and have no clear idea of exactly where to start and what you need to do that day, it’s a recipe for disaster. Plus, drifting aimlessly through the work day, without a clearly defined purpose and goal; makes it that much easier to slough off working to do other things.

Just say NO: Say no. Say no to doing unessential things that fritter away your valuable time. If you are prone to get lost in cyberspace for far too long when you Google a subject for research or information, for example, set a timer. Allow yourself X amount of minutes to get what you need and get the heck out of there! If not, you may be lost in the Bermuda Triangle of cyberspace….lost for too long while you’re reading about things that may be interesting but aren’t going to make you a penny, when you should be working.

Just say NO again: Just say no to family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, fellow members of the local Save the South American Three Toed Spotted Tree Frog club or whoever else tries to beguile, bribe, guilt or otherwise lure you away from your work. Sometimes, people just don’t get it. They mistakenly think that if you work from home, you aren’t really working. WRONG. It is your job to enlighten these folks. If all else fails and there are a few hold-outs that just don’t seem to be getting the Big Picture about not disturbing your work time, try going to where they work and asking them to take the rest of the day off for some trivial reason that could be dealt with after working hours. That usually gets the message across.

There are other things you can do, of course, to keep yourself on a productive path during working hours instead of meandering down some long, winding road to the Poor House, but those are the main problems experienced by many entrepreneurs with a home business.

Conquer those and your productivity will increase!

Plan each day: Make a plan, make a list, make a habit of planning what you are going to do each day! If you wait until it’s time to start to work and have no clear idea of exactly where to start and what you need to do that day, it’s a recipe for disaster. Plus, drifting aimlessly through the work day, without a clearly defined purpose and goal; makes it that much easier to slough off working to do other things.

Just say NO: Say no. Say no to doing unessential things that fritter away your valuable time. If you are prone to get lost in cyberspace for far too long when you Google a subject for research or information, for example, set a timer. Allow yourself X amount of minutes to get what you need and get the heck out of there! If not, you may be lost in the Bermuda Triangle of cyberspace….lost for too long while you’re reading about things that may be interesting but aren’t going to make you a penny, when you should be working.

Just say NO again: Just say no to family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, fellow members of the local Save the South American Three Toed Spotted Tree Frog club or whoever else tries to beguile, bribe, guilt or otherwise lure you away from your work. Sometimes, people just don’t get it. They mistakenly think that if you work from home, you aren’t really working. WRONG. It is your job to enlighten these folks. If all else fails and there are a few hold-outs that just don’t seem to be getting the Big Picture about not disturbing your work time, try going to where they work and asking them to take the rest of the day off for some trivial reason that could be dealt with after working hours. That usually gets the message across.

Start your own online dropship business today!

Cartfly: A Workable Widget for Social Media Marketing & eCommerce

Amanda Brooke — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:42:00 GMT

There is no doubt that social media and ecommerce are made for each others, and with widgets such as Cartfly, you can help generate income from your social media presence.

What is Cartfly?

Cartfly is a widget that allows you to share your online store on multiple locations….social media sites, blogs or your own internet website.

It’s quick and very user friendly to set up and start using. There are no listing fees or membership fees, just a small 3% transaction fee on the items you actually sell.

Based on reviews, one of the things that many users seem to like about Cartfly is the ease of use.

Cartfly describes itself as “The Social Commerce Store Network” and this seems an apt description of the service. It lets merchants turn their online stores into portable widgets, and then distribute them across social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or anywhere else on the web.

Hopefully, if you are an ecommerce entrepreneur, you have a blog. You can use the Cartfly widget there, too. What a great way to monetize your blog without coming across as pushy or salesy!

CartflyLabs is a Ustrive2 application developer lab. There are plans in the works to make Cartfly even better with new features!

To get started using Cartfly, all you need is:

Basic info about your store

A logo, image or photo that you want to use to represent your store

The email address of your valid Amazon account

Your product descriptions, images and prices

It’s just that simple!

To imbed your store on other websites, login to Cartfly and click the “share” button, then choose or specify a destination for the widget. Basically, you merely copy and paste the code that is generated to imbed the widget with your storefront wherever you want it to be.

You can customize your store with different colors, upload your own custom banner, change the name of your store and define the tag line of your store in the Appearance section of the Cartfly user’s menu.

One thing that might be important to note is that unlike eBay, you are allowed to sell electronic content with Cartfly IF you are the owner of the content.

So, if you have a great ebook or downloads that correlate with your products, you can market them on Cartfly.

Cartfly is an extremely affordable way to boost your income while working at social media marketing. It’s totally fast and simple for others to share your storefront widget, too, so the potential here for going viral is immense!

Check out Cartfly today and grow your online store!

Click Here to go to Cartfly!

Start your own online dropship business today!

Wonderful World of Widgets for eCommerce & Social Media Marketing

Madison Claire — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:41:00 GMT

If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur, you should look into the Wonderful World of Widgets for social media marketing!

What are widgets?

From Wikipedia:

“A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets usually but not always use DHTML, Javascript or Adobe Flash.

Widgets often take the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc)”

Widgets are tremendously helpful to ecommerce merchants because they can help display products on the internet---on blogs, social media websites or almost anywhere on the World Wide Web.

Social media has evolved into a powerful weapon in an ecommerce entrepreneur’s arsenal!

Websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube, to name just a few, are being recognized as an invaluable marketing tools for retail and e-tail merchants.

The widget allows merchants to take their products online across a social media community. Almost every major industry is using web widgets to help sell products online!

There are all kinds of widgets that are useful in combining ecommerce and social media marketing.

For example, PayPal Labs developed a widget called the PayPal Storefront Widget that can be imbedded onto a publisher website.
With this widget, you can easily create and build an online store and then put it directly onto MySpace or a similar site, a blog or existing website.

You can customize your storefront with various colors and themes. You just input your info, images, your store name and logo, etc. and start selling.

PayPal Storefront Widget is free.

Another quite popular embeddable widget is Cartfly.

Cartfly allows you to imbed your store into virtually any location on the internet…blogs, social communities, personal or ecommerce websites, etc. Plus your friends, followers, fans and others can also imbed your store onto their websites and so on.

Instead of one online store, you could have literally hundreds or even thousands!

Everything that is sold from any location still comes back to you.

It’s free but there is a very nominal 3% transaction fee when you sell something. If you don’t sell anything---you don’t pay anything, so there’s no risk involved whatsoever.

Check out some of these wonderful widgets that will help you combine social media with ecommerce!

Start your own online dropship business today!

eBay Sellers: Boost Holiday Sales With Hot Dropship Products!

Amanda Brooke — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:29:00 GMT

If you are an eBay seller who wants to rev up your sales a notch or two and take advantage of all the Christmas shoppers online, you might think about selling some popular dropship items.

What are some popular Christmas gift items?

Well, there are some things that you simply cannot go wrong in selling.

One of those things is fragrance. Fragrance is a perennial favorite for men and women alike and is almost guaranteed to be a gift that anyone would love to get!

Drop Ship Access has about 15,000 products in their Fragrance category.

Great name brands with popular, much loved fragrances for men and women! Body lotions, eau de colognes, shower gels, bubble baths, perfumes, after shaves, creams and body butters, and much more.

Name brands such as Elizabeth Arden, Jay-Z, Abba, Beverly Hills Sport, Rochas, Givenchy, and many more---ready to stock your online eBay auctions or store!

You are bound to find plenty of fine fragrance items at Drop Ship Access that you can start selling immediately!

It isn’t too late to get in on the increased sales of the holidays! Drop Ship Access is fully integrated with eBay and eBay ProStores, so it couldn’t get any quicker or easier to list anything you find on the dropship website on eBay. Just a few clicks and you’re in business!

Don’t worry about spending a lot of money on extra products to sell, or ordering too many of something and being stuck with excess inventory after the holidays. You don’t have to pay for the products until you sell them on eBay and collect the payment from your customers.

And you’ll be spared the hassle of packaging and shipping, because Drop Ship Access takes care of all that for you!

You will receive Low Inventory alerts to notify you if stock is getting low on a particular product, to help ensure that you don’t over sell.

If Santa Claus is coming at a bad time for you this year and you need extra money, check out some of the hot products at Drop Ship Access and start selling them on eBay right away!

Click Here to go to Drop Ship Access

Start your own online dropship business today!

Monetize Your Social Media Presence with FREE Shopit

Greg Scott — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

More and more merchants are taking advantage of the opportunities present in social media communities to combine marketing with increased sales.

Shopit is a FREE service that will let your social networks do the work selling your products, while you stay busy tending your online store and working on marketing and ad campaigns.

What is Shopit?

Shopit is an easy to use, simple but effective ecommerce platform that enables efficient sharing and publishing of products and information on the internet.

You can link your products directly to any site on the World Wide Web, including popular social community sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more.

Basically, your storefront profile is your main home in the social community. You can customize your online store, add images, tell your friends, and sell your products!

Shopit provides 100% security and identity management features and Shipping Manager. Its free services are compatible with ecommerce sites such as eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Yahoo Stores and more, besides most social networks and blogs.

Shopit also supports communication with LinkedIn and Plaxo.

For payment, Shopit is compatible with Revolutionary Money Exchange, Google Checkout and Paypal.

Shopit is the only website that allows users to create personalized widgets that can then be placed across literally anywhere on the internet! You can quickly and easily upload your items and list them for sale!

Shopit is a group of internet users who got together and decided that everybody---buyers and sellers alike---needed better tools for ecommerce.

From the Shopit website: “The site is backed and managed by a team of Internet visionaries with expertise spanning e-commerce, social networking, advertising, online marketing and affiliate marketing. Together, they realized that the next evolution in e-commerce involves empowering every Internet user to be a merchant.”

You can even add videos to your profiles!

There are no fees of any kind. No fees for the Shopit service. No listing fees. No final value fees. eBay sellers will go into reverse sticker shock!

If you want to jump on the bandwagon and start combining selling with social media marketing, it might pay you to check out Shopit.

Click Here to Visit Shopit

Start your own online dropship business today!

Survey Says: Social Media & eCommerce are Hand in Hand

Madison Claire — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With those in the know predicting that Facebook and other social media communities will soon be the next big online shopping sites; you don’t want to get left behind.

It isn’t too soon to start actively combining social media and ecommerce.

At present, almost 70% of users worldwide visit online social sites. Approximately two-thirds of marketers are using social sites for five hours or more every week, and almost 40% are using social media ten hours a week or more.

A whopping 78% of all social media users will interact with companies through social media.

Wow!

But there’s more: According to a recent marketing survey conducted by Tealeaf, around half of respondents said that social media has impacted their online buying.

75% of those surveyed said that what they saw about a brand or company online at social media influenced their choice of which merchant to buy from.

56% of respondents stated that they would avoid a company or brand after they read negative comments about it on a social media site.

If you still think that social media communities are a flash in the pan…some sort of fad that won’t last long and it would be a waste of your time and effort to use social media marketing; your ecommerce business may soon join the rest of the dinosaurs in extinction.

The fact is that far from declining, social media sites are growing incredibly fast!

According to Experian Hitwise research, visits to Facebook increased by a mindboggling 194% on a year to year basis in September of 2009.

Twitter usage, meanwhile, increased 1170% during that same time frame.

Social media sites overall experienced a 62% increase from September 2008 to September 2009.

An interesting factoid to note about this is that users in the 55 and over age group increased by 77%!

So, if you are engaged in social media marketing, don’t think that it should all be geared toward teens and young adults, because there is a great niche here for the “Silver Surfer” group.

In the beginning, most social media sites were not at all interested in having retail or e-tail merchants jumping into the pool. But things have changed a lot already and based on findings by internet analysts---will continue to change and evolve even more until social communities offer online shopping aplenty.

You don’t want your ecommerce store to be lagging behind your competitors in this lucrative and opportunity-rich online gold field, so if you aren’t already active in social media marketing; you should get started ASAP.

Be there or be square!

Start your own online dropship business today!

Is Your eCommerce Store Ready for Cyber Monday?

Greg Scott — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:35:00 GMT

After Black Friday comes Cyber Monday, which internet retail analysts are predicting will be a big ecommerce online shopping day this year.

Is your online business ready for Cyber Monday?

If you were a savvy internet entrepreneur, you had a fully researched and carefully plotted marketing strategy and ad campaign in place that brought you a lot of extra sales today.

But take a deep breath and gather your resources for Cyber Monday.

Change your content to get rid of the Black Friday stuff and replace it with Cyber Monday. Be sure to also tailor your site for the Christmas holidays, and make sure that your landing pages, home page, meta tags and everything else is rich with holiday themed keywords.

The National Retail Federation reports that approximately 87% of all ecommerce merchants will run special promotions this year for Cyber Monday.

Based on findings by the NPD, a leading US market research company, 61% of consumers will be researching a product online before they pull the trigger and make an actual purchase.

What does this mean to you?

It means that there is an excellent chance you can convert this consumer research into a sale if all the conditions are right.

You should make cure that your trust and safety symbols are prominently displayed, that your descriptions and images are adequate, that your contact info is clearly displayed, and last but not least---that your checkout process is as fast, easy and streamlined as you can possibly make it.

Hopefully your Black Friday sales today were great.

But don’t relax your vigilance just yet or slack off in your efforts to do everything you can to make sure that your online store is performing at optimal levels in every way!

You have the weekend to gear up and get ready for Cyber Monday and the next big onslaught of bargain hungry online shoppers, so use this time wisely.

Due to this grim economy, sales are not what we would all wish for during this holiday season. Nobody knows exactly what to expect with any degree of certainty.

Probably about the only thing we can know for certain is that even if holiday sales aren’t what they would be in a better economy, business is still going to brisker through the holidays than any other time of the year.

So, make the most of this opportunity to boost your ecommerce

Start your own online dropship business today!

Social Media Marketing: Will Facebook Be the Next Big Online Shopping Site?

Amanda Brooke — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:42:00 GMT

If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur who thinks that Facebook is just a place to hang out and socialize, you are missing out on the power of social media marketing and what it can do to help grow your online dropship business.

There are over 200 million active members on Facebook, and that number is growing by leaps and bounds.

70% of those members say they use and engage with one or more of the 52,000 applications, or apps, on Facebook.

Internet retail strategists are saying that Facebook might well be the next big online shopping website. According to the Financial Times, at least 20 major retailers are opening storefronts on Facebook in time for holiday shoppers.

As more and more retailers turn to the internet and social media sites to help bolster flagging sales due to the economy, Facebook could actually become a major retail destination.

If you aren’t paying attention to what these big companies are saying and doing, and aren’t tapping into that vast reservoir of potential customers yourself, you are making a grave mistake!

Basically, what it all boils down to is that if you are in ecommerce, you need to have a presence on Facebook.

You should be active in other online communities, as well, but for now we’re just talking about Facebook and its potential to help your online business expand.

By leveraging Facebook business related apps and options, you can provide your customers with a new channel for interaction, plus get new customers as your Facebook fans tell others in their circles about you!

Here are some of the Facebook apps for business pages:

Events: Here you can organize online parties or gatherings, and also spread the word about upcoming business events such as sales, contests, freebies, etc.

Notes: Here is where you can share news about your business, or engage with your fans through written entries.

Video: This is great! Here you have a high quality video platform for Facebook pages. Remember---people generally love videos, especially if it’s something informative or amusing!

Discussion Boards: This is a golden opportunity to do some good PR work and interact with your customers and prospective customers.

There are more business apps available on Facebook. But that gives you an idea of the fantastic marketing possibilities!

Start your own online dropship business today!

How to Get Twitter Followers: What NOT to Do

Greg Scott — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:28:00 GMT

The first thing you want to understand about acquiring a large number of followers on Twitter is that quality counts for a lot more than quantity.

It is more important that you have quality followers who truly might be interested in you and your business, than a long list of spammers and people who would follow anybody.

That being said, it is beneficial to build a strong base of good followers on Twitter.

Instead of another list of things you should do to get Twitter followers, let’s let the other shoe drop and take a look instead at what you shouldn’t do:

Do not, under any circumstances, be a spammer! This will get you blocked in a hurry. Yes, you want to build up your followers, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do that and spamming is most definitely the WRONG way!

Do not follow other Twitter users indiscriminately, thinking that this is a fast way to get people to follow you. Actually, is a good way to get people to follow you, but remember---you want the right people following you, not every Tom, Dick and Harriet on the World Wide Web. Be judicious in choosing who to follow, and choose people who have something in common with you and/or your business.

Don’t be too pushy or salesy! This is such a huge turn-off, really. Of course you want to grow and build your ecommerce business, and are trying to leverage social media to help make that happen. That’s fine. Just mind your manners and don’t come across as some carnival huckster or old time snake oil salesman. People don’t like that, and you will only hurt yourself if you fail to heed this caution.

Don’t send out scads of Tweets and then never respond to anything somebody else has to say. Get involved! Engage! If there are conversations going on that you honestly feel you could make a worthwhile contribution to, then jump on in there. Don’t talk at people, talk with them. Big difference! One makes you well liked and interesting, the other makes you an obnoxious bore. Guess which one does what?

Observe these things not to do, and work at building a solid base of quality Twitter followers to grow your online business!

Start your own online dropship business today!