AliExpress, Oberlo and Other Disasters

Here's another favorite of the "let's screw the sheeple" crowd. This is usually presented as a component of the Amazing Amazon Business they're going to cheat you how to build.

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Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing you have to worry about is anybody ELSE you might listen to.

Here's another favorite of the "let's screw the sheeple" crowd. This is usually presented as a component of the Amazing Amazon Business they're going to cheat you how to build.

They tell you that you need to get "unique" products into the marketplace and create your own brand with a "Private Label" because it will be impressive and cool and people will buy lots of it and love you.

NO.

First, let's think about the concept of "unique". On the Internet, people search for things they know about. They know about those things because of something called Consumer Awareness. Consumer Awareness is created by the manufacturing companies that make products. They do it by spending tens of millions of dollars in real-world mass media advertising.

They have to do that. If they don't, the big-box stores won't carry their products because consumers won't know about them and they'll be harder to sell. Yes, it's a thing, and has been forever both in the physical world and online. Make sense so far?

So, "unique" products are by definition..."unique". That means there is NO general Consumer Awareness. Most people don't know about them. They're new and unique.

Here's a news flash for the Scam Boys. The internet is based on Search. So is Amazon. So is eBay. The only way a consumer can find a product is if they search for it. That means they have to know what it is. If it's "unique", they don't know what it is, and will never search for it. That means you can't make any money with it.

DUH.

Now let's talk about the "Private Label" thing. Labeling is about branding in the Real Business World. Brands are created to instill confidence in consumers, so they will keep coming back to the brand and buy it over and over again because if the brand is built right, consumers TRUST it.

It takes years and tens of millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars to create a brand strong enough that large numbers of consumers will trust it enough to make it worthwhile to manufacture and sell.

Slapping a sticky label that says "Joe's Coffemakers" on a cheap product from China is NOT creating a brand!

Which would you rather buy? A Joe's Coffeemaker, or a Cuisinart Coffeemaker? See what I mean? This whole Private Label thing was created by some skeezy marketer somewhere as a way to make you feel cool because you "own a brand". It has ZERO value in the retail marketing world.

They'll charge you tens of thousands of dollars to "teach you" how to create that brand.

For all that money, you get told to slap sticky labels on cheap stuff from China, and you end up NOT owning a brand. You own some sticky labels, a bunch of junk from China and a miserable future trying to get rid of that cheap crap that you "Private Labeled".

Don't do it, please.

To learn to start a REAL online business that actually makes a full time living, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

Ever wonder why so much product pricing ends in 95 or 99 cents? Those are known as “charm prices”. They use what we call the “Left Digit Effect” to apply retail psychology to product pricing.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Product Pricing: Do It Right

When I teach ECommerce, product pricing is always required learning. People have such horribly skewed notions about product pricing that it's always an eye-opener for them.

Before we get into it, it's very important to understand that if we’re going to talk about product pricing, we need to talk about WHERE you sell online.

The worst thing you can possibly do to ANY small retail business is to put it squarely in the path of a crazed, charging herd of the most bargain-hunting consumers on the planet.

A small home-based EBiz simply can’t compete in a serious bargain-hunting situation. It doesn’t yet have the buying power that the much bigger companies do. That means that the home-based EBiz pays a higher wholesale price per product and can’t make any profit when competing on price in front of consumers who are specifically bargain-hunting.

This is why it’s so difficult for a small EBiz to succeed on eBay and Amazon. Over the past several years, these huge bargain-shopping venues have become favorite hangouts for large wholesale and manufacturing companies who sell directly on eBay and Amazon, often under anonymous seller names.

They can undercut any small business on price. They thrive in price-driven destination sites like eBay and Amazon, and that leaves you out in the cold. If you’re not making at least a 20% to 45% profit on your sales, you’re not going to make a living at it.

So where should you be selling?

The best place for a home-based EBiz is, always has been and always will be on it’s own web site.

Why? Because your best customers are those who are searching for what they REALLY WANT, not for the lowest possible product pricing. When consumers are bargain hunting, they tend to go DIRECTLY to eBay, Amazon, Walmart.com, etc. However, when they search for what they REALLY WANT, they go to Google.

Far, far more consumers search for products on Google than on eBay, Amazon and Walmart.com COMBINED.

Consumers who search on exactly what they really want are doing what’s called “Discretionary Purchasing”. When people are buying on a Discretionary basis, they aren’t nearly as concerned about product pricing as they are about quality and getting exactly what they want.

THAT is the sweet spot for retail businesses either online or offline. Discretionary consumers far outnumber bargain-hunting consumers, and they will pay a reasonable retail price to get what they want. For a small business, that translates directly to reasonable profits.

I know, I know; you might be selling on eBay or Amazon. However, all that had to be said in order to talk about product pricing. The rest of this discussion pertains to ANY place that you’re going to set a retail price.

1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRICING

Ever wonder why so much product pricing ends in 95 or 99 cents? Those are known as “charm prices”. They use what we call the “Left Digit Effect” to apply retail psychology to product pricing.

That effect is the fact that a nickel, or even a single penny will have an effect on a retail buyer that is HUGELY disproportionate to the actual money value in the price.

Most people who sell online tend to use the Left Digit Effect without really understanding why, because we’re all exposed to it on a daily basis in our own lives. However, many also ‘mix and match’ product pricing, and doing that throws off the consumer.

Consistency is the most important thing when it comes to the Left Digit Effect. Either always use it, or never use it. Either always use 95 or always use 99. I’ve consulted for an amazing number of EBiz sites that use 95, 99, 00, 50, 67, 97 and so on as Left Digits in their product pricing ALL on the same site!

Psychology is an amazingly important aspect of retail sales. When consumers see a mix of Left Digit pricing, it throws them off. They feel like something isn’t right, but they don’t know what it is.

Any time a consumer feels like something isn’t right on your retail EBiz pages, your chances of making a sale drop tremendously.
99 and 95 are the most commonly used Left Digit Effect numbers, and you should stick to them but never mix and match; either always 99 or always 95.

2. SALE PRICES – THE EXCEPTION

Running a sale? Use 00 for your Left Digit Effect. Psychologically, the 00 doesn’t work well for normal everyday product pricing. It tends to make the prices look high to us.

However, when it’s used sparingly in an occasional Sale Price, it looks low.

That only works, though, when you use the Sale technique SPARINGLY. Many of the sites I’ve consulted for use the old, hackneyed technique of making everything on their pages a Sale price. You’ve seen that, right?

EBiz pages that list the ‘Regular’ price, cross it out and list the ‘Sale’ price below it, then list the ‘You Save’ amount below that. On ALL their product pricing.

Hey, maybe you’ve done that or even do it now; it’s very commonly used by those who simply have not been told any different. It’s no crime not to be aware of something. The crime is being aware of something that hurts your business and not fixing it!

The technique of making everything look like a Sale price no longer works. Online consumers are much sharper than they used to be, and view that technique as something designed to fool them. When people hit your product pages and think you’re trying to fool them, you’d have better success trying to sell baby shoes to a rock.

So use 00 as a Left Digit Effect for actual Sale prices, but run actual Sales sparingly and only on a few items at a time. You’ll have much better success with it.

3. HOW TO SET PRICES

Setting prices is all about research. I know; painful, right?

Hey, you know the old saying…no pain, no gain. That’s especially true for business owners.

Researching product pricing means that you need to find the exact same product being sold by 6 of your most annoying competitors. Why are they annoying? Well, because they’re competing with you! How annoying is that!

In reality, competition is a GOOD thing. It raises consumer awareness that a product exists, and brings more people into the marketplace to buy it. However, it does mean that you have to compete for those customers.

The biggest mistake that EBiz owners make here is in trying to UNDERCUT their competitors' product pricing. You don’t need to do that when you sell to Discretionary buyers. Selling is about providing your customer with what they need and want through proper presentation. If you can do that, price becomes secondary, especially to the Discretionary buyer.

Another point that’s important to make is that if you get into a price war with competing EBiz owners, that war only ends badly for both of you because it ends when there is no profit margin left in the product. Game over.

So, find 6 other web sites that sell the same EXACT product, add up their prices, and divide by 6. That gives you the average price of your competition, and that’s where you should be. Psychologically, a product that has a price that ‘blends in’ well with other prices in the product’s market shifts the consumers’ attention away from the price and toward the value and benefit statements you make in your on-page marketing.

If you have a web site, DO NOT use eBay, Amazon or Walmart.com to research competitive price points even if they do show up high in the search engines when you do your research. A well-marketed niche web site can beat eBay, Amazon and those big bargain stores in the search engines all day long if they know what they’re doing, and learning how to do that should be your goal as an EBiz owner.

Consumers who shop on a Discretionary basis mostly shop sites other than the bargain hunting destinations, and that’s where you should focus your product pricing research.

If you do all your research on eBay, Amazon, etc., the price competition results are only going to show you how little (if any) profit there is available there, and that’ll just give you a headache.

Genuinely sorry to say that if you’re an eBay or Amazon seller, because if you are you MUST do your research on eBay or Amazon. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth.

4. ZEROING IN ON EXACT PRICE

When it comes to actually setting the exact price for a product after you’ve done your research, it might be helpful to make a note of this site: PricePoints.com. That site lists commonly used retail price points from 0.00 all the way up to 10,000.

Use it as a guideline, though, not as hard-and-fast rules.

PricePoints.com is a good place to get ideas for your RIGHT DIGIT price numbers; the actual dollars in your price to the right of the decimal point. Look at the average product pricing you got from your research, then find the closest dollar value in PricePoints. That's likely going to be an effective dollar value for you.

However, if it’s too far off the average that you researched, disregard it and use your average.

Then, apply either 95 or 99 to ALL your price points for the Left Digit Effect, and you’re good to go.
Remember to keep your product pricing consistent!

Note: some internet marketers make a big deal of the number 97 as a Left Digit Effect. That works much better for information sales than it does for physical product sales, so don’t get sucked into that idea when you sell physical products!

Learn more thoroughly amazing and incredibly important stuff. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com!

When I consult for ECommerce businesses or teach EBiz owners who already have sites, one of the things that stands out the most to me is the total lack of an Identity Package for that ECommerce business. An Identity Package helps to set the tone for site design, marketing style, and the entire Brand of the business...which always leads to more sales.

Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!

Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only time you WON'T hear the truth, is AFTER YOU LEAVE!

When I consult for ECommerce businesses or teach EBiz owners who already have sites, one of the things that stands out the most to me is the total lack of an Identity Package for that ECommerce business. An Identity Package helps to set the tone for site design, marketing style, and the entire Brand Identity of the business.

A well-constructed Branding Identity is an absolute MUST for ANY business to be truly successful, online or offline. For an EBiz, an Identity Package for branding consists of three things:

1. A GOOD SITE NAME

I’m often surprised by the number of people who have taken bad advice or learned the wrong things and given their web sites names that will do nothing for their business at best, and hurt it at worst. I don’t blame the site owners; there’s a tremendous amount of bad info floating around out there. However, when it comes to branding, they do need to learn how to do it right.

How many times have you seen a site named something like “MyGreatBargains.com”, or “GreatBuys4U.com”, or “BigPlaceFullOfExcellentThingsAtLowPrices.com”? Okay, that last one is a stretch, but you know what I mean, right?

Actually, that was a trick question. You probably only rarely come across sites with a names like that. Why? Because they don’t rank well in the search engines, and hardly ever get found by shoppers.

The reason they don’t rank well is another topic altogether; perhaps a discussion for another day, but I’ll mention it here in passing. They don’t rank because they’re trying to sell a whole bunch of different products on the same web site. Those products all have widely different Keywords in their product names and marketing content. Google and the other search engines rank best on RELEVANT Keyword content; Keywords that they know are related to one another in some way.

So, when the search engines see a site that has page after page of words describing products that the search engine knows are NOT related to one another, that site doesn’t rank well n omatter how good it's branding might be. Period.

Yep, I know, big-box stores that carry widely varied stuff seem to rank pretty well, don’t they. However, that’s for different reasons altogether, and they can be beaten with highly targeted web sites.

For that reason and many others, small home-based EBiz sites need to sell ONLY one specific product line per site in order to do well in the search engines.

As I said, though, that’s a topic for another time. There are LOTS of details involved in making an ECommerce business successful, and right now we're talking about ONE of those things: Branding. So let’s get back to our conversation about an Identity Package, with site names being the first thing to learn.

A site name needs to reflect what it sells. On a properly built, web site with thoughtful branding, that will be something very specific. However, it can’t just be “Toasters.com”.

For one thing, that name is already taken, which most of the best product-descriptive names are. For another, though, a site name needs to connect with its consumer demographic. To connect with its consumer demographic, the business owner needs to know who that consumer demographic IS. I'll talk about that in another post in this blog. Back to names, now.

Let’s say that an EBiz owner sells a very specific line of toasters that is best suited for a female audience (a demographic) made up of older women who have a serious passion for baking and cooking. What site name do you think would appeal more to that consumer audience?

– BestToasters4U.com
– CheapToasters.com
– CozyKitchenToasters.com

If you picked the last one, you’re right. A site name, like everything else in marketing, needs to tell part of a story and also make an emotional connection with its consumers. That's part of branding. CozyKitchenToasters.com evokes a warm, comfortable, familiar place where family gathers and great food is carefully made with lots of love.

The other two choices, well…don’t. So, you can see the difference between thoughtless, sales-gimmicky names and a carefully selected audience-driven name, right?

Good. That leads us to some of the other things a good site name does. It helps to drive site design. A name like that inspires a site with a warm, rich color palette, a cozy, comfortable graphic treatment and a very personally friendly space.

What else does it do? Among other things, it helps to inspire the creation of the second part of an Identity Package for branding. The Tagline.

2. A GOOD TAGLINE

These used to be called “slogans”. Now we call them Taglines, or ‘Tags’ for short.

A business without a Tagline in it's branding is a business that needs to get one, or close up shop. I cannot stress strongly enough that this is a critical part of your Identity Package, and your Identity Package is a critical part of your branding. Your branding is a critical part of your marketing, and…well, I’m sure you get the idea!

In ECommerce, Tag Lines are generally best inspired by site names. The Tag needs to support the name, while at the same time telling another part of the branding story.

Professional copywriters who create Taglines often go through dozens, if not more than a hundred different ideas before settling on a good Tag. This is not something to be taken lightly. Remember, it has to support the name, and tell more of the story of the brand.

“You’ve tried the rest, now try the best!” isn’t gonna cut it. At one time, that Tag was clever. That’s when it was new, back before humans discovered fire.

A good Tagline needs to be short, memorable, part of a story, and supportive of the brand. It needs to CONNECT with people emotionally as well, just like the site name should.

Another rule of thumb is that a Tagline shouldn’t ever be more than 3 to 5 words. That makes them much easier for consumers to remember, and that’s what you want.

Think of some of the most memorable Tags you know.

– Don’t leave home with it (5 words)
– You deserve a break today (5 words)
– Just Do It (3 words)
– The quicker picker-upper (4 words)
– The King of beers (4 words)

See what I mean? Short, memorable, and telling part of a story. Let’s look at the first one; the American Express Tagline “Don’t Leave Home Without It”. This Tag is using negative reinforcement to create a scary imagined impact if you DON’T have the product.

Warning a fellow human being not to leave a safe, comfortable place and go out into the big, bad world without a taking specific thing along makes a very visceral connection with us psychologically. It subconsciously makes us feel like bad, BAD things are going to happen if we leave our home without this thing. Again, it’s psychology. As humans, we look to other humans to warn us of danger, and a need to pay attention to those warnings is deeply ingrained in our psyche.

So, a negatively reinforcing Tagline like that works very well in branding.

What Tagline would we give our CozyKitchenToasters.com web site?

There are lots of possibilities, and there’s a serious amount of research to do before choosing one, but I’ll just throw one out there off the top of my head. (Excuse me while I remove my hat…)

Okay, how about:

"Real kitchens bake with love".

That’s 5 words. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little sappy when you look at it sitting there all by itself. Hey, I spent all of 30 seconds coming up with that; cut me a little slack!

BUT, put that Tag together with the site name ‘CozyKitchenToasters.com’ and the right graphic design, and I promise you it will look perfectly natural in that site's branding, make an emotional connection, and tell another part of the story of the site’s Brand.

There’s still one thing missing, though. The site name and Tagline will play a part in helping us to design the third and final part of an Identity Package for branding: The Logo.

3. A GOOD LOGO

How many times have you seen a web site that just has text in the top left corner of each page that says something like ‘BobsWebSite.com’? Probably too often. That's NOT branding.

The top left corner of any page on your web site is the first impression your customers have of your Brand. We all know how important first impressions are. Because we’re raised to read left to right, top to bottom (in most Western cultures, anyway) the first thing we see when our eyes hit a new piece of media, like a web page, is the top left corner of the page.

That’s where our brains expect us to start reading, so that’s the first place our eyes go. Sometimes we don’t even realize that, but it happens every time. No matter where we THINK we looked first, our brains instantly register whatever is in that top left corner.

The brainiacs at MIT tell us that the human brain can register and recall an image that it sees for as little as 13 MILLISECONDS.

That’s 13 one-thousands of a second!! So don’t think for a millisecond that your customers’ brains don’t take whatever is in the top left corner of your web site pages as their first impression of your business and branding; they absolutely do.

If that top left corner is a flat, dry, no-personality lump of text that says ‘BobsWebSite.com’, you’ve already lost that customer in their first couple of seconds on your site. At that point even the customer doesn’t consciously realize it yet, but SUBconsciously they already know they’re not going to buy anything from you, because you've killed your branding before it got a chance to get started.

A good Logo completes your Identity Package and is a cornerstone of your site’s branding. In a quick, visually symbolic way, a good Logo captures attention, tells yet another part of the Brand story, sets a mood for your customers and much more.

Professional designers charge thousands of dollars for a really good Logo, because they do a lot of research into your customer demographic and your product market and play with dozens of ideas before finalizing the design.

Don’t think you can get a good Logo from one of those five-dollar graphics sites. The graphic artists who do those dirt-cheap Logo designs literally time themselves and only devote about 10 to 15 minutes of their time to each Logo they create. How else can we realistically expect them to make any money otherwise? They’re not doing it for fun!

10 to 15 minutes isn’t going to get you a good Logo, though, and a bad Logo will sink your branding faster than a boat anchor chained to a dog biscuit. So where do you get a good Logo? Here are three suggestions, from best to worst case scenario.

It’s probably the last thing you want to hear, but any business owner who’s serious about building a successful business from the ground up needs to develop multiple skills. As an Ebiz owner, you need to have some familiarity with graphics software like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. If you spend some time with it, you can come up with a Logo on your own. Just make sure to study other successful Logos in your market and take your time.

Or, you could find a friend or family member who’s good at sketching or drawing and work with them.

Finally, if you must, you can try to find a designer who will spend more than 15 minutes on your Logo. You WILL have to pay them a pretty chunky amount of money for their time, though, if you expect a reasonable Logo in return.

Remember that your Logo will be greatly influenced by the other parts of your Identity Package; your Site Name and your Tagline, so they must be developed first.

Logos come in several forms:

Word Mark – this Logo form is simply the name of the company written out in a stylized font with no graphics. Think Disney.

Icon – this Logo form is simply a graphic that stands on its own. Think Apple.

Lettermark – this form of Logo is the initials of a company name in a stylized text font with no graphics. Think CNN.

Combination Mark – this form of Logo uses both a Word Mark and an Icon. Think Adobe.

Emblem – this form of Logo consist of words or letters inside a graphic design. Think Harley-Davidson.

Our CozyKitchenToasters.com site name could use any of these forms of Logo, as can most site name and Tagline combinations.

4. WHAT'S NEXT?

As the business owner, it’s up to you to learn to provide the creativity to build a good Identity Package for branding your web site. Your real-world business success depends on it.

Want to learn a whole lot more extremely important things you need to do for your business? Of course you do! Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. I'll teach you 'til you drop. :o)

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time!

One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!).

Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!

Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chis Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing we DON'T know is how to do it WRONG!

One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!).

1. YOU CAN’T TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

There’s a process to traditional physical sales that’s worked very well since the first caveman sold a hunting rock to his buddy in exchange for a chunk of meat.

A really good salesperson in the physical world understands that process and does it very well. That means that salesperson makes good money in sales.

The process they use to make more sales basically goes like this:

– You show someone a product.
– You ask them questions about what they desire from the product and then speak to those desires and how the product fulfills them.
– You talk price and close the sale.

That conversation is critical in good physical-world sales. If I go to Sam Ash Music in Orlando and ask a salesperson to see a specific guitar, any good salesperson is going to try to find out what I want from the product. He or she might ask me if I’m going to use the guitar for practice, for fun, to play on stage, to record with, etc. What kind of pickups do I like? What kind of tone am I looking for? What gauge strings do I like to use?

My answers to these questions allow the salesperson to either point out that the features I want already exist on that guitar or can be added to that guitar, or point out that I might want to check out a different guitar.

During that process, the salesperson is GUIDING ME THROUGH THE SALE.

If he or she does a good really job of controlling that process and guiding me through the sale, I’m most likely going to buy the product. That salesperson is always going to make more sales than one who doesn't know how to do that.

Online, though, there’s something very important that’s missing from this time-tested process. You can’t talk to your customer about what they desire from the product. You can’t physically guide them through the sale with questions and answers.

So what do you do to make more sales?

2. VISUAL MARKETING WORKS ONE-WAY

When you think about it, the entire marketing process online is VISUAL. From your product pictures to your written site content, your articles, blogs, public forum participation, social marketing, video content…everything you do is ONE-WAY, from you to your customer, and it’s all VISUAL.

Just like it’s easy to mistake someone’s tone in an email when you can’t see their expressions and body language in person, it’s easy to visually confuse people on your site and in your marketing.

In the many years I’ve spent teaching Ecommerce business owners how to fix sites that don’t work, I can’t even attempt to count the number of times I’ve seen web sites that are so visually confusing that I feel like I’m looking at them through a psychotic kaleidoscope.

Most web site owners (and yes, eBay sellers too) try to make more sales by cramming so much STUFF onto a single page that it simply descends into visual chaos right from the top of the page. It’s not the site owners’ fault, because that’s what EBiz owners see everybody ELSE doing.

However, when you understand that literally more than 97% of the Ebiz sites online never provide a full time income for their owners, it’s easy to see that this is one of the reasons.

‘Busy’ pages don’t work well visually. They’re too confusing. Online shoppers move very quickly as a rule, and a busy, confusing page turns off an online shopper faster than their cat peeing on their keyboard.

We’ve already established that this is one-way visual marketing. You can’t stand over your customers’ shoulders and direct their attention through that confusion for them. Your pages need to do the visual directing all by themselves! They can only do that if they are clean, clear, intuitive, AND focused on one thing at a time. That's the only way those pages are going to make more sales.

Visual marketing is a PROCESS. In that process, EACH PAGE of your site needs to accomplish the following things for your customer:

– Professionalism
– Legitimacy
– Engagement
– Action
– Closure

You have 3 to 7 seconds to move someone’s eyes to a single focal point on any given page. That’s because people are at their peak level of interest and attention for anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds after they first hit a new piece of media (your web page).

After that first 3 to 7 seconds, their interest and attention begin to drop off, and you’ve lost that Magic Moment when you had your one BEST chance to capture their interest. That’s one reason that confusing web pages lead to miserable sales; it takes way too much time to wade through the confusion.

Other reasons are that confusing pages are hard to follow, don’t speak well of your Brand, and are just too much work for the typical fast-moving online shopper.

3. UNDERSTANDING THE VISUAL MARKETING PROCESS

If you want to make more sales in your online business, you need an understanding of the Visual Sales Process.

So how do you establish a visual process that leads your customer to a sale instead of chasing them away? Let’s explore that process again, with some added notes.

– Professionalism:

Your customers MUST feel that they are dealing with a professional company. Professionalism is immediately established (or not!) by the top left corner of any given page in your site. That’s where they Site Name, Tagline and Logo belong, as we talked about )in a previous post). That’s your “Identity Package”. That’s what your customer will notice first, and first impressions are everything.

Make sure you learn how to put together a truly great Identity Package.

– Legitimacy:

Your customers must immediately feel that you’re a legitimate company. This is a function of how easy it is for them to contact you directly. It’s best established by a toll-free Customer Service phone number at the top right of every page on your site. It’s actually very inexpensive (about $20 a month) and it’s will definitely help you make more sales.

– Engagement:

You have to create a SINGLE focal point on each page of your web site that contains the ONE THING that your customer needs to do on that page in order to further the sale.

This is why you can’t jumble up a nasty mess of multiple product buy buttons, “free shipping” tags, coupons, ads, flashy graphics splattered all over the page, and all the rest of that garbage. When you do that, you create MULTIPLE focal points for your customers’ eyes, and they get lost, confused, and then they leave. You can't make more sales when your customers leave your site.

Engaging a customer’s eyes means catching their attention with something that moves their eyes toward your focal point. You can do this really well by placing an image of a person USING your product near the upper middle portion of your page, above and usually slightly to the left of the focal point. That person in the image should be LOOKING TOWARD your focal point; your customers will follow the eyes of the person in the image.

– Action:

This is what happens when you successfully establish Professionalism, Legitimacy and Engagement. At this point, your customer has landed on the focal point of your page, and takes an ACTION.

On a Home Page, the focal point is usually images that clearly represent your categories. On a Category Page, the focal point is a group of clean, clear product images (NOT prices and buy buttons!) that represent the products in that Category. On a Product Page, the focal point is the product image itself, the description, and the Buy button.

If your page’s visual sales process quickly and effectively moves your customer to your focal point, your customer will click on it.

Get a customer to click on a Category image on your home page, and it’s much more likely they’ll click on a Product image in the Category, and then MUCH more likely they’ll buy the product once they hit the Product page. That is, if you effectively move their eyes through the visual sales process on each of those pages.

– Closure:

This is what happens when your customer buys the product and completes the sale.

Always keep in mind that most of your customers will land somewhere in the MIDDLE of your site, not on your Home Page. That’s just one more reason that EVERY page must be clean, clear and be built with an effective visual sales process!

I've been doing this for 25 years, and I'll teach YOU how to do it. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com!

EBiz Competition - Myth or Reality? Far too many people worry about the levels of competition in online business, when the truth is that there's actually very little, and here's why.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the TRUTH about EBiz is the ONLY thing you'll ever hear.

Here are some thing I hear from people all the time. “How can my online business compete with eBay and Amazon?” "How can I compete with all those big stores?” “Aren’t there too many online stores already?” “There’s no room left to compete!”

Well, “competition” is a big and scary word. Not big meaning ‘long-big’. A ‘long-big’ word would be something like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicavolcanoconiosis. Now that's a long-big word!

No, the word “competition” is different. It’s “big” meaning all-encompassing; a generalization. Most people don’t really understand what “competition” actually IS.

Google, bless it’s googly little algorithmic heart, defines the word as “the person or people with whom one is competing, especially in a commercial or sporting arena; the opposition.” Here’s the important part: “The person or people with whom one is competing”. And only those people.

Because online business and the internet itself seem to be so big and all-encompassing, people often forget that internet users do not see the entire internet all at the same time when they search for something online. Yet that’s what they base this fear of competition on; that somebody searching for a set of dog socks on Google can somehow magically see every single store, every single page and every single price for every single pair of dog socks on the internet all at the same time!

The reality is very different. When you search for a product on Google (and we always talk about Google because it’s by far the biggest and most influential search engine) what do you see?

You see some “display ads” up in the top right corner. Those are the paid advertisements with pictures. Then the first 4 search results you see are paid ads as well (you can tell because they all say “AD” next to them). Then you see the natural listings; the pages that for whatever reason, deserved or not (but usually not deserved), have worked their way up to the top natural rankings in Google.

Here’s a little-known factoid for ya. The human eye can “subitize” (meaning “perceive a number of separate items in a group without actually counting”) only about 4 to 5 separate objects at a time. A single paid ad link on a SERP (a search engine results page) is perceived as a single OBJECT.

A single NATURAL page link on a SERP is perceived as a single OBJECT. So people CANNOT effectively see THE ENTIRE INTERNET AND EVERY SET OF DOG SOCKS ON IT ALL AT ONCE.

They can only EFFECTIVELY see 4 or 5 objects at a time.

That just begs the question…does 4 or 5 search results sound like a LOT of online business competition to you? I’m guessing that you’re thinking, “no”.

Now, here’s the kicker. Add to that the fact that the search results that people see first are psychologically interpreted as the most important and relevant results, and that vast macro-cosmos of millions of perceived competitors that so many people are afraid of has just shrunk to a number of competitors that you can count on one hand.

Now, if that's scary, you shouldn't even think about starting an online business (because it’s NOT scary, and if you think it is, well…you get the point).

Let’s throw yet another fact into the mix. People will always favor natural search engine results over paid ads. In fact, the search engine listings that gather the most clicks by far, are the first 3 natural listings (the ones that are highest on the page, but are not ads).

Most people are TIRED of ads! So...

Natural result #1 for any given search online gets about 40% of all clicks.
Natural result #2 gets about 18 to 20% of all clicks.
Natural result #3 gets about 8 to 10% of all clicks.

So there you have it. Nearly 70% of all clicks on a search engine results page are done on the top 3 natural results.

Your competition just shrunk some more. Feeling better about it? You should be feeling a LOT better about it.

SO WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE FEAR “HUGE” COMPETITION LEVELS?

Well, to answer that question we have to discuss that bane of our existence; the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the hair in our soup…the online business "marketers". These fake gurus spend a lot of time whipping up a false frenzy about massive online competition that ONLY their Super-Secret Systems And Tools Made From Unicorn Dust And Sunshine can ever break through.

They tell you over and over and over and over and over again that the only way you will ever be found among the millions of other sets of competing dog socks online that people somehow magically see all at once is to use their Amazing Systems.

They tell you (eventually, over time, so as not to sticker-shock you) that you’ll need to pay them tens of thousands of dollars to create your site, run your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) handle your blog, your social media, etc, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

When you pay them for all that, what they’re REALLY doing is spending about seven and a half minutes copying a basic template and calling it a site, and then installing some useless ‘automated marketing tool’ (which never works) to do the rest. For tens of thousands of dollars. TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.

Utterly, completely and unequivocally (defined as “In a way that leaves no doubt”) disgusting people, these fake gurus.

So we've established that your only real competition are basically the top three listings on a search engine page that are natural, and not paid ads.

The false fear that there's too much competition online should now be long-gone in your rear-view mirror.

Want to learn how to put YOUR business into those top three pages? Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Catch ya next time, and thanks for listening.

When you’re selling online, whether you use Drop Shipping or you physically stock and ship your products, wholesale backorders from your supplier are always a real possibility. As a business owner, it’s really important for you to understand why this happens and what you can do to avoid damage to your online reputation.

Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!

Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where we don't have to PRACTICE telling the truth, because we don't know how to do anything else!

When you’re selling online, whether you use Drop Shipping or you physically stock and ship your products, wholesale backorders from your supplier are always a real possibility.

Wholesale backorders often seemingly come out of nowhere, and leave you holding the bag, trying to explain to your customer why you suddenly can’t deliver what they bought.

To some degree or other, this is almost always the result of the Butterfly Effect, where one small problem in the Supply Chain ripples out across the entire product market.

As a business owner, it’s really important for you to understand why this happens and what you can do to avoid damage to your online reputation.

So please bear with me as we go through a how a hypothetical "Butterfly Effect" wholesale backorder situation might occur. Sometimes the reasons for these problems are simple, and sometimes they're more complex. I'm going to use a more complex example that touches every aspect of the Supply Chain, because a Supply Chain is something you should understand as a business owner.

Then we'll talk about what to do about the problem.

Let’s say you’re selling Coffee Makers.

The US-based Manufacturer of the coffee makers orders different parts for those coffee makers from different specialized suppliers around the world, and assembles those parts into the finished product in the US.

One day, somewhere in China, the machine that punches out the metal bands for the coffee pot handles breaks down.

As with many companies in the largely unregulated manufacturing space in China, it’s a very small manufacturing company using a very old machine to punch out those metal bands. The breakdown is a crack in the pressure cylinder that drives the press, and the fix is very difficult. Parts for that machine are impossible to come by, because this small Chinese company bought the 50 year old machine at a cheap price from a Russian surplus equipment dealer and there aren’t any replacement parts to be had.

The Chinese company can’t manufacture the metal bands until they repair or replace the machine. They can’t replace it because there aren't any cheap surplus presses to be had, and a newer machine is too expensive for this small manufacturing operation to buy.

The small Chinese company is down for 3 weeks while they remove the old cylinder and have a replacement specially made for it by an equipment fabricator in Thailand.

This one breakdown and repair delay sends a ripple effect across the entire Supply Chain for your coffee makers.

The small Chinese company is operating on a (very common) 3 month lead time. That means that the metal bands they make today, for example, don’t arrive on a ship and get offloaded to a US Customs Port for about 3 months.

Because they have that lead time, the Chinese company decides not to notify the US-based manufacturer that they have a problem. They’re afraid of losing their contract, so they keep the delay a secret for as long as they can while they scramble to fix the problem and hope to catch up to their quota in time.

The US-based manufacturer happily goes along assembling coffee makers with the parts they have from the delivery of thousands of metal bands that just came in on the last shipment, unaware that one critical part is about to be delayed.

Because the Chinese company didn’t tell the US company that there would be a delay, the US company doesn’t go out and look for a replacement supplier for the metal band.

The Chinese company gets their machine back up and running 3 weeks later and works overtime trying to make up for the time they were down, but it’s impossible to catch up. The next order they send to the US company is going to be significantly short.

Months later, the next shipment of metal bands arrives at the US company’s facility, and it’s far fewer metal bands than it should be. The US company finds out what happened, and is forced to reduce the number of coffee makers they assemble and ship to their wholesale suppliers around the country until they can get their next full shipment of metal bands for the coffeepots.

The US company doesn’t want their wholesalers to go looking for other brands of coffee makers to sell, so they decide to delay telling their wholesalers about the upcoming shortage as long as possible until they can come up with a retention strategy that won’t cost them any ill will with their wholesalers. It takes them about a month to burn through their on-hand factory inventory, and then they start to casually notify their wholesalers that future shipments will be short for about 3 months or so.

Your wholesaler of the coffee makers you sell only has a fairly small quantity of the coffee makers in stock because they’re trying to manage their cash flow as carefully as possible. They don’t bother to make a general announcement that the coffee makers will be in short supply for a while, because they don’t want to lose retailers. They decide to deal with their retailers on a case-by-case basis, offering discounts on other products in order to retain their retailers while they wait for their supply of that coffee maker to be fully available again.

Seven months after the initial equipment breakdown at the Chinese manufacturer of metal bands, you sell a coffee maker to one of your customers on your web site. You place the order with your wholesaler, only then to find out that the coffee maker is out of stock.

This is an example of poor Supply Chain management, specifically with regard to the transmission of information throughout the Supply Chain. However, it happens.

Now you have a customer that you can’t fill an order for, so you get mad at the wholesaler for not telling you their stock was running out. You’d be right; the wholesaler could have notified its retailers of the problem. However, the delay itself isn’t the wholesaler’s fault; the fault lies with that cracked pressure cylinder in China, and a couple of poor management decisions by other companies in the Supply Chain as well.

The Chinese manufacturer could have told the US company that there would be a delay, and the US company might have found a substitution for the metal bands. But, the Chinese company was afraid of losing that large contract if the temporary replacement supplier did a better job than they could.

The US company could have warned their wholesalers that the delay was coming, but they didn’t want their wholesalers shopping for other coffee maker brands from other companies in the short term or causing a drop in sales by making any announcements.

The wholesaler could have warned their retailers that stock would be low to non-existent for a while, but they didn't want to look bad to their retailers, and decided to ride it out on a case-by-case basis. They also could have looked for other brands of coffee makers to carry, but for a wholesaler that can be a months-long process that gets very costly.

These are the kinds of things you need to understand and be prepared for.

When you’re in business, one of your primary jobs is to put out fires. They’ll spring up in the strangest places for reasons that are often a complete mystery, but the business owner who reacts well to situations like this is a business owner who succeeds in business.

Simply remember that every problem is an opportunity.

That’s an old saying, but it’s an old saying for a reason; it’s true, and has stood the test of time.

In the situation describe above, for example; what do you do to turn that problem into an opportunity?

Let’s take it step by step:

1. As soon as you find out that product is out of stock, mark it "out of stock" on your website. Don't remove the page, because you don't want to lose whatever search engine ranking authority the page has already built up.

2. See if you can buy that same product from another web site; perhaps a big-box store that still has some in their inventory. If you can, buy it and have it shipped to your customer. Make sure you let your customer know what you did for them. The trust and goodwill that comes from that simple act far outweighs the few dollars you have to spend to buy the product elsewhere and send it to your customer.

3. If you can’t get the product anywhere else, contact your customer immediately. Let them know the product is out of stock. Offer them a choice; a similar replacement product at a discount, or an immediate refund.

Your immediate and effective response to your customer turns a negative into a positive every time. People will trust and respect a business that takes care of them as a customer.

It’s very important to understand that Supply Chains are complex and can be volatile, but the better you understand how they work and how to deal with the problems that arise, the more efficient and successful your business will be.

Put my 25 years of ECommerce experience to work for YOU. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time!

A fulfillment center is a shared warehouse used by small businesses. Why is that important to you? Because if you're selling products online, your ideal situation is to be buying bulk products at wholesale for better profit margins, but having them stored and delivered by someone else.

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Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast; quite possibly the only place left in the UNIVERSE that tells you the TRUTH about ECommerce!

Let's talk about fulfillment centers and why we need them.

The first thing people tend to think about when you mention fulfillment in relation to ECommerce, is Fulfillment by Amazon.

We are NOT talking about fulfillment by Amazon here. In fact, we're not talking about Amazon at all; there is NO profit margin on Amazon for small business owners, no matter how many gibbering ninnies out there want you to think there IS so they can line their pockets selling you junk information. If you're going to sell online, you need to be selling through a Web Site, NOT Amazon. Not eBay either; there hasn't been a decent profit margin available on eBay for a LONG time.

If you want to actually make MONEY in product sales online, you need your own web site. And you need a tightly focused NICHE web site that sells a very closely related set of product, not one of those ridiculous automated monstrosities that automatically load a gazillion unrelated products into your page. FOCUSING on a NICHE is the ONLY way to make money with a web site. That's a topic for another day, but I thought it was worth mentioning here. So let's get back to business and talk about fulfillment centers.

What's a fulfillment center when it's NOT Amazon? A fulfillment center is a shared warehouse used by small businesses. Why is that important to you? Because if you're selling products online, your ideal situation is to be buying bulk products at wholesale for better profit margins, but having them stored and delivered by someone else.

Wait a minute, tho. Buying bulk is expensive. You have to lay out a lot of money to get serious bulk discounts from a wholesaler. So let's back up, start at the start, and go through this point by point.

First, when you sell products online for profit through your WEB SITE you always START with drop shipping. Wholesalers who drop ship for you will let you place single item orders, and they'll send them straight to your customers from the warehouse. Of course there's more to drop shipping, but that's another story for another day. Suffice it to say that you should NOT store and ship what you sell in your basement, your living room, in a paid storage unit, in your neighbor Ed's garage...because that's a ridiculous waste of time and energy, and a serious added cost to you. Time is money, after all. That's something home-based business owners don't always think about, but should.

Second, once your web site's sales reach the point where you can accurately predict how much product you'll sell 30 days, 60 days or 90 days in the future, you're definitely making enough PROFIT to start buying your products in bulk. When you buy in bulk, your wholesale cost drops and your profit margins rise.

Third, when you buy in bulk, you need to buy ALL the products you sell on your site in bulk. We've already talked about the fact that your site needs to be a targeted niche site, so there won't be all that many differnet products you need to buy.

If you DON'T buy ALL your products in bulk, then you have some products that are still drop shipped, and others that go through another shipping method. What if somebody buys two or three products from your site, and 1 or 2 of them are sent by different shipping methods? That's multiple shipping charges, and NO customer is going to pay multiple shipping charges! Not even on Amazon or eBay. So all your products always need to be shipped from the same place using the same method.

THAT is where fulfillment centers come in. When you buy your products in bulk, you send them to a fulfillment center. Your fulfillment center puts your stuff in warehouse space reserved for you. Then they connect their system to your web site. When your site gets an order, THEY get the order too. They pick, pack and ship your product, and your done!

What does it cost? Fulfillment centers are HUGE. They ship tens of thousands of products EVERY DAY. This means they pay pennies on the dollar for shipping through UPS, FeEx and USPS, and they pass the savings to you.

Generally, the UNIT cost to store, pick, pack and ship your products FOR you comes out to about the same as you would charge your customer for shipping and handling.
I hate to get off track again, but it's also important to mention that your web site should NOT offer free shipping. Free shipping is nothing but a gimmick, it's something that your home-based business can't afford to do, and if you know how to market a product you don't NEED free shipping. So you ARE going to sharge your customers shipping and handling. That's ANOTHER story for another day, though.

So back to the topic...your unit cost per product to have the fulfillment center do everything for you comes out to an amount that you can charge back to your customer as shipping and handling (because thats actually what it IS), and you end up with a basically FREE warehouse full of people doing all the work FOR you.

So remember: start with drop shipping. When your site makes enough money to use your PROFITS to buy in bulk, buy EVERYTHING you sell in bulk. Send them to a fulfillment center, and let them do all the work.

In this business, you should NEVER physcially handle a product. It's time consuming, it takes up a lot of space, and it wastes money. Once you';re in position to start using a fulfilment center, you're helping to streamline your time and your costs, and that's always good business.

Where do you look for a fulfillment center? Just Google it. But be SURE to locate a fulfillment center that's as close as possible, like same-city close, to your wholesale supplier. You DO have to pay for the one-time shipping of your bulk product order from the wholesaler TO the fulfillment center.

Wholesalers are always located near cities, because they need the highway and railway infrastructure that cities provide. For the same reason, fulfillment centers are always located near cities. So it won't be hard to find one that's close to your wholesale supplier.

I've toured fulfillment centers, and they are AMAZING. In fact, several years ago I got a chance to spend some one-one-one time with Roy Speer, the billionaire founder of the Home Shopping Network. VERY interesting guy who took a genuine interest in what we were talking about at the time. I really appreciated that meeting. Anyway, he got me a tour of the Home Shopping Network's fulfillment center in central florida.

The place was gigantic. Warehouse space, conveyors, shipping stations, forklifts running around, loading docks full of trucks...if you ever get a chance to check out a fulfillment center first hand, you should. Quite the experience.

So that's what you need to know about fulfillment centers. For much more critical and amazingly insightful EBiz information,  get my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time!

AliExpress is something that highly questionable marketing gurus like Richard Cranium And His Amazing Wealth Machine (and many others) will tell you is a great way to get products drop shipped to your customers directly from China (sigh) at low, low prices (sigh).

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Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth is NOT negotiable.

If you haven't heard of AliExpress yet, good. Do your best not to hear of it.

If you have heard of AliExpress, run far, far away from anybody who tells you it's a good idea.

If you're actually using AliExpress, you have my most sincere sympathies. Really.

Okay, okay...I brought it up, I know. So now even if you haven't heard of it I have to talk about it because someday you would hear of it and you need to be protected.

AliExpress is something that highly questionable marketing gurus like Richard Cranium And His Amazing Wealth Machine (and many others) will tell you is a great way to get products drop shipped to your customers directly from China (sigh) at low, low prices (sigh).

Let's look at this point by point.

1. There is no way you can know whether the supposed 'drop ship supplier' in China is real. Chinese companies are not subject to the kind of regulation we have in the US and other countries. You run a huge risk not having your orders delivered at all.

2. You're dealing with companies who will very often foist cheap imitation junk products that often don't even look like their product pictures off on your customers, which results in returns and a bad rep for you.

3. You can't return products to most of these companies, because (a) they often won't accept them, and (b) if they do, it will often take weeks to get it done.

4. If you get cheated, you lose your money, period. There is NO legal recourse between the US and other countries, and China.

5. Having something drop shipped from China takes WEEKS. 3 to 6 weeks on average. Do you really think your customers are going to wait that long for you to deliver their product orders?

Look, you can't make this stuff up. It's real. I can't even count how many people I've taught and mentored who have already been nailed to a wall dealing with these people, for the exact reasons I mention above. As a home-based business owner, China is not your answer to product supply. Not EVER.

Yet again, the idiots who claim to teach you all this "amazing" eBay, Amazon and Website stuff will tell you to use AliExpress. Why would they do that when they know it doesn't work? Because it sounds EASY, and everybody wants EASY. We talked about that earlier.

Another part of this lunacy is called Oberlo. Oberlo is the creation of the geniuses (please not the sarcasm) in the Marketing Department at Shopify.

Oblero is simply a way to connect your Shopify Website to AliExpress and populate that site automatically with products drop shipped from China, in a way that hides the fact that you're actually working with AliExpress.

I checked a Thesaurus to see how many different ways there are to say "stupid". Here are the results most pertinent to what Shopify is trying to foist on you with Oberlo:

Dull, dumb, foolish, futile, ill-advised, laughable, ludicrous, naive, senseless, shortsighted, simple, rash, thick, unintelligent, brainless, dense, dim, doltish, dopey, half-baked, half-witted, idiotic, imbecilic, insensate, mindless, moronic, nonsensical, out to lunch, pointless, simpleminded, slow, stupefied, thick-headed, unthinking, and witless.

Keep in mind I'm not referring to YOU if you're already using that monstrosity. I'm referring to Shopify's utterly un-caring marketing people. Oberlo is just one of the tons of unnecssary and ridiculous "apps" that Shopify tries to sell you along with their ECommerce Website packages.

The sad thing is that the Shopify Website Platform itself is actually really GOOD. It's just all the other junk (like Oberlo) they try to sell you that is so well described by all those words above.

Shopify's marketing team, like all the other EBiz hacks out there, want you to think everything is easy so that you keep paying for their Website platform for years while you try to figure out why nothing is working, when in fact it's not working because instead of actually learning this business properly, you bought into their ridiculous "easy apps".

Using AliExpress or Oberlo is all of those words I mentioned earlier. I'm not going o repeat them because it makes me a little dizzy.

Just don't fall for it, please.

For lots more honest info about ECommerce, based on my over 25 YEARS of experience in this business, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.

If you think it's a good idea to waste all your time, gas, and energy running around to retail stores all week long looking for individual bargain products that you then have to package and ship to Amazon to hopefully get resold on FBA for an artificially jacked-up price (cheating your own customers) before Amazon figures you out and suspends your account, please raise your hand.

Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!

 Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing that gets in the way of the truth is a bad set of speakers.

Let's talk about this little gem that the bad guys like to call "Retail Arbitrage".

If you think it's a good idea to waste all your time, gas, and energy running around to retail stores all week long looking for individual bargain products that you then have to package and ship to Amazon to hopefully get resold on FBA for an artificially jacked-up price (cheating your own customers) before Amazon figures you out and suspends your account, please raise your hand.

If you raised your hand, please start this podcast over again and listen more carefully. I'm betting that you didn't raise your hand, though. When you hear it in plain english like that, the ridiculousness is unavoidable.

I KNOW there are a lot of people who TELL you that this is a good idea. The absolute morons who tell you that either don't know the first thing about the retail business, or are lying to you with a big, fake grin on their faces. Personally, I believe it's the second choice, but it is true that there is no lack of morons in the internet "guru" space. So it could be either one.

No matter which one it is, don't let them suck you in.

"Retail Arbitrage" is a phrase that was simply invented by an unscrupulous online marketer several years ago to make it sound like it's a thing. It isn't a thing. It's a lie.

Look, the word "Arbitrage" is a term that's used in the financial world, and generally refers to people who buy and sell on the world securities, currency and commodity markets.

Here's the actual dictionary definition of Arbitrage:

The simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.

Notice there's nothing there about "retail". Yes, the word "commodities" could be loosely interpreted to mean physical retail products, but only by someone who doesn't understand commodities.

Gold is a commodity. Grain, precious metals, electricity, oil, beef, and natural gas are all commodities.

An Easy Bake Oven that you have to chase all over town to find on sale and then overcharge for on Amazon is NOT a commodity.

By definition, "Retail Arbitrage" doesn't exist. It's a fake con-artist buzzword, it's a waste of your time, money and energy, and it has a "glass ceiling". That means that you only have so much time in a given year to schlep around retail stores pointing your iPhone app at stuff on sale, and when you use up that time, that's all the money you're ever going to make at this.

Glass ceiling.

Any by the way, don't let any of this blithering ninnies tell you that it works better if you buy liquidation lots either. Here's another definition for you...most products that are "liquidated, and "liquidated" because nobody else could sell them!

Just don't do it. You'll be way better off.

For much more amazingly truthful and insightful information about ECommerce, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.

Outsourcing is the favorite buzzword of all the online scammers under all the slimiest rocks on earth. Why?

Be sure to Subscribe to the Show!

Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the truth about ECommerce WILL set you free.

Outsourcing is the favorite buzzword of all the online scammers under all the slimiest rocks on earth. Why?

Because everybody thinks everything should be EASY in ECommerce. After all, that's what all those "ECommerce Experts" say, right? They WANT you to think this is easy. It gives them the perfect excuse to get you all excited about making a million dollars by next week, and then they can sell you pure garbage info instead of going to all the trouble of teaching you what you REALLY need to know.

Writing your own articles, blog posts and social media material? You don't have to do that...outsource it to India or the Philippines for a buck an Article!
Building your own Graphics for your site and marketing? You don't have to do that...just get it done on Fiver or 99 Designs for a few bucks a pop!

WRONG.

This business is RETAIL MARKETING. A critical part of Retail Marketing is building a BRAND for your Website. That means that everything your marketing says has to be said with a CONSISTENT VOICE.

It means that every graphic on your site and in all of your marketing has to be shown in a CONSISTENT STYLE.

When you own a Website, which is by far the best method and most profitable method of online sales, your customers are going to find you in a variety of different ways.

They're not just going to do a search in Google every time. They might hit your Facebook Business page first, then go from there to your Blog, then from there to your site, for example. There are lots of different points where a customer might contact your brand.

If those points of contact don't all look, sound and feel the same, your site's brand WILL NOT work.

If your brand doesn't work, your site doesn't make sales.

So 'outsourcing' is out of the question, because every time you outsource something, you're going to be dealing with a different writer or graphic artist. Unless you want to pay them to be exclusive, but that costs a fortune.

Here's what happens when you deal with different individuals on these outsourcing sites all the time:

When you outsource to different graphic artists over time, you'll be dealing with abstract artists, impressionists, classical artists, cartoonists and so on. The graphics across your site and marketing with be a horrifying kaleidoscope of mis-matched imagery. If you close ONE sale, you'll be lucky.

When you outsource to cheap writers, they simply search your Subject in Google, take someone else's article, and run it through Article Spinner software. That software spits out several different versions of the original article simply by shifting words around, and then they'll send you the one that reads the least horribly. The conversation is fractured, there's NO SEO value and it simply won't make sense to your readers.

That's not marketing. In fact it's the complete OPPOSITE Of marketing.

If you're going to own a business, you need to OWN your business. That means you need to learn it, understand it, and know how to run it. If you don't, you won't make money at it.

Don't fall into the "outsourcing makes it easy" trap. It's just part of a cheap con, nothing more. Turn around and RUN away from any online marketer who tells you to outsource; it's a sure sign that they couldn't care less about what happens to you or your business. They just want to get into your wallet by making you think everything's EASY, nothing more.

Writing your marketing content and working with graphics is NOT hard to learn, and you NEED to learn it.

So learn something. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.