Ecommerce Home Business Reality Check

Published on this site: November 27th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

If you are thinking about selling products online from home to make some extra money then you are going to need to be armed with the realities of starting a home business. There are a lot of home business packages and starter kits out there promising that you will make a lot of money in your spare time, pulling you in with the hype that anyone can do it and how easy it is. When you see these things you should automatically know that all you are buying is a dream, not a practical solution to running and maintaining a real business.

Your Product Line

• Middle Man Problem
  
  Some of these "get rich packages" will even offer you a source to buy products at wholesale price. The reality of this is that you are buying from a middle man. These companies will source products from a factory direct wholesale distributor and have them ship the products to either you or your customers for you after they mark up the price on you a little bit. This means that you are not getting the product at wholesale price and you would have to mark it up a little bit above retail to make it work.
  
  
• Competing Prices Problem
  
  All the other people who have bought one of these get rich packages are sourcing products from the same place you are, which means that you have a lot of other people trying to sell the same products in the same place as you for maybe even less than you wish to sell them at. This company has sold you a package that allows you and thousands of other people to sell their products for them and you are all working against each other.
  

The Web Marketplace

• Crowded Auction Sites
  
  Selling products on the web is not as easy as setting it up and waiting for your payday. You have to attract customers to come shop in your store. You will not make any money on auction sites like eBay either because people are selling products way below retail and your profit margin will have to be very slim to compete.
  
  
• Competing Online
  
  To get customers to buy products from you at retail price you have to build relationships with other businesses and customers first. You have to look like a real credible company and gain your customers trust to get them to buy from you. People will always pay a little more to buy from someone they know will try to meet their needs and from someone they trust. There are thousands of other people selling the same products you are going to try to sell, no matter what it is, you will need to be sure they will buy from you instead of your competition.
  

The Solution

• Product Sourcing Real Wholesale Distributors
  
  You must source products from a real factory direct wholesale distributor. Product sourcing research is the process of locating these suppliers and starting a business relationship with them. You will not find these suppliers in the search engines either. The reason is that they just warehouse these products in bulk and ship them out to big companies. They have no need to advertise their business or their products online. If you find a supplier using a search engine then chances are that it is another middle man. You must have a real legal business entity established with a federal tax id number to do business with a real wholesale distributor. The reason for this is that they wholesale products to you and they need to have this number to show justification for not charging you a sales tax. Once you have sourced and found products from a factory direct wholesale distributor and have access to the lowest possible price then you can stand a chance competing on the web.
  
  
• Building Your Reputation
  
  The next thing you would need to do is to build a product website complete with web advertising projects so that potential customers can find your website, product and business branding strategies to show your customers that you are a credible source and your products and information are good, and a customer service compliance to keep your customers coming back. Consumers want to be informed about the products they are buying and they want to be able to trust the source they are buying from.
  
  It can be costly to set up a real home business and it certainly cannot be done in your spare time. If you are serious about doing business online then you need to realize that you cannot buy your way to success. Running a business is a full time job and setting it up and getting it off the ground takes a lot of extra time and money.
  

Jason Collins - Ecommerce Solutions Developer http://www.sellersreference.com
http://marketingstrategies.sellersreference.com http://productsourcing.sellersreference.com