By: C.Y.Lai

There’s two things in the article that were new to me. The first one was the information about Yahoo Buzz. I didn’t know that you could go to Yahoo and get a list of what people were searching for. I knew you could sign up and get that information from wordtracker, but not from Yahoo. The other was that eBay offers the same service with their eBay Pulse reports. Just go to either one of these two sites and you can gather a ton of information about what people are looking for to buy.

Build a Niche Store is a popular site builder that enables you to create niche websites focus on eBay affiliate programs. As eBay is a household name, people feel safe to conduct online shopping with them. As a result, Build a Niche Store has become very popular among the webmasters as the conversation rate of eBay affiliate website is above average. While many has reported success with Build a Niche Store, large majority of the users still struggle to make a dime with their eBay websites. There’s a common traits among successful Build a Niche Store websites: they are promoting items that people are buying! This, my friend, is the key to Build a Niche Store success.

So how do you identify the right niche for Build a Niche Store program? Firstly, we are not going to use keyword research tools. You can identify the trends with information freely available online. You just have to know where to find them. Here you are going to find some solid ideas:
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These are some pretty useful tips. Some of them were new to me, so I actually learned something new today. The one thing I haven’t been able to find though is who is the supplier for all the unlocked cell phones on eBay? Most of those are selling for less than all the wholesale prices I’ve seen. Anyone know the answer?

Dropship wholesale distributors are critical to your online reseller business. The number of people making a living online out of reselling stuff on online auctions such as Ebay is growing exponentially. Closing a sale is the first part of the equation. You would need your dropshippers to deliver the products to your customers on time. Not only that, you must make sure that the merchandise is of high quality. Since your reselling business is largely dependent on your dropshippers, it is paramount to make sure you use only the best dropship wholesale distributors.
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When dealing with dropship companies, you need to make sure that each company you deal with has an automated online inventory system that updates in real time. That way, you will know well ahead of time if one of the products that you are selling on eBay, or on of the other auction sites, is running low or is out of stock. It’s no fun trying to explain to a customer that the drill bits that he just paid you for won’t be in for 12 weeks. By using a live automated inventory system, these types of problems can be alleviated.

How to overcome the out-of-stock problem with dropshipping

The number one problem with the dropshipping business model is the out-of-stock problem. You come across this all over the place. Dropshipping is a very attractive business model because it does not require you to hold any inventory. For those who do not know about this, it is a special arrangement where the distributor is set-up to send the product directly to your end customer. The customer usually doesn’t know where the product came from, or care. This arrangement has become very popular for Internet-only stores because they typically don’t have the storage or capital required to stock actual inventory.

However, this brings about a new type of problem. With a regular store, the owner and the customer can generally tell what’s out of stock by looking at the shelf. In the online world the shelf is virtual and the customer is simply looking at pictures and reading descriptions. This leads to the common out-of-stock problem for dropshippers. This is amazingly frustrating to customers, particularly when they find out after they have already paid for an item.

The solution: Only use dropshipping distributors who have automated inventory systems that update regularly. Do your homework before signing up with a distributor and make sure they have this feature. Additionally, as an online store owner, you will have to invest in some type of automated inventory update on your end. You need a way to take this information from the distributor and update it on your web store very frequently.

We’ve accomplished this at our store by building a job that runs every 4 hours. The job pulls the most recent inventory data from our distributors and updates the quantities on-hand for all 15,000 products in our store. Using this strategy, we have not had ANY out-of-stock problems. We think that in the long-run this will be a competitive advantage for us, until it eventually becomes expected of all stores. In the mean time, we plan to offer a run-you-own estore front for others to benefit from the automation we’ve built into the store.

By: Al Zan

Al blogs on Internet business strategies and the psychology of being an Internet business person at www.bigblogmonkey.com/blog

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