Working with Product Images

Depending on how you operate your eCommerce store, you may or may not have physical access to the products you sell. If you’re one of the many (like me) who use drop shippers the whole point of your business model to NOT to handle the products. So we’re left with the images provided to us by our drop shippers.

If you’ve spent any time shopping online you’ve probably seen several websites that have all or mostly the same product images. As a shopper what did that make you think? That all those websites are basically the same?

If nothing about your site stands out to the visitor they’re going to base their purchase on price. Now, it’s very true there are a lot of ways to make your site stand out from your competitors – Unique Selling Propositions, Discount Offers, Higher Search Positions, etc. Well product images are another that I think is very important but many eCommerce storeowners overlook it in the effort to build their store quickly.

It’s understandable from a store building perspective but what about from a customer perspective?

Let’s talk practically.

You have an image from your drop shipper of jewelry box. It’s sitting on top of a green blanket. Everyone using that drop shipper is also using that image. How do you think taking the green blanket out of the picture so the jewelry box is on a white background will effect the look of your product page? Do you think seeing yours will catch a visitors eye because it looks different than all the others she has seen during her search?

Yes it will!

Anything you can do to make your product stand out from the rest is a good thing. What’s nice about the images is it’s not that difficult. You need an image editor like PhotoShop and, as with all new techniques, it’ll take a bit of practice but spending a minute or two altering a product image is time well spent.

Even if all you do it flip the image horizontally, that’s enough to change your visitors perception of the image.

I take the backgrounds out of every product image I put on my stores. If I’m adding products quickly I sometimes add them as they are and then go back and alter them later… but I ALWAYS alter them.

Drop Shipper Image:

My Image:

This is something that can be outsourced as well. I have an employee who does most of our image work and since I like using PhotoShop I do some myself if I’m just sitting around watching TV.

This is one of the small steps not taken by the vast majority of online store owners. You should, every little change helps.

Take Control of Your Navigation

Many eCommerce store platforms use loops to create elements of your website. Two of the most common are product loops and navigation loops. They make it nice and easy to build your store as they populate your category pages when you add products and add links to your nav bar when you add categories. Great way to get started but ultimately you need precision control over your navigation and loops won’t give it to you.

Often the navigation link is whatever you name your category and unless you assign a specific file name your URL is that category name too. Sounds fine but what happens when your top keyword phrase for that category changes? You change the category name in the backend of your store so the anchor text in your nav bar is the phrase you’re going after. Still sounds fine, right? Well, if you aren’t using specific file names or your store platform doesn’t offer that functionality then your URL is going to change too. Uh oh. No external links, no page rank, no search positions. You have to start from scratch.

Let’s say you are using file names so you don’t have to worry about losing the URLs you’ve put so much effort into getting ranked. If you have more than a couple of categories in your store you’re going to want to create sections within the nav bar to help your customers find what they are looking for by grouping like categories under those headings. This is impossible using your store platform’s built in loop.

You need to go static. The only way to have complete dominance over your nav is to create it by hand. That may sound strange in this era of automation, but it’s the truth. You nav bar will still be automatically added to all the pages in your site (or at least the same ones the loop nav was on) and it will still be just one file. You’re going to replace the loop with HTML code.

This is easy to do whether you’ve coded before or not. You only need one thing, your published home page. Simply go to your site, view the page source, locate your nav bar, and copy the code. Paste this code over the code for the loop, publish, and… it should look exactly the same as it did before. Voila, static nav.

Now when you want to update anchor text, all you need to do to is change it in the code and publish, easy peasy. You now also have the ability to add section headings for related groups of categories – a big bonus in the conversion department. To do this, create a new table or copy an existing one from the nav. Change the anchor text to whatever you want your heading to be and remove the hyperlink.

You can get as fancy as you want now. Change the background color of the section heading to separate it from the nav links. Add image icons to grab customer attention. Add other static pages wherever you want them. The length of your page is the limit!

Diversifying Your eCommerce Business

“Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket!”

This is more of a long term success key than anything else, but it is very important. I would rather have 5 niche businesses that make me $1,000 each every month than one business that makes me $5,000 every month. Why?

Consider this:  It’s easier, and for some people more realistic, to create a business that only makes $1,000 a month.  I mean, if you sell 20 things through one store each month that make you $50.00 profit – you’re there! That’s less than one sale per day. If we sell one item every other day that makes us a profit of $60.00, how much time are we spending filling orders with our drop shippers? 10 minutes every other day?

It’s simply easier to create little businesses that generate modest profits than it is to create a mega-monster business that you and your family will live and / or starve by. Think about it!  You only need to do this one business at a time.

The real genius of this business model is that you will always have one of your businesses generating money in the marketplace.  Yeah, maybe one of them takes a downturn and your sales get cut to shreds. So what?! It happens, even to the masters! They simply get back up after the impact and create another revenue stream.  If you have 4 other little business plugging along, you’re less likely to get hurt by a server outage, a market correction, a drop shipper flub, a merchant account error or any one of a hundred things that could crop up.

Diversify!

I own and operate 4 online stores. They have their slow and busy months. Sometimes they coincide, but most of the time one or two of the stores are in their “busy season” while the others are just bringing in regular sales. This way I’m making consistent profit all year long and I don’t have to worry as much about a market change because the chances that all four of my markets will change at the same time are extremely low.

Diversification is smart for business and your personal mental state.

Need Versus Want – Product Perception

As an ecommerce storeowner, heck as anyone who sells anything online, how can you shield yourself from the nimble hands of Internet price shoppers?

If I asked you to tell me how much a low priced color scanner goes for online, could you? If you couldn’t, how many searches would it take for you to get that price? Two? Yep. If you spelled “Scanner” wrong on the first try.

Now, if I asked you to tell me how much a Battle Ready Shirt Of Chain Mail would cost…

How about a Replica Tiffany Lamp? A Novelty Pool Cue? A Life-Size Cardboard Movie Standee From Lord Of The Rings? A Mutual Fund Investment System? A Hello Kitty EZ-Bake Oven?

My point is, the products mentioned above have “I Want It” value. Their price is not restricted or encumbered by a model number.  They can’t be easily compared in the marketplace because they are not staple products. They are passion buys.

You want a Life-Size cardboard Darth Vader to greet your house guests? How much is that worth to the person who’s license plate says Jedi?

NASCAR Fan? Oh wait – Are you a Pool Shootin’ NASCAR Fan? How much is that Rusty Wallace Billiard cue with the Mother of Pearl Inlay worth? The answer? Whatever your willing to pay for it.

Let’s face it, everything computer, Internet, electronic, and anything else with a plug or a model number already has a manufacturer screaming it’s value to the marketplace. If you sell these types of products, you’re saddled with shoppers who are going to compare “Apples to Apples” and the reach of the Internet makes it easy for them to do that.

That’s not to say that a shopper who is dying to get their hands on a Battle Ready Chain Mail Shirt will not already have done their research. They absolutely will, but because Sony has not yet released a Chain Mail Shirt Model, you can use carefully crafted product listings to build a high perception of value for that product.

Your success in ecommerce depends on your ability to market and sell a product that has a high perceived value to your customer, not a value that is determined by the marketplace. Isn’t it amazing how much an avid sport fisher will spend on a lure that measures 2 inches by 3 inches? Yet, they will never buy a microwave oven unless it’s on sale at BestBuy.

Need vs. Want. That is your key to ecommerce success. We already know that the best chance for a 1 or 2 person ecommerce shop to succeed is to specialize, to stay in the niche markets. Now, take that a step further. Instead of selling a product that you think a customer needs, sell them a product that they “WANT”.

Your customers buy based on emotion, and then back up their purchase decisions with logic. Yes, you should sell them something that they are crazy about, but then keep the sale alive by offering good customer service, a great guarantee, an easy way to contact you, and a fair price for a product that satisfies their passion.

Here’s a Little eCommerce Secret

“HTML, Java Script, CSS, CGI, Perl, PHP…

Ahhh… technology. The hustle-bustle, the abbreviations, the wealth potential.

I can remember being in the shoes of the budding Internet Entrepreneur – the one who doesn’t program enterprise wide servers for a living. I thought to myself “ Am I going to need another degree to do this?”

Even today, the word “eCommerce” is the Buzz Phrase or Power Word used to loosely define what we all want to achieve on the Internet: “Sell Something for a Profit”.

Here’s a little secret of eCommerce: Opening an online store front was, for a long, long time, very difficult and expensive because…

…it kept people employed.

All of the web masters, programmers, graphic designers, flash animators, IT Engineers… each was needed to build and operate a traditional eCommerce store front. The expense was astronomical. I’m fortunate to know someone who works for a Fortune 100 company that was a pioneer in eCommerce. His company is huge… with an operational budget of many billions of dollars. The level of resources that his company brought to bear on their eCommerce project read like a list of Atomic Engineers. Spectacular titles, many with PhD scribbled after their names would spend hours hand coding cryptic characters into syntax editors to create a shopping environment.

He once told me the cost of one of their misadventures – Many Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars.

“Here’s the Thing”, he told me once, “The Store Front is tremendous! It looks great, it’s fast, it captures customer information, it can hold thousands of products… but it’s not working.”

So, I asked him what the problem was. He said, “It’s not making a profit”. I asked him how much revenue it would need to make to be profitable. He said, “How much money did you make this year”? It had been a very good year for me. He said “Triple That…”

Gag!!

Ultimately, that’s the problem. What my friend was soon able to take to his supervisors turns out to be the same reason that so many motivated, passionate, work-at-home hopefuls can’t quite seem to make their online efforts work…

“eCommerce is all about technology and when you want to open up an online store, you will need the technology, but that’s not your goal.”

Your goal is marketing and sales. The faces on my friend’s superiors twisted into degrees of anguish and amazement. “What the hell do we know about sales and marketing? We’re spending our money on technology!”

He replied, “My point exactly.”

People don’t seem to realize that selling successfully online is still the same process as selling successfully ANYWHERE.

- You must know where to sell it, and you find that out by observing what people are buying.

- You must know where to find your products so that you can sell them to people that are buying.

- You must know how your products benefit your customers so that they will understand why they are buying.

- You must be able to buy your products cheaply enough to make a profit.

You must serve and protect your customers after the sale so they will buy from you again!

Notice how there was not a single mention of SQL Databases, or DHTML, or Server Side Extensions?

This is how people get confused. When they start shopping for a service to host their online store, they get so carried away in the technology of it they forget that their first and most important responsibility is to get their product in front of the customer.

The truth is, the customer only wants a few things:

A Great Product at
A Great Price,
Shipped Quickly and Efficiently from,
People that they trust to spend their money with.

They couldn’t care less about how fancy your eCommerce shopping cart is; if you don’t have 3 out of the 4 things above, you have not got a chance to sell them anything. Here’s my point.You want to sell online? Then SELL online! Don’t you dare get caught up in all of that technological nonsense that web geeks tell you will make you money.

There is only one thing that will make you any money for your online store – Sales.

You want to make sales online? Figure out what people are buying and sell it to them. You want to make money online? Get your product in front of the right customers and CLOSE THE SALE!

eCommerce is just a tool. Get it setup right and leave it alone. If you want to make money online, go out and find some customers and get them to come to your “Tool.”

Ask yourself, what’s your goal online? Is it to make money, to build wealth? If it is, them why would you focus your efforts on technology? Focus your efforts on Making Money! No matter how good your technology is, unless you have customers, you will not make any money.

The quickest path to income online is to actually make a sale. All other things are secondary. Technology does not matter, so don’t chase it. You can get it already set-up with a built in customer base for less than dinner for 2 at the Outback Steak House. So, you no longer have any excuses to not sell online.

eCommerce Drop Shipping

All right, let’s say that you fall in to the 80th percentile of people whom do not have a product or service of his or her own to sell. You are in good company! And you have a lot of decisions to make. But these decisions are a little bit more fun than some of the others.

The first decision is, if you have your wish what would you sell?

I chose to sell something that I had some knowledge about.  This a key concept.  It wasn’t because it was a matter of convenience. Heck NO!  If anything, if you go to Google and type in “Sword” in the search engine there, you have about 1000 different ones to choose from.  So there was already a ton of competition.

But I have become quite the collector over the years and have learned what makes one sword different from the other. So when a potential customer comes looking for a sword, and they want to educate themselves about the different type, brands, metals, etc., I am there for them, ready with all the information that they need.

So when it comes time to buy a sword, I hope they choose me over the dude who is selling swords along with the AB-Roller and decorative soap.

It’s about being the expert in your field. Short of that, it’s having killer customer service, great prices and knowing how to reach your audience.

Lets get the most difficult part out of the way.  You need real products to sell, so let me give you a few ways to find them.

The ideal online store where you are selling a product is one where you do not have any inventory.

Most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to shell out on a pallet of products that we are not even sure are in demand.  Even if you do have that kind of money, I would caution you to not start by having a physical inventory of anything. It’s just far too risky. Until you have identified a viable marketplace and a product that the market responds to with regularity and predictability, tying up your cash by owning inventory is not smart thinking.  There is a better way.

DROP SHIPPING!

A Drop Shipper is a wholesale company or manufacturer of real products that only sell to real-legitimate business. (I.e. business that is registered with a Tax ID. Cost? About $65 depending on which state you live in). What I mean when I say “ sell to legitimate business” is this:

You take an order from your online store for a nice set of wind chimes, or maybe a power drill.  You sell your product for $70.00 plus shipping and handling.  You then contact your Drop Shipper or Drop Shippers (you can have as many as you want covering a wide range of product types).  You buy the product that you just sold online for $70.00 from your Drop Shipper for $40.00 and then the real magic happens.

The Drop Shipper sends the product directly to your customer with your company name on the packaging!

Magic.

Drop Shipping is truly wonderful.  There are literally thousands of Drop Shippers out there.  You can find just about any name brand, just about any category at just about any price point.

The Specifics:

First, you need to become a real business in order to work with a Drop Shipper.  That means you go to your local courthouse and register a business name. Then go to your local IRS office and get a Tax ID number.  This is, of course, for a sole proprietorship or partnership.  If you want to incorporate or form a LLC (Limited liability corporation) check out this site The Company Corporation. There are lots of advantages to being incorporated, including liability and asset protection, but it costs a bit more and takes more time to get started.

Once you have the all of the requisite certificates, you then contact a Drop Shipper and create a relationship with them.  They have you fill out an application, sign you up, and send you a catalog of their products from which you then sell on your website.  Some Drop Shippers may also have a website where you can go and download their images and sales material directly and put it right on your website.

The Drop Shipper sets the price that you pay….

You set the price that your customers pay…

The difference is your profit!

It’s really a great way to start an online business quickly.  You can even do it inside of a week or two if everything slips into place.

Having a relationship with a Drop Shipper is FREE! And if you look more than casually you can find some really unique products (meaning less competition for your store).

What in blazes do I sell?

The $64,000 question. When I first evaluated the vast amount of products available for me to Drop Ship, I was overwhelmed.  Visions of huge virtual shopping malls with my name on the marquee swirled around in my head. And me, swaying in my hammock counting my money…

WRONG!

Even though you will be tempted to sell absolutely everything – don’t! Know this now, you cannot compete with Amazon.com

Maybe you will someday, if the fates have blessed you and you have unlimited cash.  But if you don’t get blessed and have a fixed income – don’t worry! You will not need to compete with Amazon in order to be successful! The key for those of you that want to succeed in online retail is to specialize!  Have a boutique mentality. Not boutique as in knick-knack crap. But boutique as in niche Market.

If you have a personal passion for your Harley – Sell Harley Stuff!

Like NASCAR – SELL NASCAR STUFF!

Why? Not just because you like it, but also because you can TALK ABOUT IT!

For Example; Let’s say your hobby is Astronomy.  You know all about the Heavens and Star Gazing in particular.  USE that knowledge to help your customers make informed buying decisions.  Show them how a Refractor telescope is superior for Astrophotography than a Reflector scope.  Organize a subcategory of your telescopes into a section called “Astrophotography Ready”.

I can’t say this enough – Specialize!

Sell what you know. Especially if it’s a product that you have researched and found it to be “In Demand”.  In addition to making your store stand out vs. the competition, it also helps you zero in on your target market!  And remember, the more focused your audience is, the better conversion rate you will have when it comes time for the shopper to become a buyer.

Stay with me on this – NICHE MARKETS!

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