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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
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Inhalt bereitgestellt von Chris Malta. Alle Podcast-Inhalte, einschließlich Episoden, Grafiken und Podcast-Beschreibungen, werden direkt von Chris Malta oder seinem Podcast-Plattformpartner hochgeladen und bereitgestellt. Wenn Sie glauben, dass jemand Ihr urheberrechtlich geschütztes Werk ohne Ihre Erlaubnis nutzt, können Sie dem hier beschriebenen Verfahren folgen https://de.player.fm/legal.
Learn the TRUTH about ECommerce from Chris Malta. 30+ years in Online Business. Business Owner, Author, Radio Show Host, Internet Convention Speaker, Mentor and ECommerce Educator.
…
continue reading
27 Episoden
Alle als (un)gespielt markieren ...
Manage series 2284598
Inhalt bereitgestellt von Chris Malta. Alle Podcast-Inhalte, einschließlich Episoden, Grafiken und Podcast-Beschreibungen, werden direkt von Chris Malta oder seinem Podcast-Plattformpartner hochgeladen und bereitgestellt. Wenn Sie glauben, dass jemand Ihr urheberrechtlich geschütztes Werk ohne Ihre Erlaubnis nutzt, können Sie dem hier beschriebenen Verfahren folgen https://de.player.fm/legal.
Learn the TRUTH about ECommerce from Chris Malta. 30+ years in Online Business. Business Owner, Author, Radio Show Host, Internet Convention Speaker, Mentor and ECommerce Educator.
…
continue reading
27 Episoden
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
When you're selling online, finding the right wholesale suppliers can feel like navigating a maze. There are countless options out there, but not all of them are what they claim to be. In fact, most so-called “wholesalers” that you find in Google or YouTube are anything but legitimate. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT When you're selling online, finding the right wholesale suppliers can feel like navigating a maze. There are countless options out there, but not all of them are what they claim to be. In fact, most so-called “wholesalers” that you find in Google or YouTube are anything but legitimate. Falling for a fake supplier leads to wasted money, lost time, and even the complete derailment of your business. The good news is that with a little knowledge and attention to detail, you can avoid these pitfalls and ensure you’re only working with genuine, trustworthy partners. The first step in spotting red flags is understanding why fake wholesalers exist in the first place. Ecommerce is a booming industry, and with so many new sellers eager to get started, there’s no shortage of people willing to cut corners, looking for “quick and easy” solutions. Scammers take advantage of this eagerness, presenting themselves as suppliers who can make your life easier. They may offer “wholesale” prices, extensive product catalogs, or even drop shipping services that seem too good to be true. Unfortunately, these suppliers come with hidden costs, unreliable service, or outright fraud. One of the biggest red flags is when a “wholesaler” won’t give you information about their manufacturers. Genuine wholesalers are authorized by manufacturers to distribute their products and have no reason to hide this relationship. If a supplier refuses to provide information about the brands they carry or how they source their inventory, that’s a sign you’re not dealing with a legitimate business. Real wholesalers are transparent because they know their reputation depends on trust and reliability. Another warning sign is when a supplier requires ongoing membership fees or charges for access to their catalog. While it’s common for a fully vetted Directory of wholesalers, like WorldwideBrands.com , to charge a one-time fee for access to vetted lists, an individual wholesaler does not need you to pay to see their products. Wholesalers make their money by selling inventory, not through memberships or subscriptions. If you’re being asked to pay just to browse an individual wholesaler’s products, they’re not legitimate. The way a supplier communicates can also reveal a lot. If emails are riddled with errors, phone calls feel rushed or vague, or customer service is hard to reach, these are all signs that something is off. A real wholesale operation will have professional, clear communication. They’ll take the time to answer your questions and provide detailed information about their terms, products, and processes. Scammers, on the other hand, often rely on ambiguity to cover their tracks. One of the most subtle but significant red flags is when a supplier markets themselves heavily to small online sellers. While this might seem appealing, genuine wholesalers usually focus their efforts on large retail accounts because that’s where the majority of their business comes from. They might be open to working with smaller businesses, but they won’t spend a lot of time or resources advertising to them. If you come across a supplier that seems to be shouting from the rooftops about how perfect they are for small ecommerce stores, take a closer look. Real wholesalers tend to be quieter in their marketing and often rely on word-of-mouth or direct manufacturer referrals. Free directories and supplier lists are another area where caution is critical. These resources may seem like an easy way to find suppliers, but they’re filled with middlemen or fake wholesalers. Scammers use these platforms to collect your information or lure you into paying inflated prices for products that aren’t genuinely wholesale. If you’re using a directory, make sure it’s a reputable, vetted source with a track record of connecting retailers to real suppliers. Again, WorldwideBrands.com has a 25-year track record as the best wholesale supplier directory on the planet. Using a well-known Directory with a real reputation will save you a lot of trouble down the line. A legitimate wholesaler will also have clear terms when it comes to pricing, minimum order quantities, and payment methods. If a supplier’s pricing seems unusually low or their terms are too flexible, it’s worth investigating further. Scammers often lure in new sellers with “amazing deals” that don’t hold up under scrutiny. Always compare their prices to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price or other verified wholesale options. If the numbers don’t make sense, neither does the deal. One of the best ways to avoid fake wholesalers is to go directly to the source. Contact the manufacturer of the products you want to sell and ask for a list of their authorized distributors. Manufacturers have a vested interest in ensuring their products are sold through legitimate channels and will usually provide this information willingly. This approach not only eliminates the risk of working with a scammer but also gives you confidence in the quality and authenticity of the products you’re selling. If you’re already working with a supplier and something feels off, trust your instincts. Take the time to verify their credentials. Check for a physical address and contact number and see if their business is registered and in good standing. Look for reviews or feedback from other retailers, but be wary of overly positive testimonials that might be fabricated. A lack of reviews or presence online is another red flag—it’s unusual for a legitimate supplier to leave no trace. Protecting yourself from fake wholesalers is about staying vigilant and doing your due diligence. While it might take a little extra effort to research suppliers, it’s an investment that pays off in the long run. Building your business on a foundation of genuine partnerships not only protects your profits but also helps you create a reliable, reputable brand that customers trust. Remember, if something feels too good to be true, it probably is. Take the time to dig deeper, ask questions, and make sure you’re working with suppliers who are as invested in your success as you are. Learn more about wholesalers and everything else Ecommerce. Join one of my Free Ecommerce Zoom Meetings and ask about anything you like. I’ve been selling online for over 30 years; there are a lot of things I can teach you!…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Everybody who decides to open a home-based ECommerce business is going to come across a huge variety of scams. It's unavoidable; there are literally thousands of people out there who will lie to you and try to cheat you out of tens of thousands of dollars. Learn what happens, how to avoid it, and what the true cost is. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Everybody who decides to open a home based e commerce business is going to come across a huge variety of scams. It's unavoidable. There are literally thousands of people out there who will lie to you and try to cheat you out of tens of thousands of dollars. They know they're lying, they know they're cheating. They know they could be prosecuted and sued for what they do, but the money is so good for them that they just can't resist. You're listening to this podcast, which means you either have an interest in starting an online business, or you already have an ECommerce business. If you're just starting out and you haven't spent any money yet, you're one of the very lucky few who just might make this happen without getting screwed to a wall financially. If you have an existing eBiz, there's a 97% chance it isn't making you any real money, then an unbelievable 90% plus chance that you've been cheated out of at least $15,000. Possibly as much as 35 to $40,000. I've been very successful in online business for over 30 years. I've been teaching online business since 2009. I easily have over ten thousand hours of ECommerce mentoring under my belt. More than 80% of the people I've taught had been cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars by multiple ECommerce scams. These eBiz scammers run in packs like rabid wolves. They hunt together to take you down and pass you around in order to squeeze every last dime from you. For absolutely useless apps, tools and services that will never work. Does that sound like a conspiracy theory? If you're one of the very few who hasn't been nailed by this stuff, yet, it may sound like that. But to the more than 90% of those who listen to this podcast who have spent money with these dirtbags, you already know, don't you? The minute you sign up for a free trial website, an eBiz app or tool, attend a "mastermind" webinar, sign up for a mailing list, go to a hotel seminar or take advice from a public "experts" forum, these people have you hooked. More importantly, they have your email address and possibly even your phone number, if you gave it to them. If you didn't, they'll try to look it up online through various phone location services. So how do they hook you? They make promises they can't keep. Please understand this. Nobody can promise you success. Nobody can guarantee that you'll make money, not in any kind of business, not ever. But these people will do that all day long. They'll show you fake websites that they claim make millions of dollars. They'll show you bank statements that are Photoshopped to look like they have money coming in every day. They'll give you testimonials from people who claim to make tons of money from their systems. Those people work for them. They're not real eBiz owners. They will absolutely guarantee your success in a very short period of time and tell you how easy it's going to be. They'll tell you that they'll do most of the work for you. Then they'll actually go online with you and help you apply for 40 or $50,000 worth of credit cards that you then max out with them. And they'll tell you it's okay, because they'll promise you you'll make all that money back within a few months and pay off those cards. But it won't happen. They'll tell you it's okay to take out a $70,000 mortgage on your house and spend it with them, because you'll make the money back in a few months. But it won't happen. I'm not just speaking in general terms here. Everything I've said has actually happened to people I've personally worked with in my Education, talked to over the phone, or have met in person. All of it with those actual numbers. Keep these following things in mind. Write them down, stick them up with a fridge magnet, whatever you have to do. Anybody who tells you that Amazon, eBay, affiliate marketing, template based websites, SEO apps and tools, private labeling, importing from China, using AliExpress, outsourcing your marketing and graphics, or that you'll make good money quickly online in any way, is absolutely flat out lying to you. I will guarantee that. So, like I said, better than 80% of the people listening to this podcast have already been burned this way. If it happened to you, I give you tremendous amounts of credit for even being here at all. Most people just curl up into a ball and sob for weeks. Then spend the next 10 years trying to dig themselves out of all that debt, working three jobs and selling half their possessions. If it's not happened to you yet, be very aware that when you step into home based ECommerce, you're stepping into a live minefield in the dark, wearing clown shoes and pushing a 30 foot wide lawn roller right in front of you. If that sounds really scary, good. It's meant to. But being victimized like that robs you of something far worse than money. It robs you of your self confidence, your self esteem, and your trust in your own decision making ability. It robs you of your ability to trust other people. It affects your entire life, your personal relationships, your family members, your living situation, and your ability to support yourself and your family,. Your entire future is forever changed by something like that. Most people who have been hit hard by these sickening scammers end up feeling deeply personally violated, and many end up suffering from years of depression or other psychological damage. The countless number of people I've had conversations with over the years who have been victimized in this way tell me that they feel foolish or even stupid for allowing this to happen to them. If you're one of those people, you can't put that on yourself. You were lied to. You were cheated. You were victimized. The people who do this to you are very, very good at what they do. They know the psychology, they know the buzzwords, they play on your emotions and your desire to better your life, and they lie. It's not the fault of the victim, it's the fault of the victimizer. I personally am a big believer in karma. What goes around comes around, and karma can be a Screaming Banshee on a rocket sled when it needs to be. I almost pity those victimizers when it catches up to them, and it will. I ALMOST pity them. Okay, if you can't tell by now, I get really fired up about this whole thing. It disgusts me. It makes me wish I could sit those scammers down one at a time in a room with all the people they've hurt and make them look those people in the eyes and really see the monetary and psychological ruin they create every single day. There are two reasons I feel that way. First, hey, I'm human, just like anybody else. I've actually listened to those victims tell those stories, literally thousands of them over all the years that I've been trying to help people understand this business in different ways. It's taken its toll on me too. I've listened to people on the other end of the phone who are literally sobbing about all the money they've lost. How horrible they feel about themselves. How they don't know what they're going to do when their spouse or family finds out. That's no exaggeration. It's absolutely true, and it's heartbreaking to hear over and over and over again from so many people for so many years. The other reason is because this is my chosen industry. I was here over 30 years ago at the very beginning. I actually HAVE made millions in this business because I don't just talk about it. I do all the things I talk about, and seeing these frauds doing so many bad things to so many good people is just incredibly frustrating. It also ends up making me look guilty by association. It's harder for me to actually tell people the truth and help them because they've already been burned so badly and simply have no trust left to give. Anyway, I'll end this rant with a really serious warning. Be very careful out there. I've told you what to look for. It's no joke. If you've been victimized, that was not your fault. If you haven't, they're coming for you. Don't let them get you. If you'd like to hear the truth about this business for once, and if you're willing to extend just a little bit of trust just one more time, talk to me. You can call or join one of my free ECommerce Q & A Meetings any time. No pitch, no pressure, just the first real conversation you'll ever have about selling online. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Every couple of years, somebody somewhere does something that brings the idea of an Internet-wide sales tax back into the news here in the US. This naturally causes people to freak out left and right. Why? Because most people are seriously misinformed about why this might happen, how it might happen, and what effect it may have on home-based ECommerce businesses. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Quick disclaimer: I'm not a legal professional, and the information here is my personal opinion after nearly 50 years in business. A scary rumor has been making its way around the Internet for many years now, and a lot of companies with extremely shady morals have been profiting heavily from it. Here's the rumor. As a home-based business owner, you have to collect and pay sales tax in every state where you sell a product from the minute you start selling online. Those shady companies I mentioned have been charging thousands of dollars for ‘systems and tools’ that are supposed to figure out and pay all those sales taxes in all 50 US states for you. The truth is, however, that you may not have to "do" that especially when you first start out. Home-based business owners historically couldn't charge sales tax in states where they didn't reside, due to the principle of nexus. Nexus refers to the "connection or sufficient presence" a business must have in a state for that state to impose its tax obligations on the business. Until 2018, it was effectively illegal for a home-based business owner to charge sales tax to residents of a state in which that business owner did not have a physical presence or business license. A home-based business owner would have had to file for a Sales Tax ID in every state in the US in order to do that. You couldn't get a Sales Tax ID in a state where you didn’t have a licensed business or any kind of physical presence. Collecting sales tax in a state where you don’t have a license to do so was, you guessed it, illegal. However, the legal landscape regarding nexus and sales tax collection has changed to some degree. The Supreme Court of the United States case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., decided in June 2018, brought those changes to the previous nexus rules. In this case, the court ruled that a physical presence is no longer the sole determining factor for establishing nexus. The reason for this case being brought before the Supreme Court was that South Dakota was sick and tired of big online-only companies like Amazon, eBay and others selling products to their residents without charging sales tax and paying that sales tax to the state of South Dakota. As a result, the Court established a new standard known as economic nexus, which considers a business's economic activity in a state as a basis for imposing tax collection responsibilities. Under this standard, even if a home-based business owner does not have a physical presence in a particular state, they may still be required to collect and remit sales tax if they meet certain economic thresholds set by that state. These thresholds typically involve reaching a specified level of sales revenue or completing a specific number of transactions within the state. The Wayfair decision was driven by the rise of e-commerce and the need to level the playing field between traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and online businesses. The Court recognized that modern technology allows businesses to conduct substantial economic activities in states without a physical presence. In the wake of the Wayfair ruling, unsurprisingly almost every state began falling all over themselves implementing economic nexus laws that require out-of-state businesses, including home-based businesses, to collect and remit sales tax if they meet the state's economic thresholds. This expansion of nexus has affected home-based businesses to some degree, as they may now be subject to sales tax obligations in multiple states, again, depending on their level of economic activity. It's important for home-based business owners to remember that Government being Government, compliance with laws in all kinds of different states other than your own can be messy. But…do NOT buy into any of those online services who tell you that they’ll "do it all for you”. Those people are nothing more than morally bankrupt opportunists using scare tactics to push very expensive junk software on unsuspecting business owners. Keep in mind that first, in order to be required to pay sales tax in all 50 states, you’d have to be grossing at least 5 million dollars a year in sales. In South Dakota, for example, economic nexus doesn't kick in until you either make over a hundred thousand dollars from South Dakota residents or complete at least 200 transaction with them in a given year. If you learn and build this business right, you can reach those levels. So when you do get there, talk to your Accountant. They’ll have a tailored solution for you that won’t involve ripping you off for way too much money or lying to you, like the online services do. Your Accountant will always be the person you look to in order to answer these kinds of questions and deal with these kinds of issues for you. Don’t panic and buy junk software, and don’t try to do it yourself. Work with a professional. For much more really important information about selling online, check out my Free EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Google is a search engine. It's not a business owner, and it cannot teach you how to be a business owner. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show ! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT I spend a great deal of time teaching the Ecommerce business to all kinds of people, through my FREE Ecommerce Q and A Meetings, my Personally Mentored ECommerce Education, my videos, podcasts, articles, eBooks, and much more. I've been doing that for most of the 30 plus years that I've been successful in online business. I tell people that they can call my cell phone directly, for FREE, if they have questions about selling online. I tell them that I answer my own phone, and I'll answer their questions. Most people's response to that is surprise. How could I possibly spend that much time answering the phone? After all, I send emails about everything I do to a huge number of people. But you might be surprised to learn that I really don't get that many phone calls. Why? Because people don't believe I'll actually answer the phone. They think that offer of a phone call is some sinister trick to get them to call into a sales floor so that some fast-talking salesperson can sell them a whole bunch of garbage. Look, I totally understand why people think that way. Pretty much every MARKETER in the Ecommerce space does exactly that when they offer a phone number. But I'm not a marketer. I'm a BUSINESS OWNER, an EDUCATOR and a MENTOR. There's a BIG difference. So I don't play those stupid games. I answer my phone myself. And I answer people's questions. Free. Anyway, the reason I mentioned it is because when I do get calls, sometimes it's really obvious that I'm talking to someone who thinks Google can teach them ecommerce, or that AI can do all the work for them. The people I'm talking about start asking me a never-ending laundry list of GENERAL questions about ecommerce processes, and ask me to WAIT while they take NOTES! I can actually hear them typing on their keyboards in the background. I know what they're doing. These are people who are trying to get me to give them a step-by-step list of the things they need to do to build an online business the right way. Then they figure they can type those steps into YouTube and Google or an AI, one at a time, read some random information and set up a business successfully on their own without any help. People who do that are fooling themselves. They're also HURTING themselves. They're going to waste unbelievable amounts of time and money trying to slog their way through all the bad information, fake tools, scams and other bogus e-blabber they're going to find in YouTube, Google and AI bots. I can tell you from long experience, that this is a rabbit hole that will take them years to climb back out of, and they'll never get a business going that way. Not successfully. How do I know that? Because I've taught thousands of people the right way to build this business over the years. And hundreds of those people have told me that they took a deep dive into that same self-teaching rabbit hole, lost a lot of time and money, and spent years trying to find their way out. There are several reasons people do this, so let's talk about those for a minute. One. They just got laid off and they need to start a business quickly to make money. If that's the case, they need to go look for a job, and quickly. Selling online is NEVER a short-term solution to a financial crunch. No matter what the bubblehead gurus out there want you to think, this business is not fast and it's not easy. It'll take time, work and a good deal of learning. Two. They've been scammed in the past by the huge number of dirtbag ebiz marketing thieves online and refuse to ever trust anybody again. I UNDERSTAND that. ...Probably more than 90% of the people I've taught in this business have been cheated somewhere along the way before they found me. They don't want to get scammed again. And they're resigned to just trying to figure it out themselves. And three, there are people out there who don't understand the value of real information. They believe all information should be free. They feel entitled to it. And they think that just because the search engines exist, everything you find there is real. But it ISN'T. I've been in business overall for nearly 50 years, since I was a young teenager. I busted my butt to get where I am. I've lived through all the learning curves, the successes, and the failures. And that 50 years of experience is something I paid dearly for. I've learned things in that time that you'll never find in the search engines or in all the books you can possibly read on the subject. All that experience and knowledge is tremendously valuable, because it allows me to teach people to cut through all the crap and get straight to the core of what they need to know to do this right. Learning how to start a business from a successful experienced business owner is worth a LOT. Let's look at it another way. If you want to become a plumber, would you call a local plumbing company, ask a whole bunch of questions about how plumbing works, then watch some YouTube videos and start a plumbing business? Of COURSE not. The very first time you flood somebody's kitchen, which will likely be your very first plumbing job, will be the end of that particular fantasy. On the other hand, if you go to school for plumbing, where you're going to be learning from a plumber that already "knows" the trade and has spent years working in it, you can open a plumbing business when you're done. Let's look at other examples. WHO teaches people to be doctors? ...DOCTORS do. Who teaches people to be LAWYERS? ...Yep, LAWYERS do that. No matter what you want to do in life or in business, you'll only learn it RIGHT from someone who already KNOWS how to do it. Google is a search engine. It's not a business owner, and it CANNOT teach YOU how to BE a business owner. YouTube is a wall-to-wall swamp crawling with con artists. Nobody there is going to help you. AI can only repeat information it finds in Google; it can't create anything new. How is that any different that going to Google? So you have to be extremely careful about who you listen to. Please understand that free info on YouTube, the search engines or AI will NEVER teach you how to build and run a business. When you're ready to learn how to do this, call me for free or check out my Free ECommerce Q & A Meetings , both at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
I often get this question in my EBiz Insider Workshops: Do I need business insurance for my ECommerce business? Well, if you ask an insurance salesperson, the answer will always be a resounding YES!...because you're talking to an insurance salesperson. In reality, things are a bit different. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT People sometimes ask me if they need business insurance for their ECommerce business. Well, if you ask an insurance salesperson, the answer will always be a resounding yes. Because you're talking to an insurance salesperson. In the real world, things are a bit different. Keep in mind that I'm not a legal professional. So this isn't meant to be legal advice. If you want legal advice, talk to an attorney. My advice in this area comes from nearly 50 years of actually owning and running businesses, and it's my personal opinion. There are times when I've had business insurance, and times when I haven't. It depends on the circumstances. The most common type of business insurance is liability insurance. An insurance salesperson will tell you that you need this in case somebody gets sick or is injured by something you sell, or somebody's injured on your business premises. In my businesses, I've had offices where my employees work, and where potential customers and other people come to meet with us. I've always had liability insurance for any office space I've ever had, where other people work or visit. On the other hand, if you own a home based business, in my opinion, you can rule out liability insurance for your business premises. You won't have your internet based customers traipsing in and out of your home. They'll be buying from you online and won't even know where you live. So the chances of one of your customers being injured on your business premises by tripping over your cat or slipping on a patch of ice on your front porch is nil. It won't happen. Another potential liability is one of your customers getting sick or being injured by something you sell. When it comes to that scenario, follow these simple rules. One, never sell anything that people eat, drink, put on their skin, or feed to their pets. Two, never sell anything that explodes. I've never carried liability insurance on any of the sites I've had where I've sold physical products online, because I've always followed those rules. Is it possible that someone could hurt themselves with other products you sell? Sure, there's always that chance. If you sell clothing irons, and some guy tries to flatten his arm hair using a hot iron, that's going to hurt. If somebody has a knot in their shoelace that they can't untie, and tries to cut through it with a skill saw you just sold them, that's gonna hurt. So you really can't protect yourself all the time against every possible stupid human trick that the species can conceive of, and there are a lot of them. However, it's also very unlikely that anybody would try to sue over something like that or ever be successful if they tried. Let's look at more likely scenarios. A lot of the products that are sold in the US these days are made in China. With such lax regulation in Chinese manufacturing, there's always the possibility of lead paint, cheap and brittle plastic that breaks easily and can hurt somebody, or any number of other product problems that relate to largely unregulated manufacturing processes. This is yet another reason (in a long list of reasons) not to buy products directly from China. Forget importing directly from China; it's far too expensive anyway. Don't waste your time and money on AliExpress or anything like it. Check out my other episodes to learn why those are such bad ideas on o many levels. If you're going to sell products online you want to deliver safe, quality products to your customers and greatly minimize any need for liability insurance. That means you always buy from reputable US based wholesale suppliers that are licensed by the product manufacturers. Generally speaking, even if the products are made in China, reputable US-based wholesale suppliers do not import the cheap, dangerous stuff. They don't want that liability either. Also, if somebody does get hurt using a product you sold them, and you bought it from a reputable US source, any legal action is more likely to go after that source instead of your home based business. Liability lawsuit attorneys look for people with the mega deep pockets, like the manufacturers and suppliers. In the more than 30 years I've been in the ECommerce business, I've never known or heard of a home based business owner who was sued over a product liability issue. The only exception I'd caution you about, is if a product you sell is suddenly subject to a product safety recall. If you know that and you keep selling it anyway, that could be a problem. Your supplier will notify you if any of their products that you sell are ever hit by a safety recall. If that ever happens, remove the product from your site immediately. When it comes to wondering if you need liability insurance, the question you're asking is related to risk. If you pay attention to what I've told you here, you'll have a much lower level of risk than the insurance salespeople want you to think you have. This is obviously a decision you have to make for yourself. I'm not telling you to ignore risk factors in your business, or to ignore legal or insurance professionals. I'm just warning you to be careful about falling victim to hysterical sales practices that are designed to make you think that you need something more than you actually do. Again, just my humble opinion after nearly 50 years in business overall. I also mentioned that there are other reasons to carry business insurance. Specifically, there are two other types of insurance that businesses do use regularly. The first is property insurance. Let's say that you're selling on eBay or Amazon, and you have $20,000 worth of wholesale products sitting in your garage. Suddenly, there's an electrical fire or a flood or some other disaster that destroys that property. First, allow me to mention that you should not be in this situation in the first place, because you should not be selling on eBay or Amazon. Both those platforms have miserable profit margins. They're extremely difficult to work with, etcetera. There's more on that in other episodes. Second, if you are in that situation, your homeowners insurance will cover your home and your personal property, but may not cover your business property. So that is a reason to consider business property insurance. Or you could just get away from eBay and Amazon and build your own website like you really should be doing. The other type of insurance is transit insurance. This again relates to handling bulk wholesale products yourself. If you're buying loads of wholesale products locally and shipping them to a fulfillment center, for example, insurance companies offer transit insurance in case those products get lost or damaged in transit. Of course, UPS FedEx and USPS offer insurance for exactly the same thing. In my opinion, I would take advantage of that, instead of buying blanket transit insurance coverage. Just remember that a business insurance salesperson is always going to try to scare you into buying as much coverage as they can, whether you need it or not. You might opt for some type of insurance for your business if you really feel the need to. But you can't bubble wrap your whole life. So don't go overboard. Learn a whole lot more of the truth about ECommerce. Check out my Free EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
There are a lot of mixed-up perceptions out there about what you should name your business and how you should register it. That can cause you a lot of problems down the road. If you do those five things, you'll be fine. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT There are a lot of mixed up perceptions out there about what you should name your online business and how you should register it. There are, of course, all the self-proclaimed but terminally self-interested EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you have to spend tons of money to let them register your business for you in some other state, and spend thousands of dollars doing so. Please don't listen to those people. In case you're not aware, Google and YouTube are packed wall to wall with newbie marketers calling themselves gurus who are simply affiliates of the many scams that exist in this business. In other words, they're only after your money and couldn't care less about your success. I'm here to talk about the truth, not the scams. When it comes to setting up and naming your business, first, I have to state for the record that I am not a lawyer or an accountant. What I'm telling you is not to be treated as legal advice. These are my experiences and opinions after over three decades in online business for myself. With that being said, here are the facts as I've experienced them over and over again. When it comes to setting up your business within the United States, always set up your business in the state you live in. The so-called experts tell you to set up in states like Nevada or Delaware or Wyoming to take advantage of "amazing secret tax breaks" and other such drivel. While there are some differences in corporate law in those states as a home based business, those differences aren't going to matter to you at this point. Make no mistake, you're going to pay taxes, and you're not going to escape that fact, no matter where you set your business up. When you grow to the size of Nike or Netflix, okay, you might want to consider some of those Nevada, Delaware or Wyoming perks. But until then, keep it simple and keep it local. It's much easier to deal with a business setup in your own state, and it's much less expensive to deal with your accounting when your business is in your own state. In some states, an accountant can set up your business properly. In other states, an attorney is needed. In all states, you can actually do it yourself, but you shouldn't. If you do it yourself and you make a mistake, most of the time that mistake won't be noticed at first. By the time it catches up to you, possibly even years later, you could find yourself owing penalties and fines that could cost you tons of money. Governments "love" penalties and fines. You need to locate an accountant or attorney near where you live, not in some other city. Having the ability to easily meet in person with the accountant or attorney who manages your business filings is a huge advantage. Make sure you shop around. The fees for setting up businesses are set by your state, but the costs you pay for your accountant or attorney are set by the accountant or the attorney. Some are way more expensive than others for exactly the same work. Don't be afraid to come right out and ask what they charge and then shop around until you find that balance between a reputable professional and the fees that they charge. Remember, the initial business setup fee isn't the only fee you'll pay them over the life of your business. You need to make sure you get a good hourly rate on your accounting and legal advice, because you'll need more of it in the future. It's actually best to find one of these professionals in a small practice. The big firms charge you for all their overhead expenses, and you don't need to pay for that. When you do this, consider the type of business entity very carefully. The legal professional you choose will give you good advice on this. My personal advice would be to go with a limited liability company known as an LLC. There are three main types of business entities that can work for a home based business. A DBA, also called a sole proprietorship, is the one that most people choose. It's quick, it's cheap and it's easy. However, with that type of business, your personal assets are exposed. That means that if you ever do have any serious legal issues with your company, the men with the black ties and the calculators can show up and take your car, your house and clean out your bank accounts. It's not worth the risk, no matter how small that risk may be. The next business type is called an LLC. You can think of an LLC as kind of a halfway step between a sole proprietorship and a full blown Corporation. It has legal protections in place for your personal assets, but it's not as complex or costly as a full blown Corporation is. The LLC was created in Wyoming in 1977 and has spread across all the US states since then. The LLC, like I said, protects you in many ways without costing as much or causing as many complications as a corporation. It's my business entity of choice. It's inexpensive to file and run an LLC. It also allows you to write your own agreements and bylaws, so to speak, as to how that business will be run within a loose framework, which makes it very flexible. The third general business type is called a corporation. A full on Corporation has many forms. They're all expensive, complicated and cost much more to maintain. Personally, the only time I would recommend a corporation is if you're going to have a business partner. A corporation offers you more detailed remedies against a partner who does you dirty in some way in the future. I've been involved in several partnerships over the course of my decades in business, and I hate to say it, but I have never had a partner who did not try to screw me out of money at some point. A couple of them succeeded. It doesn't matter who the partner is. They can be the most trustworthy person you know. They can be a lifelong friend, even a family member. People get really weird when it comes to money. Money changes people in ways you would often never expect. If you're going to have a business partner, I would strongly recommend that you talk to your legal pro about a full corporation and a very detailed Partnership Agreement. Other than that, out of those three basic business types, once again my personal recommendation will always be an LLC. Finally, don't screw up the name. I see new ECommerce business owners doing that all the time. How can you screw up a business name? First, you could name it something that you personally think sounds really cool, like "The Purple Unicorn, LLC", for example. When you're in business, you have to remember that something that you think is really cool, could look really silly to other people. You don't want your business name to be something that could be a negative for any of your customers in any way. Second, you could screw it up by naming it for the product niche that you think you're going to be selling. So if you think you want to sell Baby Shoes, you call it Milton's Baby Shoes LLC. What happens if that product niche doesn't work out in your research, or if you decide to sell in additional product niches down the road? People who might at some point buy a metal detector from you are going to scream fraud when they see the name "Milton's Baby Shoes" on their credit card receipt. Then they're going to complain to their bank. Your merchant company is going to get a credit card charge back, and you have a whole nasty mess to straighten out. If that happens often enough, you could actually lose your merchant account. That's the thing you use to collect money from your customers. It's kind of important. The best thing you can possibly do is choose a generic business name. "Smith Enterprises LLC" is just fine. You're not going to have a domain name for the business name. You're not going to have a website for the business name. The only place people will see it, will be in your website's copyright notices and credit card receipts. Your actual product sales website will be called something different altogether, and that site name will be owned by your business. So ignore the self-proclaimed gurus who want to change you thousands of dollars for this. If you do it right, it's very affordable. Consult a legal pro in your area. Strongly consider the LLC (unless you have a partner) and keep the name generic. If you do those things, you'll be fine. As always, if you have questions, talk to me. You'll find my phone number and my FREE ECommerce Q & A Meetings at ChrisMalta.com. I'm happy to help. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. To those who DO have experience in retail, however, buying and selling liquidations is about as exciting as putting on a $3,000 pair of Nike sneakers and accidentally stepping in a mud puddle. First, you have to understand that there's a lot of risk involved, even if the "liquidation" price seems low. Liquidated products (also called “secondary market goods”, to make the whole thing sound a little less horrifying) come from lots of sources. They COULD (rarely!) be factory overruns that never left the manufacturer or last year’s models that were never sold at the retail store. Much more likely, though, they're customer returns to big-box stores, used products such as old computers or other outdated electronics, incomplete or damaged scratch-n-dents, etc. It's hard to tell what you're actually getting, because the descriptions of the ORIGIN and CONDITION of the liquidated products are often vague, or even flat-out misleading. There are lots of web sites that advertise liquidations, acting as brokers. The web sites themselves, though, are simply paid advertising platforms. No matter how good their reputations, they do not control the actual liquidation sales themselves. Most don’t even check out the legitimacy of the liquidators advertising on them. That’s on your head; you’re the one who has to make sure you’re not getting burned when you buy. You could easily end up with a waste factor of 20 to 30% or more. Waste means products that are damaged, dented, non-functional, dirty, torn or generally useless for one reason or another. Of course the damaged boxes that contain the waste will almost always be hidden out of sight in the middle of the pallet. On top of all that, always remember that liquidated products are liquidated in the first place because nobody ELSE could sell them at retail! Second, if you're buying liquidated product pallets, you're most likely trying to sell those products on eBay or Amazon. If you've been told that selling on EITHER of those platforms is a good idea for a home-based business owner, go get some of those $3,000 Nike sneakers and look for a mud puddle. At least that won't be as disappointing as finding out that there are no profit margins left for home-based business owners on eBay or Amazon. (For more info on that sorry state of affairs, check out my Podcasts and Blog Posts on eBay and Amazon). Third, no matter where you try to sell liquidated products, the fact that you're carrying physical inventory is going to hurt your business. Selling online SHOULD be a situation in which you NEVER actually touch a product. You should NOT be storing, cleaning, packing and shipping somebody else's leftovers one at a time for a miserable profit. That's NOT an effective business model. Fourth, the only people making any real money in liquidation are the brokers. The ones you buy the pallets from. The bigger brokers buy TRUCKLOADS of liquidation pallets all at once at REALLY low prices from big companies that couldn't sell the products for one reason or another, SIGHT UNSEEN. They do NOT inspect those individual pallets. Then they unload them on YOU at a profit without even looking at them, and YOU'RE the one who gets to deal with all the heartache of trying to sell that junk at something approaching an individual profit margin that MIGHT get you a beer and a bag of chips if you're lucky. Look, if you're going to be in business, BE IN BUSINESS. Forget about the gimmicks and all the other crap that sounds too good to be true. It IS too good to be true. Get away from eBay and Amazon. Learn how to plan, research and start your own website, where you actually are your own boss. Sell NEW products that people actually WANT from legitimate manufacturers and wholesalers. Use drop shipping so that you don't have to invest any money or handle the products physically. That's how the people who make money in this business actually make money in this business. Anybody who tells you different is lying to you. Simple as that. For much more no-holds-barred, real life EBiz information, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time!…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you cannot simply use an ECommerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, guess what? There are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you can't simply use an e-commerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, there are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Because EASY. I say this over and over again in my podcasts, my articles, my books, my blog posts, my ECommerce courses...I repeat it so often, because it's so important. Whenever anybody tells you that anything in business is EASY, they're lying to you. They just wanna to get into your wallet. Telling everybody that this business is easy is like having the master key to every wallet on the planet! So because of EASY, every day more and more people get suckered into the idea that they can take a pre-designed website template full of random pretty pictures, slap some products on it, and start selling like there's no tomorrow. No, no, NO. This business is retail marketing. When retail marketing is done online, some of it is based in technology, yes. Hence websites. But about 90% of retail marketing, both offline and online, is based in Psychology. That's what marketing is. Psychology. If you don't understand the psychology of retail marketing, you need to find someone legit who's willing to teach you. That's not easy, because there's only a very small handful of people in this business who are legit. Like me, for example. This is important, because this stuff really is make-or-break, seriously. Here s just one of the many things you need to understand about retail Marketing in relation to psychology. We'll focus on this one because it relates to website templates. Demographics. I'll bet you've never heard that word from the online con artists that wallpaper YouTube. People like that don't even know this stuff. And if even if they did, they wouldn't teach you, because when you know what you're doing, you don't need their useless, over-priced apps, tools and amazing systems . So anyway, demographics. It's not enough to just put products out there on a website with random pretty pictures, not by a long shot. What you really need to know is who is buying those products. Why? Two reasons. One. You can't sell the same product to all age and gender groups successfully at the same time. No professional marketer ever tries to do that. Two. Different age and gender groups respond to different styles marketing. So in order to be successful, you need to understand who your best, most likely customer is. This is called creating a Consumer Persona, or Avatar. It's a very important, detailed process. Creating that Consumer Persona through careful demographic research tells you what style of marketing that particular demographic responds to. That allows you to properly create the style, graphics, typography, messaging, and social phraseology that you use to attract and communicate with your potential customers. Look, I know that sounds all fancy and stuff. It really isn't. Owning a business isn't EASY, but this stuff isn't rocket science either. It's just learning the details, like anything else in life. But it does illustrate the fact that you will never find a pre-designed e-commerce website template that is already built exactly right for the combination of the products you sell and the expectations of the demographic who buys them the most. Fancy, pretty website templates are created by graphic designers. Graphic designers are not Retail Marketers. They're GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. Don't get me wrong here. It's good to use a website template. There's so much coding in them that you don't want to build the site completely from scratch yourself. However, any website template you ever use for an e-commerce store will have to be modified visually and structurally to be an experience that your consumer demographic will respond to and buy from. This means people like the bubbleheads on YouTube who bounce up and down and say things like "I just built a professional website in ten minutes with Stix!" are not going to be helpful to you. Not EVER. So remember, templates in general are a good foundation to start with, but putting them online straight out of the box is very, very BAD. If you want to learn a lot more about how this business REALLY works, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. Unfortunately, Meg Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Let's talk about the question that more and more eBay Sellers are asking more and more every day: What happened to eBay? To do that we have to start with a little history lesson. From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. I was very involved with eBay back then. I was an eBay Developer Partner. I was a speaker at their national eBay Live conventions. I spent years as a regular guest on eBay Radio. When eBay wanted info and content on Wholesaling, they called me. In about 2006, they asked me to write a book about how to find stuff to sell on eBay, and I did. It was published by McGraw-Hill and is still in bookstores today, although I would not recommend it now, because eBay has gone seriously downhill since about 2009. I firmly believe that the driving force behind all the things that were GOOD about eBay in those days was Meg Whitman, eBay's CEO back then. On her watch, the eBay Partner Program was created. eBay Educators were trained and certified to help potential sellers. Outreach programs for disadvantaged people who wanted to start a business were created. The eBay Radio Show began. The "eBay Live!" national convention was created. The 'eBay Bible" was written. I met Meg Whitman at the eBay convention in Las Vegas in 2006, when I was there as a speaker. Very smart person, and very interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, Ms. Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. eBay is a price-driven marketplace. It's like a flea market, actually. Everybody who shops there is looking for deal and bargains; they all look for the lowest price. That was okay when it was just people selling to other people back in the glory days. That marketplace tended to correct itself with respect to general pricing. After Meg Whitman left and the new management took over, it seems that the people running things got greedy. It started to look like everything was about earning more money for eBay in any way possible, even if it was at their Sellers' expense. The 'eBay Live!' conventions were shut down. The training and partner programs were shut down. eBay University was shut down. Regulations got more regulatory. Customer Service got less customer servicey. Fees went up, more and more each year. eBay stopped backing up their sellers as much as they used to during problem resolutions, and started siding with the buyers much more often. Sometime in about 2009 I was contacted by eBay and asked if I would work with one of their groups, to teach them how wholesale companies operated and how to properly communicate with them. I figured, "Great, eBay wants to learn more about how wholesale works!" That couldn't be a bad thing, right? So I did what they asked. Later on, I learned what they had really been interested in. They had started a project which, if I remember correctly (don't quote me on this) they internally called the 'Enterprise Project'. They basically opened a back-channel into eBay and began contacting wholesale and manufacturing companies, and invited them to come in and sell directly on eBay. Under assumed Seller names, so that nobody would know who they really were. In other words, eBay was no longer just people selling to people; it became more and more about wholesalers selling to people, but most people didn't know that. The effect is that eBay has been flooded with wholesalers who can sell at much lower prices than individual eBay Sellers can. That's a terrible thing for eBay Sellers. In fact, more and more eBay Sellers are complaining that they can't find cheap enough wholesale sources of products to beat their competition on eBay and make a profit. Those Sellers blame their wholesalers for that. The reality is that eBay Sellers simply can't compete against other 'Sellers' that they don't realize ARE wholesale companies. As I said earlier, eBay has always been a price-driven marketplace. People looking for the lowest prices. Searching for what they want, then clicking the "Sort By Lowest Price" button. So of course eBay Sellers can't compete, because the wholesalers will always have the lowest price! It's important to understand that the worst place you can possibly put a home-based retail business is squarely in the path of the most bargain-hunting consumers. That's a given no matter where you're selling because home-based business owners need real profit margins (at least 20%) to sustain a business, and 30 to 35% to grow that business. That doesn't happen in ANY bargain-hunting, price driven marketplace. Add direct wholesalers into the mix, and you can forget it. At this point, in my experienced opinion, eBay is no longer a place where a home-based business owner can make any significant money. YET...there are HUNDREDS of "Make Money On eBay!" programs, tools and systems out there, many that sell for thousands of dollars, run by sniveling weasels who know they're lying to you. There are OTHER programs and systems that tell you that eBay should be a PART of your online business, along with Amazon and your own Website. Anybody who knows this business knows that's post-digestive dog food, because price-driven marketplaces like eBay and Amazon do NOT mesh with properly marketing-driven businesses like Websites. But the weasels lie to you and sell you that junk for college-tuition-level money anyway. Don't you believe them. For bargain hunters who SHOP on eBay, things have gotten BETTER. For the home-based business owner who tries to make a serious full time living SELLING on eBay, it's game over. For MUCH more home based EBiz info you just won't learn anywhere else, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
Apparently China has somehow become a place that defies the general rules of Economics. Products are made at Amazing Low Prices, sold at Amazing Low Prices, and you can get them to your garage, your basement or a Convenient Storage Unit Near You at Amazing Low Prices. (Sigh). Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Okay, here we go on another Magical Mystery Tour. Apparently China has somehow become a place that defies the general rules of Economics. Products are made at Amazing Low Prices, sold at Amazing Low Prices, and you can get them to your garage, your basement or a Convenient Storage Unit Near You at Amazing Low Prices. (Sigh). A while back, I sent one of my business partners and several of my employees TO China for two weeks. Guangzhou Province, to be specific, which is a port area where a LOT of manufacturing goes on. Their mission was to determine whether it would be reasonable for us to begin large scale (not small-scale home-based business level) importing from China. We were looking at several product lines, but I'll just use one product line and one specific product as an example. You know those camping chairs with the aluminum legs and canvas seats that you can fold up and slide into a nylon bag and take with you wherever you go? Those were selling for $12 to $14 per unit retail in the US at the time. If we bought them in bulk in China, we could get them for $3.12. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? But wait...there's more. To get them at that price, we would have to buy at least a container load of them. A "container" is a railroad car. That's a lot of chairs. Before we even bought anything at all, we would have to hire an Agent in China that we could trust (good luck) to look after our sourcing interests there. Then the order would have to be placed, and we would have to wait 2 to 3 months for the order to be manufactured. Manufacturers in China don't make all kinds of stuff ahead of time, store it in warehouses and then sell it. They don't lay out that kind of effort and capital expense ahead of time. It's made to order, and that takes time. Then our trusty Agent in China (good luck) would have to inspect the product, and get it to a shipping port to be transported to the US. That's ocean shipping, as in big ships that travel over the ocean. You can't FedEx a railroad car. Then we'd have to consult the US Harmonized Tariff Schedule to determine how much we're going to pay in Import Taxes to bring our chairs into the US. Then we'd pay Customs Fees at our Port of Entry into the US, then hire a trucking company to transport our chairs to whatever warehouse we'd be paying for in order to store all those camping chairs. Once we added up all those costs, it turned out that it would actually cost us more than $9.00 per unit to buy those chairs in China, get them to the US and store them so that we could (hopefully) sell them all. Now, I'm no theoretical mathematician, but to me it sounds like $9.00 is a whole lot more than $3.12. On top of that, it turned out that we could actually buy those chairs already imported into the US by other really big existing importers for about $7.00. So what would be the point? We'd be better off buying them in the US. All the (expensive) steps I described above that come after "this costs $3.12 in China" are the steps that all those slippery eels on YouTube conveniently LEAVE OUT of the information they sell you for thousands of dollars. Their pitch only has one line: "This costs $3.12 in China!" It's not the whole story, not by a long shot. What you need to know is that there are already lots and lots of very large import companies in the US that have the money and the infrastructure to import billions of dollars in Chinese-made products into the US at VERY low prices (because they buy HUGE quantity) and then sell them to you at wholesale for less than it would cost you to deal with China directly on a small-business scale. So please, for the sake of your kids' college fund, DO NOT buy in to the fantasy that you're going to get tons of dirt-cheap products if you buy direct from China. The chuckleheads who tell you that are just trying to make you think online business is CHEAP and EASY so they can upsell you on their 'Amazing Systems' and 'Foolproof Tools'. In some cases, they're actually trying to get you to pay them thousands of dollars to TAKE YOU ON A TRIP to China with so you feel like you've accomplished something. They're going to pocket most of that money while they slow-boat you there and leave you in a seedy hotel with a couple of trips to a trade show. On a home-based business scale, buying from China successfully is just a flat-out lie. If you want to learn a whole lot more about home-based business and how it REALLY works, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you later!…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Amazon is a great place for LARGE companies to sell products. Not so much for home-based business. Can you make SOME money on Amazon as a small business? Sure. You can also make SOME money collecting old soda cans. It's just not going to be a full time living. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Let's talk about the whale in the goldfish bowl for a little while. Amazon is a great place for large companies to sell products. Not so much for home-based business. Can you make some money on Amazon as a small business? Sure. You can also make some money collecting old soda cans. It’s just not going to be a full time living. Most people are familiar with Amazon FBA, which is Fulfillment by Amazon. That's where you send wholesale products into an Amazon warehouse, and they basically take over the sale. They sell the product, handle the shipping, customer service returns, etc. When something of yours sells, you get paid a small profit, on the order of three to four percent. Amazon has fees, lots of them. And as a small business owner who can't get those big bulk wholesale price breaks, those fees will hit you hard right where the sun don't shine. Also keep in mind that you’re in direct competition with thousands of actual wholesale companies. Wholesalers live on three to four percent margins. They like that number. Remember that wholesalers are in the volume business, not the margin business. As a small business owner, you need a minimum of twenty percent just to survive. You need thirty five percent or more to grow. Not gonna happen on Amazon. And it’s not just margins that are the problem. Amazon can gate a product on you with no notice and often does. What does that mean? Let's say you send 30 Minelab Metal Detectors to Amazon FBA so they can sell them for you. Then let's say that a little later on, Minelab decides that they're tired of Amazon sellers selling their products at discount prices. Yes, that happens all the time. Big manufacturers have to maintain a certain price point for their products in the overall marketplace. Otherwise, the products become devalued, which means their perceived value is less than they really are worth. And then the big box physical stores refuse to sell them. Why? Because big box stores have lots of overhead. Employees to pay, parking lots and buildings to maintain, mass media advertising to shovel out and much more. In other words, they have costs. If enough people see that Minelab Metal Detectors are selling on Amazon for half the cost they pay in big box stores, the big box stores going to stop selling it. That's bad for Minelab because the big box stores are still their bread and butter. The big boxers go screaming to Minelab that they can't compete anymore. And Minelab goes screaming to Amazon, and all of Minelab's wholesalers as well, that the product can no longer be sold at a discount online. Amazon won’t tell you why you’re gated, only that you are. So then you get to pay for Amazon to ship your unsold Metal Detectors back to you, so that you can store them in your garage until the mice chew the wiring out of them and they become dumpster food. Or, Amazon will offer to simply destroy them for you. Isn’t that nice of them. The worst part is that gating can apply to entire brand names as well as entire categories of products. Gating is a common complaint with home based business owners, and will cost you a lot of money. Another problem a lot of Amazon sellers complain about is that Amazon will push them out of the buy box in favor of larger sellers. Amazon watches their sales metrics with an electron microscope. So let's say you send some product into Amazon that starts selling like crazy. When Amazon realizes this, (about a nanosecond after it starts to happen), they go on the hunt for larger companies that can send lots more of those products into their warehouses at cheaper wholesale prices. If and when they find one, which they almost always will, you get spanked like a rented mule and sent into timeout, while the big wholesale company gets featured on Amazon for that product instead of you. Is it wrong of Amazon to do that? No. It's their site, their platform, and they have every right to locate large suppliers of products that can fill their customers’ needs better than your small business can. They also have every right to feature whatever they darn well please. It's not much fun for you, but there's really nothing to be done about it. Then there are all the tools that other Amazon sellers use to study their competition, meaning you. Amazon sellers are constantly checking out and copying their competition, which makes it easy for people with a little more money to swoop in and out-compete you as soon as you hit on something that actually sells. While competition is a normal part of any marketplace, it's just way too easy to get hammered like that on Amazon. Add to that all of the other problems and pitfalls that are just too numerous to list here, and this is just not a good idea for your home-based business. You spend most of your time trying to outfox your competition, dealing with tons of rules and regulations, and being forced to sell at profit margins that home based businesses simply cannot survive on. When you try to work within a business framework like that, you're really not running your own business. You're being told what you can and can't do by a big company. You're getting shafted on your take home pay. You're working far too hard for far too little money, and the ground shifts under you unpredictably every other day. Isn't that what you were trying to get away from when you started your own business? Amazon is best left to the big wholesalers and manufacturers that it was designed to work with. And yet there they are still all the evil clowns on YouTube who swear to you all day long that you're going to make a fortune selling on Amazon in just a few weeks. All you have to do, they say, is pay them $35,000 for their “Amazing Amazon Coaching System”. Yeah, sure. If you really want to learn the ECommerce business from someone who's been successful in it for more than 30 years and will not lie to you, check out my Free Video Series and Free Ecommerce Q and A Meetings at Chrismalta.com. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.…
If you've decided to get in on this by starting your own home-based ECommerce business, the first thing you need to know is that you're going to be walking through a minefield in the dark. With a blindfold on. Hands tied behind your back, forced to hop on one foot. Be prepared! Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT There's a 21st century gold rush going on, and it isn't on the Discovery Channel. If you've decided to get in on this by starting your own home-based ECommerce business, the first thing you need to know is that you're going to be walking through a minefield in the dark. With a blindfold on. Hands tied behind your back, forced to hop on one foot. And dizzy. Does that sound like an exaggeration? IT ISN'T. When I first started in this business way back in 1992, things were whole lot simpler. Even though internet availability to the consumer was brand new and we were feeling our way along learning (and inventing) new things every day, at least nobody was trying to sabotage us on purpose. Today it's a whole different ball game. It seems like everybody with access to a keyboard, a bag of Cheetos, a YouTube account and a complete disregard for basic human decency claims to be an EBiz Guru of some kind. There are thousands of them. Yes, I said thousands, and I'm serious. 99% of these people couldn't muster enough brain cells long enough to tie their own shoes, but oh, they're EXPERTS in ECommerce! Yeah. Ok. While they claim to be experts, they sell you absolutely useless apps, tools, systems, information, and coaching for tens of thousands of dollars. These Grinning Ninnies have blanketed YouTube with storms of stupid. They have people hanging on every slippery word thinking they'll be able to start a business with no money, and get rich by next week. I hate to say this, but it's not just them. It's the people who listen to them as well. They're heartless, disgusting con artists, yes. But a con artist needs a willing "Mark". (The "Mark" is the target of the con, in case you're not up on con artist lingo). Remember this well. If the Mark isn't willing, the con doesn't work. So if YOU are the Mark, (which you absolutely are, the moment you get involved with these people) YOU have to be willing to believe that it's possible to get rich in a week with no money, no learning and no experience. And if you DO allow yourself to believe that even for just one minute, you might as well fry an egg, grab a slice of cheese and pop yourself in the toaster, because YOU are the Breakfast Bagel that these jack-wagons are gonna to chow down on every morning before they even get dressed. No matter how many of these swamp lizards paddle up to your door, the only way they can hurt you is if you believe that starting a real, live business that makes actual full-time money is EASY, or can be bought from somebody else on easy credit terms. Starting, building and running a real money-making business online is NOT easy, and you CAN'T buy 'tools, systems and apps' that will do it FOR you. Not EVER. Let's face it, in life we want things to be easy. Easy is better than hard. However, life being life, that ain't gonna happen. But the knuckle-draggers who think cheating people is actually a smart business method KNOW that we want easy. So they serve it up to us like a three-scoop bowl of ice cream and give us a giant spoon. The only problem is that they charge thousands of dollars a scoop, and when the bowl is empty all you end up with is an empty bowl. Which you could have gotten for a dollar at the Dollar Store, if all you actually wanted really was a bowl. If you've read any history or maybe watched the History Channel once in a while you might remember learning about the great California Gold Rush of 1849. During the years of that gold rush, the people who actually made much more money much more consistently were the people who were smart enough to go into the retail business, not the "Gimme a shovel, I'm gonna get rich by Tuesday" business. Hoteliers, store owners, butchers, restaurateurs, etc. were the real gold rush winners in 1849. There were actually very few miners who made fortunes, and the vast majority of them were the few who actually knew how to mine gold. But those facts (which were known at the time) didn't stop the shipping and transportation companies 'back east' (and even in other countries) from screaming at the top of their lungs that you could pick gold up in the streets in California, and all you needed was a really expensive ticket on their ships and wagon trains. Huh...guess they made a lot of money too, right? This is no different. The thousands of needle-heads who know that you don't know how to mine gold, charge you tens of thousands of dollars for a ticket on the Secret Train To The Gold Fields. They'll put you in a first-class seat so you can relax comfortably while you eat your ice cream. They'll give you all kinds of fancy-looking gimmicks to play with that flash and spin and have buttons that bleep when you click them. They'll tell you about all the magical ways you can summon your own personal Unicorns (which don't actually exist; sorry!) that will fly around scooping up people to buy from you. They'll promise you a Secret Code to the hidden Trans-Pacific Matter Transporters (that don't actually exist) that will make huge loads of incredible products from China appear in your garage for mere pennies on the dollar (which isn't actually true). They'll show you amazing-looking web sites that they claim make quadrillions of dollars per second (but actually don't). They'll show you heart-felt testimonials (that they wrote themselves, but don't ask that question!) from others (themselves) who are all giddy and tingly about their Amazing Systems (that don't actually work). They'll show you "Actual Bank Statements" (that they actually spent entire minutes of their lives creating by pecking away at Photoshop with their stubby little fingers) that PROVE that their "Amazing Systems" have made millions of dollars for themselves and other giddy and tingly people (only they actually didn't). THE ONLY THING THEY DON'T DO is actually teach you how to mine gold. The thing they never tell you (but should be easy enough to figure out) is that the Secret Train To The Gold Fields is powered by your money. That train doesn't run on a wood-burning boiler or diesel fuel. It runs on your CASH. Picture somebody at the front of the train tossing shovel-fulls of your hundred dollar bills into the flaming maw of an old-fashioned steam boiler fire-box, laughing maniacally. Not a pretty picture, is it. The minute your money is gone and there's nothing more to shovel into the fire-box, that train's emergency brakes automatically kick in. The Conductor stomps over to your seat, unceremoniously tosses you out the window into the desert, and the train screeches off down the line shoveling other people's money into the fire. So now you're sitting in the desert, broke, nowhere near the actual gold fields, and you have no idea what to do next. And you still don't know how to mine gold. So get off the train, come to Chris Malta.com and check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series . I've been a REAL successful gold miner for over 30 years online. I'll show you where the gold REALLY is. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch ya next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
There’s a very good reason why the Fake Gurus tell you to use paid advertising, even though they know perfectly well that for home based business owners paid advertising is a huge flushing toilet the size of Niagara Falls, only instead of flushing water it flushes your cash down the drain. The Fake Gurus don’t care if that happens to you, and it will happen to you if you use paid advertising. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT We have a saying around here at “The People Who Know What We’re Doing Online” clubhouse, and it goes like this: “People who use paid advertising are people who don’t know how to MARKET”. This refers to home-based business owners, and if you use paid advertising now or have used it in the past, don’t take that personally. All it means is that you’ve gotten bad information from the fake 'ebiz gurus' that have told you to use paid advertising. That’s not your fault. There’s a very good reason why the Fake Gurus tell you to use paid advertising, even though they know perfectly well that for home based business owners paid advertising is a huge flushing toilet the size of Niagara Falls, only instead of flushing water it flushes your "cash" down the drain. The Fake Gurus don’t care if that happens to you, and it "will" happen to you if you use paid advertising. They "need" you to use paid advertising, though (which is why they tell you to do it), because the "systems, tools and wealth programs" they sell you are so uniformly horrible that they only way you’ll ever make a few sales using them is if you actually pay for advertising on TOP of using their horrible tools. This is really all about psychology. Again, the Fake Gurus know the "Magical Mystical Success Tools" they sell you are junk and won’t work. But they also know that if you use paid advertising, you "will" make a "few" sales. If you start to make a few sales, then you don't realize that the "Magical Mystical Success Tools" are junk because hey, you made a few sales while you were using those tools. (AND paid advertising!). Psychologically they know that those FEW sales will make you feel that the junk tools DO work, but for some mysterious reason you’re not making "enough" sales. They'll blame that on you, telling you that you need to buy more of their tools. See, if you ever complain to the Fake Gurus about their horrible tools, they can say, “Well, since you made a few sales, our "Twenty Thousand Dollar Cornucopia Of Excellent Tools At Amazing Prices" DID work, you’re just not "using" them right. So since you're such a dumb-ass, you need to buy our "Supersized Marketing Incredo-Pack"; that’s only another ten thousand dollars. Then the few sales you’ve made so far (using pad advertising, remember), will multiply like rabbits on an island that only rabbits live on!” (Which, of course, they won’t. Rabbits never live on islands that only rabbits live on). See how that works? The few sales you’ll make with paid ads (which, by the way, will cost you more than you earn in profits!) will give you a false IMPRESSION (that’s a paid advertising joke…get it?) that the horrible tools work, then they tell you that you just need to buy more horrible tools to amp it up into more sales. As a home-based business owner with a limited budget and a pile of junk tools and information that frankly just suck, using paid advertising is like buying a new car, and then having to buy another new car to push the first new car with, because the first new car doesn’t have an engine. Would you ever do that? Of course not. You wouldn’t buy the first car if it needed another car to push it because it doesn’t run. I know what you’re thinking (or at least I’m taking a reasonably educated guess). I’m guessing that you’re thinking “Hey, all those big box stores use paid advertising. Paid advertising is all over TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, bus stop benches AND the internet! So how can paid advertising be so bad??” (If you weren’t thinking that, you are NOW, right?!) Okay, let’s talk about the difference between big companies who have hundreds of millions of dollars to flood consumer markets with tons of advertising, and small home-based businesses that don’t have anywhere near that kind of money. There, we just talked about the difference. Small home-based businesses can’t afford to blanket half the known universe with paid advertising. It’s not cost-effective, at least not when you’re starting out. So how, then, is YOUR web site supposed to rise to the top of a search engine, or ever be found ANYWHERE in a search engine against all those big companies that have a gazillion dollars set aside just for lunch money? Well first, let’s dispel a myth here. Many people have been told that your web site ranking gets better and better when you pay the search engines more and more money for advertising. FALSE. Flat out, unequivocally, never-ever-happens FALSE. You CANNOT buy your way to the top of a search engine, period. So how do you get your web site to outrank all those big-box stores? Yes, it most certainly can be done. You just have to learn a thing or three. THE SEARCH ENGINES NOW RANK SITES BASED ON AUTHORITY In the covered-wagon days of the internet, you could have a web site that had tons of different pages on it, EACH of those pages selling completely different things. That was back when the search engines were much simpler. They only understood nouns. Being simple and basic as they were, they used to rank web pages on each page’s individual merit. In those days, if AllTheStuffYouNeed.com’s web site had the word “Squeegee” on their Squeegee sales page 24 times, and BobsCratesOfVariousStufs.com’s Squeegee page had the word “Squeegee” on it’s Squeegee sales page 36 times, BobsCratesOfVariousStufs.com WINS. YOU GO, Bob! Yes, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. But that was a lot of how ranking worked back then. Now, (starting with Google’s big ‘Panda Update’ in 2011), search engines are much more sophisticated. They understand Nouns, Verbs, Pronouns, Adjectives and lots of other word-types that you probably forgot about ten minutes after you got out of school. I know I did. They also look at fussy little things like Grammar and Syntax. The most important part is that they now look at an entire web site as a whole, not just as a loose collection of individual pages. When a web site is a serious source of authority for one thing and one thing only, Google looks at that web site with unabashed adoration in it’s googly little eyes. It LOVES that web site. It writes that web site poetry, sends it flowers, and hopes it can take that site out to dinner and a movie on Friday night. Okay, I know I got a bit carried away…but I think I made the point. So the way Google operates NOW, a web site that is a focused source of authority on one subject will ALWAYS naturally rank very well in the search engines. Big-box store web sites and sites like Amazon and eBay have horribly scattered authority. They have tens of thousands of product pages that are not related to one another as one subject, and cannot rank well in a search engine on their own. So what is a huge site or big-box store to do? Hmmm…how about paid advertising? Big-box stores NEED paid advertising. And I’m not just talking about paid advertising online. I mean paid advertising everywhere. Those big companies would come to your house and paint an ad on your cat if they thought they could get away with it. They need physical-world mass-media advertising because they need their scatter-shot web sites to already be know to consumers ahead of time, so that consumers go there directly when they shop online. SO THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF SUCCESSFUL SITES. One. Sites that are big-box stores like Home Depot and Target, and bargain-hunting destinations like eBay and Amazon. They pay for advertising all over the place, online and in the physical world. They can’t rank well NATURALLY because their pages are so scattered among so many subjects that Google just can’t get an authority handle on them. But their paid advertising causes lots of people to go directly to those sites without ever using a search engine, and that’s what they need. Two. Sites that are small, home-based, very tightly niched sources of authority for one subject, and one subject only. When built and marketed properly, those sites can easily out-rank the big-box stores and mega-bargain stores all day long. SO WHY DON’T YOU SEE THOSE SMALL SITES AT THE TOP OF THE SEARCH ENGINES ALL THE TIME? If what I just told you is true, how come you see so many big-box stores (and Amazon and eBay) at the top of the search engine results so often? It’s simple, really. Very few people know how to create real authority with a search engine. When a search engine can’t find a site with real, focused authority in a given search, it defaults to other ranking factors like size of the site, how long it’s been out there, how many links, etc. Why don’t more people know how to do that? That’s simple, too. If more people knew how to actually market a site with authority to a search engine, they wouldn’t need the Fake Guru's horrible tools and systems. And the Fake Gurus' horrible tools and systems are a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY. That’s right, I said the B word. Most of those lousy fake marketers out there work together in some form or another, whether it’s passing your personal information around like a bowl of potato chips at a company picnic or getting together to build new garbage info-products like rusty sculptures at a junkyard art festival. They’re part of an extended fat-cat conglomerate of liars and thieves who work with each other to prevent you from finding out the truth. If everybody knew the TRUTH about online marketing, the bad guys would be out of business and would and have to go back to living in their parents’ basements munching Cheetos and watching Seinfeld reruns all day. THE TRUTH IS that while paid advertising "does" have a place in business, that place is not in "your" home-based ECommerce start-up. That means Google advertising, it means Facebook advertising, all of it. So when is paid advertising useful to a home-based business? When you learn how to market properly, your site will rise in the search engine rankings naturally and begin to make sales. As it does, you monitor your site’s metrics (meaning "use Google Analytics"). After your business begins running well based on authority, your analytics will tell you what your top one or two keywords actually are. Then, if you choose to, you can put a little bit of your profits into a very SMALL, TARGETED ad campaign on just that best keyword at first. When that begins to work (which it will), you can use some of those profits to expand that campaign to other keywords that your site metrics have already told you are working for you. Then again, if you really learn how to market, you’ll never need to use paid advertising if you don’t want to. SO, IN SUMMARY: One. For a home-based online startup, paid advertising is too expensive, completely ineffective (when you don’t have site metrics yet) and used as a tool to fool you into thinking that the Fake Guru tools are actually working. Two. Web sites rank in the search engines when they are authoritative about one subject only, which means niching tightly into a single product line and learning how to properly market it. If you want to learn a lot more about this subject and many others in ECommerce, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
Free Shipping has a cost. Always. Small business owners can't afford to cover any of that cost out of their profit margins (which is the only way they can offer Free Shipping). Fake Gurus who tell you that as a small business owner you must offer Free Shipping are simply trying to feed you a plate full of ship, so to speak, and are expecting you to pay them for the meal. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site . EPISODE TRANSCRIPT "Free Shipping" doesn't exist. There's no such thing. It's a myth. Somebody ALWAYS pays for shipping. In the 30 plus years I've been making money online I have never come across a shipping company that ships for free. Have you? One of my ECommerce Students a few years ago had been a UPS Driver for 17 years. I asked him if he ever worked for free. He said no. I was not surprised. Covering the shipping cost of a product to an online customer happens in one of three ways: 1. The seller pays for the shipping, which comes out of their profit margin. 2. The buyer pays for the shipping, which gets charged to them during the purchase. 3. The seller pays for the shipping by HIDING the shipping cost in a higher product price, which still means that they buyer pays for the shipping. Then of course sometimes, there's a combination where the seller hides SOME of the shipping in a higher product price, and charges the buyer a lower 'flat rate' shipping price. Any way you ship it, there is NO such thing as actual Free Shipping. Free Shipping has a cost. Always. Small business owners can't afford to cover any of that cost out of their profit margins (which is the only way they can offer Free Shipping). Fake Gurus who tell you that as a small business owner you must offer Free Shipping are simply trying to feed you a plate full of ship, so to speak, and are expecting you to pay them for the meal. Like so many other things in sales, Free Shipping is a gimmick. You don't need it. Remember this. Sales gimmicks are the last resorts of people who don't know how to actually market products. Fake Gurus do not know how to actually market products. They only know how to feed you plates full of ship, and (ironically) charge you for delivering them. Small business owners who do know how to market products charge shipping to their customers all day long, and their customers pay it without a problem. So let's talk about just a few of the things involved in actually marketing a product properly. #1. Choose a product market that's profitable and has room for competition. Market Research (when done correctly) is the process of finding products that (a) sell well, (b) are not overly competitive, and (c) fall within certain price ranges that make a product worth selling. The Fake Gurus will tell you to 'sell something you like', or 'test products to see what sells'. That's why they're called Fake Gurus; both of those ideas are ridiculous. This isn't about selling what you like. It's about researching what sells well and has room for competition, and then learning to love that product. A good retail salesperson is a die-hard evangelist for the product they sell. If they're not, their lack of enthusiasm in their Social Media efforts will rat them out in a heartbeat and kill their sales before they begin. #2. Understand how people search for the product. A good marketer knows that Keyword Research is, well... KEY to marketing a product. Researching every possible word or phrase, whether closely or distantly related to the product line, and then using those words and phrases properly in marketing makes all the difference. The fake gurus won't even mention Keyword Research to you most of the time, but it's absolutely critical to do it, and do it right. #3. Develop a deep understanding of WHO BUYS the product. You CANNOT sell the same product to all age and gender demographics at the same time. No professional marketer ever even tries to do that. Not even the big kids at the multi-million dollar Ad Agencies on Madison Avenue. Every product line has a single demographic where the highest concentration of customers for that product exist. It's a marketer's job to find that demographic and understand it. When you figure out who the customer is that buys the most of your product most of the time, you've found the money in the product line. Demographic Research then tells you things like how to talk to them, what color palettes work for them, whether they prefer to see a lot of text and less imagery, or lots of imagery and less text on sales pages, what style of graphics and typography we should be using, and many, many more critically important things. When you understand the Demographic, you know how to present them with an extended marketing message that strikes an irresistible chord with them, and if that's done right they'll buy from you immediately even if they have to walk to the Moon and pick up the product themselves. But again, Fake Gurus know nothing of these processes. These are real world marketing tools, and the Fake Gurus aren't interested in the real world except as it applies to emptying your wallet. #4. Sell in the right places. If you were going to build a lemonade stand on the sidewalk and sell cups of lemonade to passers-by, like kids do in the summertime, would you rather build that lemonade stand in from of The Dollar Store, or in front of Macy's? People walking into The Dollar Store are bargain hunting. They're trying to save money. You might get a nickel a cup for lemonade once in a while in front of The Dollar Store. However, you'll get a quarter a cup for lemonade all day long in front of Macy's. In the PHYSICAL retail world, LOCATION matters because the FOOT TRAFFIC matters. Higher end retail stores are built in physical locations that have a higher-income DEMOGRAPHIC per capita because that's where the money is. The same thing happens online. People who are shopping on eBay, Amazon, WalMart.com, etc., are bargain hunting. Those people will most often be price-comparing, because they have a need to save money. In those places, Free Shipping DOES have an impact, and so does price. When you sell in places where people shop with a bargain-hunting mentality, you have to lower your price to the point where your profit margins are so low you couldn't see under them with a microscope, and that's no way to run a business. You need to place your business where the money is; where people are searching for products based on the quality they want rather than the price they can afford. That is and always will be your own web site. People who shop the search engines for products are NOT going directly to eBay, Amazon and WalMart. They're searching for the PRODUCT, not the PRICE. The number of people who search Google and other search engines for products vastly outnumbers the people who bargain hunt directly at eBay, Amazon, etc. If you learn proper Market Research, Keyword Research, Demographics, and sell in the right place with a clear understanding of marketing, you'll make a lot of money and you won't need to even think about offering Free Shipping. Want to learn how this business really works? I've been making it work for over three decades, and I'll be happy to teach you. Just call me or join a Free Q & A Meeting at ChrisMalta.com , and I'll answer any questions you have, free. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
There are serious problems with automated product feeds that nobody seems to want to tell you. So I'll tell you, because I don't want you to have serious problems with your online business! Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT When you have a website that sells products online, sometimes you come across automated product feeds from drop shippers and other wholesalers. This means that your supplier automatically loads your website with products, descriptions, prices, quantity available and so forth. These automated product feeds are updated on a regular basis so that you don't have to manually add products, manage prices and descriptions, and so on. For people who are new to online business, this looks like the Holy Grail of easy product management. But there are serious problems with automatic product feeds that nobody seems to want to tell you. So I'll tell you, because I don't want you to have serious problems with your online business. The first problem is that people tend to take the entire product feed and put it on their website. That often means hundreds, or even thousands of products on a single site. It also means products on that site will be unrelated to each other. For example, a drop shipping slash wholesale product feed might carry everything from sporting goods to jewelry, from clocks to baby buggies. That's really bad. Why is that bad? Because a website that has more than one specific product line on it, is next to impossible to get ranked in Google, which is the most important search engine online. These days search engines look for websites that tell one story about one thing. If you're going to sell baby buggies, you need to sell only baby buggies on your site. If you're going to sell sporting goods, pick one type of sporting goods product, baseball bats for example, and sell only that. If you mix products that a search engine sees as unrelated to each other, you have completely unrelated keywords on that site, and you just confuse the search engines. When that happens, nobody will ever find your site. If nobody finds your site, no sales. The second problem is that automated product feeds give you the product descriptions along with all the other info they put on your site. Now, that might seem like a good thing. But for your SEO, (your search engine optimization), it's actually a bad thing. Wholesalers' descriptions of products are almost always short and factual. For good SEO and for good sales conversions, your product descriptions need to be much more personalized. They need to be written specifically for the consumers of that product. They need to contain the right SEO keywords for that product and page, and give people that warm fuzzy that matches the overall look and personality of your site. When you take the descriptions directly from the automated product feeds, and don't rewrite them to do all those things, you lose a very important part of your SEO. That means you lose a very important part of your sales conversion, which is turning visitors into buyers. So let's say you make the mistake of using an automated product feed. And you do rewrite your descriptions to be more SEO and conversion friendly. In a week or so, that product feed is going to update. When it does, it's going to reset all your product descriptions back to the original text. In other words, it'll wipe out all your changes. And then you'll have to do it all over again. And then, in another week or so when the feed updates again... well, you get the picture. For these reasons, there is simply no good way to use an automated product feed of any kind, not for a small online business. The big box stores use them all the time. Because the big box stores don't need to personalize their product descriptions and rely on SEO. They rely on the power of their real world advertising and name brands to bring in traffic. And as a small business owner, you can't spend millions of dollars on real world advertising. You need every advantage you can get in the search engines. That means your product descriptions become a huge part of your marketing. Automated product feeds will kill your search engine ranking all day long. Most of the time, the things that seem the easiest in this business turn out to be the worst things you can do. And automated product feeds are simply a prime example. Learn a LOT more about the real world of ECommerce. Check out my Free EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.…
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