Ecommerce Success

[bigfdbill]

Hello,

Where the critics at? Tell me what you think of this business plan summary.

I will be utilizing Zen-Cart for my ecommerce shopping cart. I plan to start with a drop-shipper until I become familiar with the software and am able to get my marketing specifics in place which will be mainly organic search and adwords/overture etc.

Once I complete the above, I can fine tune my site for a respectable conversion ratio hopefully at 1%. If I am successful at this and have consistent traffic with a solid turnover rate, I should be able to source my inventory from overseas, mostly China. I could lease an industrial warehouse and do all the order fulfillment in-house. This would greatly increase the bottom line compared to drop-shipping.

I should be able to do one theme per site, for instance high-end niche pet supplies. If I can get SEO results with Zen-Cart I should be able to open multiple sites with different themes and products.

Has anyone had good organic search results with the above cart? This is the main thing I will be focusing on in the beginning and could be the biggest hurdle/learning curve to succeed at. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.

[JPnyc]

My understanding is that it's your site design, not shopping cart design, that is responsible for SE rankings.

[bigfdbill]

My understanding is that it's your site design, not shopping cart design, that is responsible for SE rankings.

I would have to disagree. From my research, the design of your website is not really a factor regarding organic search results. Whether you have blue background or white, for instance, wouldn't really affect your SERP's ranking. Anyway, I believe your keywords and linking are weighted more in the search engine algorithyms. But I really don't want to make this a search discussion. Rather, I'm interested in those netpreneurs who have had experience with starting an e-tail shop.

Is anyone here drop-shipping with success? Has anyone moved on to product sourcing from overseas? If you could, provide some insight for us all here!

Thanks.

[nategeeze]

I would disagree that you should lease an industrial warehouse and deal with fulfillment in house. It will give you more margin than drop shipping.

However, there are alternate order fulfillment options than investing in a warehouse, security, software, warehouse staff and the like.

Outsource it.

one option is http://www.shipwire.com

To bigfdbill's comments there are lots of small businesses now sourcing oversees and bringing inventory into the LA port. Shipwire has some case studies on the home page.

please note, I work at shipwire and this is not intended to be an advertisement.

[nategeeze]

bigfdbill:

I would share two things.
Backlink density makes a huge difference for SEO rankings as does your keywords.

I disagree with this portion of your original post: "I could lease an industrial warehouse and do all the order fulfillment in-house. This would greatly increase the bottom line compared to drop-shipping."

Drop Shipping margins are tight. Most people start with drop shipping because they don't want to handle order fulfillment. When/if your ready to import there is an alternative to leasing your own warehouse and dealing with the overhead/hassle of lease, warehouse management, order fulfillment, security, shrinkage, employee hassles, etc.

Outsource this aspect of your business and just focus on growing your business.

I work for Shipwire (not trying to advertise), I post options below.

http://www.shipwire.com allows you to just plug an online store in, send us inventory and has hosting like pricing plans.

there are other small warehouses out there that try and do this. Amazon has also started doing this with their fulfillment by solution.

Anyway, just a thought if you want more margin than drop shipping, may be importing containers from Asia (probably into LA/Long Beach port) and don't want to hassle with order fulfillment.

Have a good one and best of luck