7 Things You Must Avoid If You Want A Bigger Retail Online Business You are already receiving some steady sales, and now you are offering a nice range of product to your customer base. But in this moment you are pondering on expanding your business to attract more customers with more products, better prices and even better, with a new presence on Internet through your new designed website. This article will show you 7 things you must avoid if you want to be successful expanding your business while at the same time you streamline all processes. So let's start with the first trap. 1) Sell a product without market. If you want to attract new clients offering new products first make sure that demand exists for these products. There are many ways to do market research, but why don't you take advantage of your existent customer base. Ask them what kind of products are they interested in, what level of price they are expecting for these kinds of products, etc. Be creative in order they give you this kind of information, for example, offer a discount in the next purchase to those customers who help you with a little survey; maybe post one article on your blog related to this new product and ask your customers for their opinion about this kind of products. 2) Don´t limit your business only to products you are passionate about If you sell a product that you really like there is nothing wrong with that, the problem is that you put limits to your business based only on your passions; if you want to expand your product base, compile a list of potential products that your friends and family likes, or products related to products you are already selling in your store or products in another category but in the same niche; for example if you are selling sport products then add products like DVDs (information product) within the football niche. Please don't forget to take advantage of Internet when it's time to assess the market of new products you want to sell or new microniches you want to serve. Today there are keywords tools who will help you to find what kind of searches people in your market/niche are doing in search engines, this will help you to know what related (or surprisingly unrelated) products/services/interest your market want. 3) Don't try to research a product if you don't have a wholesaler first Just image that after you do an extensive research on a specific product, evaluating your
niche, compiling keywords and keyphrases for doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), surveys, etc. only to find that there are NO real wholesalers willing to work with online retailers. It's frustrating, right? So make sure that you have a real wholesale distributor willing to work with you before you start researching a specific product you are thinking about selling. 4) Don't look for real wholesalers on Internet If you make search engine listings and directories your primary source for real wholesalers, you will soon find yourself scammed. Many scam artist behind welldesigned websites are in the business of making you believe that they are something that they are not. They only want to position themselves inside the distribution channel between a legitimate factory authorized wholesale supplier and your business, from this illegitimate position, they will leave you without your deserved profits that you would get if you deal with a genuine wholesaler. The vast majority of real wholesale suppliers do not want to be listed on search engine results. One of the fundamental reasons is that they realize that advertise on Internet will attract a lot of unwanted small accounts, they prefer bigger purchases from bigger business, it's more cost and time effective distribute products this way. So, true wholesale suppliers prefer and will continue using the sales and marketing structure that has been in place long before Internet ever came to be. 5) Don't rely only on local sourcing techniques Yes Internet is full of scam artist who want to mislead you making you believe that they are genuine factory authorized wholesalers, but this is not reason to avoid searching the benefits of real suppliers with product sourcing methods other than local artisans and merchants. Wholesale supply companies allow you use methods like: light bulk wholesaling, drop shipping, liquidation buying and closeout buying. If you get to know real factory authorized wholesalers you will enjoy the benefits associated to these methods is they are suitable to your sales model. If you rely only on local suppliers, you have to ask this question: Are they capable to keep up with a fastpaced sales season like the Christmas holyday? maybe not, so generally large wholesale suppliers are much more reliable and stable. 6) Don't Try to find real wholesalers without getting a Business Name and tax ID
Definitely the way to go is sourcing your products directly with a real wholesale supplier. In order to do this you need to do some simple legal paperwork to be able to deal with real wholesale distributors. Why is that necessary, simply because you can not work from a real wholesale supplier if you are not a legal business. And by the way, here is a word of caution, any distributor who allows you to purchase products for resale without legal business paperwork is not a real wholesaler. Getting legal is really easy, the only thing we need is commitment with our business. The basic steps are: get an official business name, a tax ID, a business bank account and if you want to accept your customers credit card, you need a merchant account. 7) Don't get discouraged so easy If you discover that products you intend to sell won't give the level of profit margin you wanted, please don't be discouraged so easy. One of the reason is because at first you are not able to compete with people who is selling the same kind of products for years, maybe they are purchasing to wholesalers in very big volumes, while you only can purchase light bulk volume. Now is not that bad, if you discover that you are not able to compete with a product before you invest money trying to selling with no success, consider that as a time you won. Just repeat the marketing research process with another product. Worldwide Brands team, have the world's largest database of genuine wholesale suppliers. This database will help you to find real factory authorized wholesale suppliers, so you don't fall prey to scam artists online, also this database will give you access to over 8 million wholesale products, they will help you to decide what products to sell with the market research tool, and will give you resources for setting up a business and sales Tax ID, plus many educational courses and videos that jumpstart your online business. Please check worldwideBrands for yourself to see how these tool will help you to avoid above mistakes.