When To Use 3rd Party Sites To Sell
Get Your Online Store Up Immediately
One of the major reasons that
people use 3rd party sites to sell is that it's far easier to use someone else's format and
templates to get a site live faster than
to try to figure out how to do it on your own. Even though website programming has gotten a lot easier, it
can still be a steep learning curve for someone
who has never dealt with HTML or templates before. If they don't want to take the time to learn, many 3rd
party sites are extremely user- friendly
and have a working staff that can help people to get their stores up in record
time.
POPULAR 3RD PARTY SITES
We'll discuss more in detail a
number of 3rd party sites that others have found user-friendly and easy to get started selling online. You
probably have heard of eBay.com as a
highly popular way to sell, but there are many
others, including Etsy.com, CafePress.com, Amazon.com, and many more.
Each has its own strengths and
weaknesses and will appeal to a particular
audience.
MATCH THE INVENTORY TO THE SITE
The reason that eBay.com
is so popular is because
you can sell a wide range of products in an auction format, thus
getting more sales. However, other sites
like Amazon.com can also sell more than books; the public just isn't as aware of the many options available.
Etsy.com tends to attract artists, while CafePress.com
will appeal to people with an idea who don't want to create products
as much as market those products that come from their ideas.
GET HELP ALONG
THE WAY
Take advantage of the many ways
to get help from each of these sites. EBay.com has a
large help support area that
is quite responsive, as it makes its money by people selling things on the
eBay site. It pays for the people of eBay
to help facilitate your experience. It's not going to be a slam dunk, but it will
certainly be easier
than programming a website
from the ground
up.
Take a look at other sellers on
the site before you get into your own site. See how sales are taking place. Place some of your
own orders so you can see the
process from the buyer's point of view too. Go into the community forum if they have one and ask your questions
there. There's no reason to go it alone when you use a 3rd party site.
No Special Tools To Download Or Install
You will find that these sites
are created to be extremely user-friendly. You
don't have to download an update
if one is necessary. It's all done behind the scenes.
You don't have to know HTML, although it can help to differentiate your offerings from others. You don't have
to install a specific browser, as they
work with most Internet browsers. You don't have to be very technical at all for the most part.
It's all done for you by the staff of the online 3rd party site. They understand that their
users are not programmers, and they don't expect
you to download software
programs or to install them either.
However, they will offer software
features that anyone can learn to use, and
you can become a super user without having to really become a technical expert.
OPEN YOUR BROWSER
AND GET STARTED
All you have to do to get started
with 3rd party sites is to open your Internet browser and navigate to their main URL. They will have an area
where you can register with them as a
seller, and it will be pretty obvious what button or link to click. Instead of running programs, installing
software, or selecting templates,
all you have to do is to set up an account by giving them some basic information that is
already preformatted as a form for you to fill in. It's really that easy.
LIST YOUR PRODUCTS
Once you have an account, and
they know where to send the check to, you can start listing your products. You will be limited to the terms of service
for that particular site. No
firearms are allowed to be sold on eBay.com, for instance. Know what you can and can't sell by reading the terms
of service that comes up when you
first register. If you try to sell something that is prohibited, your account
will be suspended.
Aside from that, it's pretty easy
to list your products, and the sites have tools that make this process very easy. For Amazon.com, all you have
to do is to put in an ISBN number for
it to pull up the book title, and then you can add information on the quality of the item in your possession that
you wish to sell secondhand. That's
definitely something you won't have with a standard website, yet with 3rd party sites, these types of
tools are common. Whatever makes it
easier for their sellers to list their products gets them to list more, which means more commissions for them. It makes sense to provide more
tools to facilitate
listings. If you make a lot
of sales, premium tools are made available to PowerSellers on eBay.com.
Third party sites will try to support your selling activities as best as they can.
Search-Friendly Listings
If you were to put up your own
website and then get some good tools for listing
your items, like an e-commerce cart, it still isn't going to give you the same exposure as a 3rd party
site. The reason for this is that many of these sites are crawled by Google and other search engines frequently.
They know that new sale items are
coming up every day, and people want to find the listing if they input a
description into their search engine for a particular site. That's
why they're heavily favored in search engines, in some cases, especially eBay listings, due to the
amount of interest and the credibility this
3rd party site has already
established.
In comparison, your own personal
website, while fancy and slick, needs time
to build up the same credibility and interest from search engines. If
you want to eventually develop your
own site, it doesn't hurt to start by marketing some items on 3rd party sites and then having a
reference URL back to your site. That
way, you get the advantage of the search-friendly listings of 3rd party sites, but also start to develop
your own personal following that will help you with search
engines later on.
THINK LIKE
A BUYER
When you build your listing,
think like a potential buyer. Try to make it easy for your listing
to be seen before others’
listings on the same site.
Third party sites will sell their high visibility
features, from bolding to highlighting, or featured
listings. You can actually buy these, as well as buy multiple image files. You might get some of these items
for free if you progress up their ladder
of stellar sellers, but until then, you will probably have to buy the additional features. That's why it isn't just words that sell online; it's also how you use those
words.
Include keywords that people are
searching for in the heading and subheading
of your listing. Try to describe your item in words as best as possible. Make sure the listing is
accurate too, as you will be held to your word,
and it can affect your standing in the community if you misrepresent a product that sells. Pay close attention
to the heading, as this is what people see of the
listing first.
Similarly, the
image file is very important, as that is the next thing they will look at. While 3rd party sites
won't take pictures for you, they try to provide the best guidelines to help your pictures be at their best. You can buy the
option to list more than one
image, and that can be a way to help differentiate
your listing from others. Keep in mind that while 3rd party sites offer many perks, they can cost you in
terms of additional fees that eat into the final selling price of the product. Take that into account when structuring your
sale on these sites.
When You Want An Instant Audience
Third party sites that are
well-established have a large audience of fans and frequent visitors that will come back again and again. This is
one of the main advantages of using
third party sites when you can't generate the same traffic as these established sites. As the saying goes, “If you
can't beat them, join them.” That's
exactly what millions of business vendors are doing to help generate interest and sales at a site
that already has a large audience, instead
of trying to build their own high-traffic site. Of course, the hope is that by aligning themselves with a major
player, they can siphon off some of their
buyers back to their own sites eventually and not have to pay commissions on their sales. Until then, a
commission is a small price to pay for a higher volume of
sales from increased opportunities.
THEY ARE THERE TO BUY
Unlike visitors who come to your
personal or business website, these people
who frequent 3rd party sites are there to buy. They aren't
just there out of curiosity or to
visit and move on. They usually show up because they have a purchase in mind, and they're going
online to look for something specific or to
browse available listings. Thus, the audience isn't just large, but it's a large audience
of people buying, not just dilly-dallying.
EVERY SELLER
HAS A CHANCE AT THE SPOTLIGHT
Even though there are tons of
other sellers, the sites are usually set up to
show the most recent item posting or the auction that's ending soon. In addition, these sites help their sellers
to categorize their offerings by giving them
a list of possible categories and sub-categories that people coming to the site might want
to browse. This helps the seller to showcase
his/her items in the right
areas where people who show up for those categories will be. That way, they're not competing with car part sellers when
they're selling antique dolls.
HIGHLY ORGANIZED INVENTORY
The sites themselves are very
organized to make it easy for sellers to classify their items and for buyers interested in buying to find them.
They have search engines that help people
locate specifically what they want, which is
why sellers should describe their items carefully. It's not enough to
offer a table lamp. Offer a porcelain
table lamp with a bird design that features two blue birds. That seems like overkill, but you don't know what a
buyer will put in the search
engine. If it's blue bird paraphernalia, you want to show
up.
You’re Brilliant, Just Not Crafty
Plenty of people assume that to
get on these 3rd party sites, you have to be able to create products with your own two hands or hire a work
force or factory to create them for
you. Actually, that's a huge misconception! While there are many success stories of artists and craftspeople
selling their products online, there
are also less talked-about people who sell things that they just imagine without creating a physical product or
outsourcing to get it done either.
They're just brilliant at turning a phrase or spotting a golden opportunity.
CAFEPRESS.COM
You can set up a store that just
puts out promotional materials with witty slogans
and catchy phrases using CafePress.com. As long as you aren't infringing on anyone's copyright, you are
free to publish whatever you want on
an inventory of products like cups, mousepads, and t-shirts. All you do is send the phrase in the font you want, and
they will imprint it onto a number of
different things that you choose from their inventory of products. They add those products to your store, and all you
have to do is to market them to your friends,
family, and associates.
This is often how people get
started with 3rd party sales: by using them to fundraise for specific organizations. They
can create any number of promotional items
and have a store set up fairly quickly.
Sending out the URL to the organization's membership and
parents can be a nice way to create some
income for that club. The nice thing is that it costs nothing to join and nothing to create the products, which
remain virtual until someone buys one. Then,
they are printed out and shipped, with CafePress.com taking a commission off the top and you getting the rest.
KUNAKI.COM
AND CREATESPACE.COM
Another 3rd party site that deals
with music CDs or ebooks on CD is Kunaki.com.
You can set up a free account and transfer your information to their site. You can have people order
from them and have it drop shipped directly
to the customer for another fee, besides the commission. This is a good site for bands that want to start
distributing their music CDs or for clubs
that are setting up informational materials that they want to send all over the
country.
Another great site for authors
who want to send out a printed book is CreateSpace.com.
You just send them the files, pick a template for a book cover and for the text, and you'll be able to sell your book
on Amazon.com directly through
CreateSpace.com too.
When You Want Things
Drop Shipped
With eBay.com, you have to sell a
physical product in the auction section. How
it gets to the customer is your issue. There's a lot of trouble involved in selling on 3rd party sites,
especially if demand exceeds your ability to ship things on time. To solve that issue, you have to be careful to
see which 3rd party sites
will ship things for you and which won't. When a 3rd party site ships an item for you in your name, that's
called drop shipping. The customer isn't
even aware that you don't have a warehouse, don’t have any inventory, or didn’t even spend time to ship anything to them. It's
a seller's dream.
Some things lend themselves well
to being drop shipped, while other things don't.
Original artwork does not lend itself well to being drop shipped, unless you're selling graphic copies and not
the original piece. We've already discussed
one site where drop shipping is available: Kunaki.com. They will actually put your own branding on the
shipped item instead of their own. If you sell through CreateSpace.com, even though you're
not actually doing the shipping, it's not technically drop
shipping, as they'll put their name on the branding and not
your name.
WORKING WITH TWO 3RD PARTY SITES
The way that many eBay sellers
get around the need to carry a physical inventory
to list on the auction site is to hire a 3rd party drop shipper to handle any orders. They automate orders
using autoresponders, while all they
have to do is to keep listing items in the drop shipper's inventory. It's a very slick setup, but also one that is
well known. You will be competing with many other people
who have already figured out how to do this.
SELL YOURSELF
AS AN EBAY EXPERT
If you get really good at
attracting attention to your listings and think you want to expand your inventory, why not check out some original
offline stores who want to go online?
They can be your drop shipper, as they already
carry the inventory. You post the listings for a small fee or simply take a commission off of the sold item.
You pass along the sale information to
the actual manufacturer of these items, and they put your brand on it for the return address. They can keep the
branding on the actual piece that is being
sold, as you aren't actually representing yourself as the manufacturer of that product, just as a retailer. In
this case, you would be working with two
3rd party sites and one original manufacturer. As long as you
automate orders and have an
established way to reconcile the partnership so everyone gets a fair share, it can be a great way to expand without adding shipping.
For Special
Sales Events
If your baseball team is fundraising, a 3rd party site
can be an ideal way to set up a quick online store without
actually having to hire a programmer. If you
have a website that already is selling, but not as well as you had hoped, you can gain more exposure by putting up
special promotional sales on 3rd party sites to attract attention to your brands. Not every business owner does
business all year round. Some are seasonal workers who only want to put up a quick online presence during
certain holidays and not bother with it the
rest of the year. It just doesn't make sense to sell in some cases, such as selling
Halloween costumes in January. Depending
on whether you have a full
lineup of costumes or just happened to corner the market in which costumes for a yard sale, you may just
want to put it up during a specific time period
and forget about it for the rest
of the year.
NON-PROFITS, CLUBS, AND FUNDRAISING
Having a virtual garage
sale is fun and takes
far less effort
than trying to find a space to house everything in one place.
It can also run for a whole lot longer
than just a couple of hours. You don't have to use eBay.com for this, as it would be hard to track. However,
Craigslist.com is a bulletin board where
you can post multiple pictures and have a price next to them. They can pick up the item at a central place,
like a church or office, and help you fundraise this way without
too much fuss.
HOLIDAY
SALES
Just like you know that people
want Christmas tree decorations between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you are going
to want to expose these
items
when they are most likely to
be purchased. You don't want to go through
the hassle of building a full
site just for some special holiday sales, as there will be large periods of time when you might not be selling anything.
A website like that will quickly lose
its audience. That's why a 3rd party site makes the most sense. You can update a listing when
it's time to sell and disappear for the
rest of the year, and no one is going to notice your disappearance since there are many other sellers continuing to
sell on the 3rd party site throughout the year.
RARE OFFERINGS
If you have a one-of-a-kind item
that's very valuable, you can post it on an auction
site with a good reserve and see if it sells. Someone may be scouring the Internet for just such a find, but
be unable to find it on your site because the
site shows up on the 15th page of the search results. On
search-engine- friendly 3rd
party sites, such a rare sale will climb to the top of the search engine rankings.
Third Party Payment Sites
Another place where 3rd
party sites shine is in the area of payment collection. Here, we have to distinguish between transaction processors, like PayPal, and the systems in place to collect
payment for people who join sites like Elance.com,
a freelance site. Either way, business people who are new to the Internet may wonder how to collect
payment online or how to end up not getting stiffed.
There is fraud on the Internet, and when it comes to collecting
payment from a total stranger halfway across the world, it pays to deal with
systems that have already been proven
successful.
PAYPAL.COM
PayPal is a revolutionary way to
do business online and allows even people who
don't have credit card merchant agreements to collect payments via credit cards. You can put PayPal buttons
on your own website; however, it's so
fully integrated with other 3rd party sites that you don't even have
to do that anymore. On eBay, for instance,
all you have to do is say that you accept
PayPal, give them your PayPal username, and you're done. No need to create
buttons.
Setting up a PayPal account is
ridiculously easy. You will link it to a bank
account where money can be deposited when it is received by PayPal.
There are fees for this service, but
there also ways to reduce the amount of fees
that you pay. Check the terms of service to see how to get paid to
reduce your fees. It will verify the
bank accounts of people on PayPal, so you know
that you're dealing with someone who actually has money. You can even pay
people in other countries in
their country's currency, even though the payment
originates in your own currency. This is useful if you're outsourcing work
from other countries.
ELANCE.COM
Elance is just one of many
freelancing boards out there. All of them act as an intermediary in the payment collection system so that they can
get their cut off the top. There are
positives to this system in that if you don't get paid, they won't either. That means that they will aggressively pursue
people who you do work for and try
many means to get them to pay, all without your interference. The payment contract is set up ahead of time and is transparent to everyone.
On the other hand, if your client
has an issue with your work, they may still try
to stiff you. Or, if they are committing fraud online, not paying you is still a possibility. However, the occurrence
of this is less when you use a 3rd party site that monitors
how people pay and how people perform
for that pay.
You Gain Instant
Credibility
When you put up your own site,
your friends and family might make an obligatory
visit, but no one else is obliged to show up. If you set up a store on a 3rd party site, the fact
that you're there can give you instant credibility. In some cases, the audience will be told that you are a new
seller, but that doesn't really stand
against you. What you want to do is to start amassing more and more credibility, not just have the initial thrill of
being online on a massive community
of immense reputation. Guarding and increasing your credibility will help you to stay on top of your game and
help you to continue to sell more items when others may be falling
by the wayside.
GUARD YOUR ONLINE
REPUTATION
The best way to make sure that
you continue to have a good experience with
your online 3rd party site is to guard your selling
reputation by seeking to offer the
customer service that they associate with their brand name. For eBay.com,
that means delivering your product when you say that you will.
One of the biggest reasons people
get lower ratings is because they fail to ship
on time. A customer who waits too long for something to show up is an unhappy customer, and eBay has its own
ideas on when things should show up too. If you fail to hit their guidelines, you better have a good reason,
like a massive postal strike, which may not be a good enough
excuse.
If you are using drop shippers,
you want to make sure that they are shipping
within the right amount of time
or it's your reputation that will suffer.
Customers that get their items
late will dock your feedback, and that will affect
your ability to progress into some of the sweeter deals that are offered by 3rd party sites. They want
to make sure that the people they sponsor or
promote are the ones that can handle the added sales that will come from such exposure
by maintaining excellent customer service standards.
EASY TO GET TESTIMONIALS
Third party sites will ask their
customers to provide feedback on their buying
experience, giving your store the opportunity to amass positive feedback
and testimonials without much
effort on your part. It can work against you if you fail to live up to their standards, but it also helps to keep
you functioning at your best. If you
have a personal website, you know how hard it is to try to get a testimonial for your website. It's
like begging, and it means that if you have to ask, well, they might not be that
enthusiastic. With a system
in place that automatically asks for feedback and
logs it so that others can view it, it serves
the purpose of giving your credibility a big boost – as long as it stays positive. Keep doing what you're doing and
take care of complaints to the customer's satisfaction to keep a high feedback
score.
You Want To Drive Traffic Back To Your Sites
So far, we've only talked about
the potential to increase sales by using 3rd party sites. There is another very big reason to use 3rd
party sites, and that's to increase
your online exposure and to drive traffic back to your sites. The reason for this is that you don't have to
post your entire inventory on a 3rd
party site. If you're making decent sales on your site, why put that
lineup under someone else's banner
where you have to pay a commission to sell it
too? You wouldn't do that for your entire inventory, but doing so with a
few best-selling items
now and then can help drive traffic back to your site.
IT’S TARGETED TRAFFIC
Just like people who buy
advertising to get more eyeballs to their products, some people will sell a loss leader online on 3rd party
sites to get more eyeballs back to
their other websites. In the same fashion that some retail stores offer several unbelievable deals
during Black Friday to bring more people
into their store, you can use 3rd party sites to drive targeted
traffic back to your sites. After
all, those sites are so well organized that you already know that the people looking at your sale are all in
your market niche. Why wouldn't you
want to expose them to a few more of your products and services? If you can do
that by having a store online that has a
link back to your own site, and
it's not against the terms of service, then you can grab traffic from these sites. Even if you can't send them
directly back to your site, you can
send them to a blog or a social network where they can become more personal and can learn more about you as well as
your business.
DRIVE THEM BACK TO YOUR STOREFRONT
EBay also lets its vendors send
people from a listing back to an eBay storefront
where more of their product offerings reside. It's a way of back- end selling within
a 3rd party
site, even if you still have to pay commissions on what you sell. A listing
and a storefront are two different things.
Remember that you want to expose
as many of your products and offerings to
the massive traffic that these 3rd party sites attract. It's not
just about the listings that are
currently active, but also about everything that you have to offer on the Internet.
BRAND YOUR PHYSICAL
ITEMS
If you're selling something like a USB drive that you can brand with your URL, why not do it? Just like companies have their name or logo on their tennis shoes, you should use every occasion to remind people who buy from you of your online presence. Don't miss a chance to brand the interaction in a way that drives them back online and back to your site. Some people do this with books and CDs by placing other offers or even a website address within the print. If the customer lends that item out, your branding goes with it too, leading to greater exposure and more potential future sales, all from a 3rd party site listing.
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