by Danny Brown on January 21st, 2008
Even with online retail sales growing year over year, the retail catalog industry has remained a multi-billion dollar industry and has even outpaced online sales. Catalog sales is an excellent opportunity for existing online retailers to expand into a new channel and earn a major percentage of sales.
If you’re looking to start your own catalog business, one of the key factors in whether you’ll be successful or not is how you approach it. This includes doing your research before even thinking about what your catalog will be selling, and getting it printed. There are many more basics that you... Read more »
by Veronica Stone on October 19th, 2007
Selecting what products to sell in your store can be one of the most daunting tasks for a start-up business. How do you sort through a seemingly endless list of possibilities and decide what product you want to invest seriously in? You need to find something that is in demand and will turn out to be profitable. You should also try to find something that you will enjoy selling.
Take some of the following things into account when choosing a product:
How marketable is it? If a product you’re considering isn’t something that people are willing to buy with their... Read more »
by Carrie Hinkel on October 4th, 2007
Think of your inventory as money on the shelf. The national average for a typical store is $15,000 worth of inventory and 30 percent of that is non-moving, dead merchandise! So what can you do to get control of your inventory and convert your inventory to dollars quicker?
Keep inventory levels comfortably low. Most business owners will inevitably make the mistake of ordering too much of a certain product to get quantity discounts. While that is a smart move for an item that’s a proven fast seller in your store, it’s not a good idea for an initial order. It... Read more »
by Keith D. Commiskey on September 19th, 2007
As the owner of GiftsForYou.Biz, the following is an outline showing, in my own experience, why product focus is not only a good thing, but nearly essential, especially for small businesses where vendors can be volatile.
When I began promoting products on the web in July 2002, I thought I would be the rare exception to the rule in that I did not feel I had to specialize in any one type of product. I signed up for a service that offered over 2,000 products, and my web development savvy and I set out to promote them all. And I... Read more »