I have gone silent on my blog for the longest time since I started it. I have had two main reasons for this.
Reason number 1 is because my wife has been ill recently. We spent 8 days in the hospital and I have had to put my business on the side to do much more with the kids. She is feeling better now, and that leads me to my second reason.
For about 3 years now I have had an idea to help people sell computers online. There are a ton of people who strongly believe that the future of business is online, and for most types of business I agree with them. People compare and shop for things online, but they will always need some things to be in person. For computers it is definitely online. Now here is the problem, people want to make money online, but they simply don’t have the tools or knowledge that they need. There are many companies that I have found that take advantage of this. They take a very basic, and hardly working cart, and they put it online, and they give some basic consulting information. They sell this to people who don’t know much about the Internet or about computers and they sell this for many thousands of dollars.
There are also many people who want to drop ship products, and for about 4 years now my company has been listed in books and many drop ship websites as a source of high quality computer systems. We have been contacted by over 2000 people who have asked us about this. They call me, they email me but 98% of them have never purchased anything. Part of that is my fault because when I get little return from something I pay little attention to it. Recently I updated my website and as a part of the application to do something with me I asked them where they currently are and what their goals are. I would say that 90% of them have not yet created a cart, nor do they have much of a plan. I totally understand this, because to install a good cart out there takes a ton of knowledge and work. I am a complete computer expert and I still had to call tech support, and it still took me many many hours to figure out. If someone does not understand HTML, PHP, JAVA, FTP, Linux Permissions, and 20 other things I don’t see how they would ever get it up on their own. So they rely on these companies that “sell” carts. The problem is that most of them leave you with an empty cart, and then they give you a list of companies like me and you need to create relationships with them. There are a few that fill your cart up with items, but all the ones I found sell either really useless stuff that no one buys, or really over priced items that simply can’t be sold. All of this is a huge discouraging mountain for the once gleeful and hopeful would be entrepreneur.
There is one local company that we know of that sells websites that are totally cookie cutter, they offer nothing in the way of custimization other than one “About Us” page that lets the merchant put a few small sentences about themself and their contact info. It sells products that have not changed for over 30 years, like candles, lotions. The problem is that they charge over $12,000 just to have one of these sites, and they charge thousands more to accept credit cards, and thousands more for consulting. They then charge monthly hosting fees in the 100’s of dollars and if you ever stop paying you lose everything. We have a sister company that offers help and consulting to clients of this company, and we have talked to 100’s of people, and we have NEVER talked to one who actually made a profit, yet this company sells 20-50 of their sites per day, mostly focusing on low income or elderly clients who know nothing about computers. At least 20% of the ones we talked to did not even have a computer, many others could not even put food on their table but were asked to borrow $12k or more from friends and family to start thier business. (If you can’t tell this type of business practice makes me really mad.)
So what is my project. Well first off I am building a site that sells the best and most popular computer products. My site will use the latest design techniques and latest eCommerce tools. I am putting everything on our site with small markup for me and a 20% profit margin for the people who but these sites. I plan to sell this site for UNDER $1000, and this site will be a REAL oppertunity, something where people can make REAL money. If they pay us $1,000 to build the site they only need to sell $5,000 in computer hardware to start to make money, and in computers that can take just a few days. And the prices that I have on my site are VERY good, so they can advertise the site and make money right away. People will be able to add any other items they want to sell, they will also have the ability to totally customize the site. And for a small fee we will even host it and update it daily.
So I have been spending almost all of my limited time building this site. So far I have a 100% functional site, it has RSS Feeds, over 500 inventory items, and the complete ability to clone the site. I still need to finish a few things so it is NOT open to the public yet, but I think that in the next week it will be. I am excited to call these people and tell them that I finally have the ability to help them reach their dreams. I have a great cart, that is affordable, functional and has products in it that allow them to make money from day one. This has really been my goal for about three years now. Part of my mission in life to help other people out.
If you would like to be on the list of people who I will call when this goes online, then go HERE. If I can keep out the distractions I will have it up soon.
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