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| | The Minding Your Own Business Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | Views: 981 | | Feb 15, 2006 4:13 pm | | Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # | 
GiGi Gaggero | | After reading passive income I am all charged up...
I am currently re-doing my website to flow better and now adding retail product area. Currently, I am working on what I want to sell from my site.
Later I want to add short instructional video stream as a bonus to my clients when they visit.
I understand the front door .. meaning... driving clients to my page, setting up goods for sale, securing a shopping cart set up...
But....... I need to know what to do once the order comes in...?????
What is a successful way to streamline, tracking order clients, packaging and shipping out the back door...?
How to I complete the back door phase with on -line selling?
Any suggestions would help!
gg
(www.Kidsculinaryadventures.com)if it helps to look
Private Reply to GiGi Gaggero | | Feb 16, 2006 12:00 pm | | re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # | 
Denise O'Berry | | GG --
That would depend on your product.
If you are featuring a product from a company of which you are an affiliate, you don't need to worry about the back end stuff. They take care of it for you.
If you are selling a digital product, you could set it up through ClickBank or PayDotCom. ClickBank will take care of everything for you too including handling payment. PayDotCom requires a back end PayPal account where your orders would be paid to.
If you are selling tangible hard goods, you can get a merchant account and shopping cart which will handle all the processing of orders. You would just need to fill them. Alternatively, you could probably use PayPal as your payment processor. Most people are familiar with it these days and it no longer requires them to sign up for membership so there are less barriers to using it than there used to be.
Last, but not least, you could use a drop shipper for delivery of your items. You take and process the order, then communicate it to your drop shipper and they do the selection and delivery. I've used WorldWide Brands Drop Shipper Directory with good success in the past to locate drop shippers. I also use their market research wizard to help determine what to sell.
Lots of choices here and all are dependent on what you are selling.
Best regards,
Denise O'Berry
Network LeaderPrivate Reply to Denise O'Berry | | Feb 16, 2006 12:20 pm | | re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
Rhonda Warren | | Denise,
As an option for the Digital store which method do you prefer? I am trying to decide whether I want to purchase a script for my site for my ebook sales or if I want to use an alternate payment method.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated ...
Thanks, Rhonda Warren
The Mom Outlet
www.momoutlet.com
Private Reply to Rhonda Warren | | Feb 16, 2006 3:22 pm | | re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
GiGi Gaggero | | Thank you ! That was really helpful. I am already set up with Pay pal. I think it was the drop ship info I was searching for!
Perfect!
g Private Reply to GiGi Gaggero | | Feb 16, 2006 4:13 pm | | re: re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
Denise O'Berry | | Rhonda --
That depends on how confident you are that the ebook sales will get you a good return on investment. I've used all of the places I told GG about above -- ClickBank, PayDotCom, PayPal and my own shopping cart system.
They all have pros and cons.
Although ClickBank has a huge audience, you can't get your product into the marketplace until you've made your first sale. That's tough for some people. Then you can't get a payment until you've had four sales and there is a one time $49.95 set up fee. Once you're rolling along, you'll get your payments every couple of weeks. In my experience there are a ton more returns from people who buy using ClickBank. For example, I used to sell my Target Referrals Expert Roundtable -- www.targetreferrals.com -- through ClickBank. With them, I had a 25% return rate. I also sell this through my regular shopping cart and have never had a return.
PayDotCom is similar to ClickBank as far as audience and marketplace. I only have my Small Business Matters membership site -- www.smallbusinessmatters.com -- listed there for now. Haven't had a problem with refunds. I also sell this through my regular shopping cart and PayPal subscriptions.
If you want to test out sales with a low risk option, PayPal is probably your best bet. On the other hand, if you want to think long term and want a comprehensive package that includes shopping cart, affiliate, autoresponders, mailing list and more then the shopping cart would be a good option for you. It will set you back $79 / month or $799 / year but is a very flexible service. I've been with www.1shoppingcart.com now for over three years and have been very happy.
Best regards,
Denise O'Berry
Network LeaderPrivate Reply to Denise O'Berry | | Mar 17, 2006 3:37 pm | | re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # | 
James Theopistos | | I am assuming from your post you want to know how to get started in order processing. If you are ready to start selling but have not started to work out the back-end order processing method once the order comes in, then you may be unpleasantly surprised at how much goes into it.
Most online retail that ship themselves have to work out the kinks themselves as well. Some things you will want to consider is packaging /shipping supplies, packaging methods, creating shipping lables and providing your customers order status and tracking information.
The packaging and shipping aspect is a matter of setting up a work place to package your items. I simply setup my garage at one point with some long tables, shelves for tape, boxes and so on.
The next aspect is very important. Your shopping cart system have an order management section that only you can access. This shoudl give you full customer and order details, the ability to create packing slips and the ability to edit orders (for returns and order changes).
You will want to use a program like UPS Worldship to that lets you generate shipping lables. The UPS worldship software lets you import order details and generate shipping labels without having to enter everything but I must admit that to streamline this process it does take some database management skills.
If you are using PayPal, PayPal has all this built in so is one of the better options for processing orders. If you are not using PayPal but instead your own merchant account, you will need to build your own infrastructure if your cart system does not have one already.
I hope the info helps or at least provides some understanding of what is involved.
Other issues you will want to figure out is things like return policy, how to handle lost or damaged shipments, chargeback reversals and rare fraudulant orders. If your business starts to quickly boom, you will find that not planning for all these things will compete for your time which can be better spent marketing and improving you online presentation for your products. Private Reply to James Theopistos | | Mar 17, 2006 5:51 pm | | re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
GiGi Gaggero | | James: Thank you , very informative! Not to bore others, I sent you a PM. Please ck your mail!
ggPrivate Reply to GiGi Gaggero | | Mar 17, 2006 8:48 pm | | re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # | 
Reg Charie | | gg,
James made a lot of good points.
I had an occasion to work with a client to develop their ordering process as
40% of their online orders were not being filled due to logistics. This amounted
to some 50 or more orders each day.
Each of these un-filled orders required extra work in contacting the customer by
email, and refunding the order.
The client had seven "real world" used CD stores as well as an online store.
Due to the stock being fairly unique, sales were often made online to items that
had already been sold in the stores, or were sold before the stores received the
notification of the online sales.
The solution was reasonably simple.
Each store was connected to the internet. (They all weren't when we started,
orders were phoned in)
Each store had MS Outlook email client installed.
Outlook can be configured to do a lot of automatic actions using it's rules
options.
When an online order was received at the main office the order was
automatically:
- Printed. (They were a "paper based" business.)
- Forwarded to accounting.
- Forwarded to shipping to be used to make shipping labels.
- Forwarded to the proper store based upon the store code in the order
email.
Each store's email client was set up to automatically:
- Check email every 15 minutes.
- Print out the order.
- Sound an audio alarm when an order was received.
- Once a store received an order it was picked from stock immediately.
- The product was wrapped with the printed order and placed in a shipping
container to be sent to the shipping department at the end of the day.
- The order was entered into their POS (Point Of Sale) system. (A report
was generated at the end of each day by the POS and attached to an email
sent to the online department. Each report was imported into Excel and using
macros, converted to the format their online database used, and uploaded,
ready for the next day's orders.)
- If an order was not filled, the email would be forwarded back to the
online order desk.
- The unfilled order print out was placed in an "unfilled orders" envelope
to be sent back to shipping with the day's picked items.
Shipping would return unfilled order print outs to the online manager as a
double check.
Setting all this up reduced unfilled orders to around 5%.
Reg
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nothing. Private Reply to Reg Charie | | Mar 17, 2006 10:27 pm | | re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
GiGi Gaggero | | Reg,
Wow! My head is spinning after reading that! Sounds like if I do get large enough, I should invest in a good POS system. I do know through my research, Quick books has an affordable POS system. Outlook which I love, sounds like something I should get into as well.
Working at the Culinary Academy in S.F.; I had the experience of placing new POS system within the rest. and extended within three outlets, including interfacing their retail shop... ( Aloha systems) however, I don't have funding for that type of system. YET!
Maybe I will call upon the salespeople that assisted me with that purchase, they might shed some light on the subject for me as well.
James has been full of great info as well! It seems with his websites, he is currently in the mix!
Great to know all of this, thank you! Always a pleasure to hear from all of you!
gg
Private Reply to GiGi Gaggero | | Mar 18, 2006 12:40 am | | re: re: re: Help : The Physical In's and outs of selling retail off my website ! | # |
Reg Charie | | gg,
It is not necessary to pour a ton of money into a POS, but if you are
considering buying one, try to find one that will integrate with an online
database.
Unfortunately these are REALLY pricy.
While I have not checked these systems, a search for "open source point of
sale programs" turned up a lot of results
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&q=open+source+point+of+sale+programs+
Reg
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Webmaster's Resource
MetaCryL - Business Promotion - FREE - 38 Days of eBooks.
0Grief - Zero Grief Hosting.
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nothing. Private Reply to Reg Charie | | |
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