Luxury Furniture to Make a Million Dollars

Well so far I created my site. Purchased a lifetime menbership with Worldwide Brands Onesource, Signed up with Distributors, and now I have my very own ecommerce site.

 www.SpecialtyMarketplace.com is the newest retailer of high-end luxury outdoor living products.

 How do you ask? I signed up with Homestead.com instead of Yahoo online stores and saved a ton of money. Don’t worry I am not a homestead affiliate or marketer. But basically the Homestead enahnced version allowed me all the same features as the Yahoo store without the $50 signup fee, the per transaction fee, and I got one month free to try it. That was about all the encouragement I needed. I then signed up for the Paypal Pro online merchant processing which allowed me to seemlessly integrate with my store without needing to spend a ton of money. The paypal account was $20 per month. Oh the other good with Homestead is that the price is $24 per month flat fee instead of the 34.99 that the basic yahoo store charges.

So far so good. Now I added my products from my wholesale accounts and will be explaining that in more detail later. The site is now live for viewing at www.SpecialtyMarketplace.com

Talk to You Soon,

Keith

Best DropShip/Product Sourcing Tool Ever!!

Alright, to catch everyone up to speed I have decided upon starting with a drop shipping scenario to test products to sell. I spent a lot of time scouring the net looking for wholesalers who apparently don’t market to online home businesses. I almost learned this the hard way by signing up to a “wholesaler” who I later learned was a middleman. A middleman is a person who poses as a wholesaler, but in actuallity sends your order to the actual middleman.  There are many scams like this out there, Read more here

 So to give you more insight into what I am doing, I purchased a membership for $299.00 to their product called onesource. This is a database full of real wholesalers (whom I’ll mention in a minute). The interface is excellent. It performs market research automatically and gives you a percentage chance of success.

 So I have been using it for 1 week and already have 2 wholesalers lined up and ready to drop-ship their products. This may not sound amazing, but considering how long I searched for 1 valid wholesaler on my own and failed, 2 “real” wholesalers in 1 week is amazing.

 As you can probably tell, I am excited and this may sound a bit propaganda-ish. To be completely honest, I signed up to promote their product using their Free Affiliate Program. This program allows me to earn $75 dollars for every referal I send them as well as 29.99 for any sale made by someone I refered.

 So this is another means to an end. Although I promise not to abuse my audience. I will only endorse the tools that I think are worth it. If you feel you can find wholesalers on your own, be my guest, but I can guarantee that finding the right product can NEVER be more straightforward than with Onesource from Wordwide Brands

 An of the links on this post can be used to visit the website and to read more about this tool. I will let you know more about my experiences with the wholesaler and setting up my webstore in my next post.

Thanks,

Keith

The first tool purchased!

So I have been in the process of reading this book, which I am sure you have all heard about called “The 4-hour workweek”. The book provides insight on how to create a business that works without you in it and resources on how to develop a niche product or online store.

 I plan on explaining some of the tools mentioned in this book and letting you know what and why I chose the ones I did in my next few posts.

Some of the tools I used so far are: WorldWide Brands’ Onesource, WritersMarket.com, and Yahoo online stores.

Creating Realistic Goals

So I thought a bit more about this experiment and decided that I needed to give myself some clear goals. Just saying that I am going to start an online business is not motivating. I could start it and let it die too easily. I also need to have some marker for success. Is simply starting the e-store the sucess or does it mean more?

So to further clarify my goals I am going to do the following:

-Start this venture using only the spare change I have in my home.

-Have a time limit of 1 year, August 2008.

-Have a goal of $100,000 in sales to reach by the 1 year mark.

I know the goal might be a bit lofty, but then again what is the point of putting in all this effort to make chunp change.

The Startup Experiment Begins….

So I guess now would be a good time to explain what “The Start-Up Experiment” is. Well first off, it is a bit of a social experiment. My plan is that over the next year I will be attempting to learn about, build, market, and profit from an e-commerce site. I will be chronicaling every step of the process and will alert you to the tools I use, how well they work, and impart any knowledge that I may ascertain in the process.

I want this to be a bit of an open forum for discussion. The most exciting thing is that apart from knowing a lot about web site creation, I know nothing about e-commerce. I have sold some used gear on ebay, but that is about as far as it goes. So please feel free to respond to my postings, send me email, and provide any tips for those of us who are learning.

Lets make this collaborative and we will all benefit. My hope is that my determination and success will inspire you to do the same and follow in my footsteps. This will be an honest account of my experiences and I will spare you the propoganda that other sites do about e-commerce. You do not need to spend $20 to join a site and get bogus info. Just cold hard fact!

Thanks,
Keith