If you are an online retailer you simply have to know that any product (no matter if it is a needle or a highly sophisticated multimedia system) has its own life cycle. It means that during a year there is always a time when it sells highest.

It works like this: at the beginning of such a time a few early buyers come, then come all the bulk of clients (suppliers as a rule run out of stock and the prices for the good rise), then gradually the demand falls.

Here, at Dropshiparea, we try to help you find the best wholesale suppliers, but we can’t create your online business web site for you. You need to thing the matter over and do your best to create a user-friendly interface and a worthy customer service.

If you want to be a successful online retailer you have not only to be aware of these cycles but try to predict and anticipate them. There are a few tips that can help you do that:

1. Keep it going

If you want the sales volume to maintain at the same level you have to be ready for the pick season. Prepare the seasonal products for early shoppers while other products might become less popular (the end of their season). If you find the right balance of new and old products you are likely to keep your income rising.

2. Prepare for the season in advance

Let’s hear what Lisa Suttora (from WhatDoISell.com) has to say:

“The advantage to having your products ready several months before a holiday season is you capture the early bird buyers…You’d be amazed how many people shop months in advance of a holiday.”

So what conclusion can you make out of her words? Don’t wait for the season proper to phase in new products. Do it two of three months in advance. In this case you will have a competitive edge over your competitors.

Another opportunity that you get by the early promotion of the product – search engine benefit. If you phase in a new product earlier search engines are more likely to find your page faster than the pages of your competitors.

3. Promote what you have

Seasonal variations of demand doesn’t really mean changing the entire product line. You can use your creativity and make the clients believe that some of your products are seasonal ones. You can try to create various bundles – people who are looking for fast purchases are likely to appreciate it and buy.

4. Don’t forget about your store

Again let’s listen to Suttora once more:

“Your sales don’t have to drop. Evaluate what you’re selling and how you want to position it—freshen up the look of your site. You’ve got a whole new group of buyers coming in [with each new season], so you want to be ready for them.”

It means that you have to make your online store season-focused.

If you think that there are no really big players in the dropship industry then the below case study will make you think. It is also a sample for those who run dropship businesses on a small level and are not sure if there is a way to expand their drop ship venture.

We have an extensive section covering a large selection of profitable dropship businesses so far, but it is the first time we publish a case of drop ship store generating over $1,000,000 in sales monthly. Do you think it is possible to easily find verified dropshipping merchants to meet & handle that amount of orders?

How to grow this sort of drop ship business? What human resources it takes to build ad maintain? How much it cost to develop and run? What are the marketing costs of such business? And what promotion techniques are applied to generate that much in sales? Find all your questions answered below.

Our recent case study of a really BIG dropship business.

• URL: www.payhalf.com
• Established: 30 Jun 2006
• Uniques/ Month: 5,000
• Page views/ month: 25,000
• Monthly Revenue: $1,000,000 gross in sales
• PageRank: 7

Description:

This is a first class auction for e-commerce site. Over $175,000 was spent developing the site. We had a team of 4 of us 3 full time one part time and grossed over $2,000,000 in 2 months with a 10% markup (October and November can show merchant reports to verify this) but due to other projects could not keep up the pace as we have a call center and several other businesses to manage. We did not stock any merchandise we were a drop ship company and listed products then pushed our product feed to pricegrabber, shoppzilla.com, nextag.com, ect ect, we spent less than $25,000.00 with these comparison sites to generate the $2,000,000 plus in sales.

The site is coded in custom php, mysql. Can support over 200,000 products and currently has a database with close to 200,000 products including detailed descriptions, pricing and images.

Expect to get hit with 250+ orders per day and it took us a while to get our dropshipper to get the correct/ realtime inventory levels so that we did not get an order for something that was out of stock. But by the time we got all that corrected our other businesses were taking off and we just did not have the team to support the growth. the site has been up since then just not taking orders as again we do not have the time to fulfill all the orders that would result in turning the ordering back on. Also if you notice these reviews were very early on you wont see any recent ones as all the issues were again corrected.

We do not stock anything and do not ship anything but we still have to perform order entry into the vendors site which was a lot of data entry. Don’t get me wrong 2-300 orders per day is nice but when you get behind and cannot get all the orders in per day you start to get behind really quick and then you customers who are not happy.

Site also has a comprehensive admin panel and is already integrated for paypal and verisign.

Site also has customer admin.

Also has an affiliate backend to where affiliates can load and list and sell their products on the site. You can charge them what ever fee structure you want on this or allow free listing to promote website growth and then monetize the site by selling google ads, chitkia ect ect. We did not do this but wish we had of as we are sure we left a lot of advertising dollars on the table.

Also partially finished sections as follows:

Barter section to where users can list items and barter back and forth other items for free or for a fee your choice.

Has a classified section similar to craigslist.

Has a merchant control center where users can import items from eBay and other sites.

Has a community section as well customized in phpbb.

This is a great match to implement a few social shopping web 2.0 features and with the catchy payhalf.com name turn this into a really high profile site.

The domain name is a premium one and we get offers weekly for people wanting to purchase it for high dollar amounts.

Revenue Details:

This is a first class auction for e-commerce site. Over $175,000 was spent developing the site. We had a team of 4 of us 3 full time one part time and grossed over $2,000,000 in 2 months with a 10% markup (October and November can show merchant reports to verify this )but due to other projects could not keep up the pace as we have a call center and several other business to manage. We did not stock any merchandise we were a drop ship company and listed products then pushed our product feed to pricegrabber, shoppzilla.com, nextag.com, ect ect, we spent less than $25,000.00 with these comparisons sites to generate the $2,000,000 plus in sales.

Traffic Details:

Traffic comes from google, yahoo, people are coming to the site to purchase electronic goods, affiliates list items for sale also.

Feed? What’s that?

Generally speaking, feeds are a way of sharing online content. If you want to make some material from your website available for publishing on some other web-page you give that site a feed. So to cut the long story short, it is a code that allows that site to post your blog entries or articles. There are different types of feeds – XML, RSS, Atom etc. But, in fact, they are just different ways of accessing the same feed.

Here, at Dropshiparea.com, we try to follow all the latest trends in both affiliate marketing and business solutions. To tell you the truth, until recently, we never considered feeds as a valuable source of content, but we tried and realized that it is a working scheme of data exchange between us and our worthy dropship suppliers

Sydney Johnston, the Internet expert says: “The great thing about a feed is everybody wins.” How could that be? Very simple – the author of the article gets readers, the readers learn something new and the online seller gets an endless source of high-quality content.

Can Feeds help an Online Business?

Yes, they can, and in various ways:

• With the help of feeds you can deceive spam filters. Feeds are optional. If a user wants to get a feed, he/she will subscribe to it, if not – unsubscribe. No more wars for readers’ inboxes.
• Feed are a source of free content. How to make your site stand out in a crowd? Fill it with worthy content. For your business it can be very useful – you can write and thus make your clients read about the products you are selling. You have to make sure that your feeds are up-to-date. In this case they can become a good reason for clients to come back to your page.
• Search engine ranking improvement. Search engines are keep on fresh and constantly updated content, so feeds are exactly what you want. You can kill two birds with one stone – fill your page with interesting entries and improve your search rankings.
• If you have Affiliate Marketing schemes feeds can be a great asset to you. In this very respect they are very similar to banners but they don’t look commerce.
• Increase the traffic. If other sites pick up your feeds – it is just like free advertising for you. Some of the traffic from those sites is automatically redirected to yours.

If you want to find feeds it is very easy to do. There are search engines for feeds only (Plazoo.com, Feedster.com).

Johnston adds:

“The future of the internet for entrepreneurs is feeds. If people don’t master them, they’re going to get left behind, period.”