03 Shopster – It Doesn’t Get Much Easier Than This We keep hearing that the “dot-com” businesses are a thing of the past, but that’s far from true. There’s merely been a shift in how online business is done, and what makes some profitable and others not. According to Shopster’s research, online retail sales are positioned to skyrocket. They anticipate growth to be between three and eight times their current level, over the next two years. To put this in a better perspective, when we began looking into alternate sources of income, around 1980, we took a home-study course in catalog sales. That was exciting, and we seriously planned how we would up our own catalog sales business. The nature of that business offered multiple streams of income, and the opportunity to work from anywhere we wanted to settle, though we would have to have a central business located somewhere. Circumstances prevented us from following through with that business plan, but, now, with the advent of online opportunities, we have a chance to do something very similar through a company called Shopster. That is to set up an online store. Though there are a few huge differences, they are all to our advantage. Shopster is far less complicated. They handle the hardest parts of this work, and do all of it for us. It requires very little capital investment, and can be managed while we hold full-time jobs. It offers the potential for an income that will let us retire from dependency on employer-based jobs, and become completely self-employed. We aren’t tied to a single location. If we want to travel, move, or just stay at home, the only adjustment we need to make is to ensure that we have frequent access to an Internet connection. They are the centrally located business site, and with electronic payments, we don’t require a physical address to function as a full-service retail store. Shopster has arranged with suppliers of nearly 1,000,000 name brand products to provide inventory to our customers. We don’t have to deal with suppliers, negotiate pricing, shipping, or any of the core agreements traditionally associated with direct sales. Shopster has done all of that. We deal with Shopster, who provides web sites, software, customer database services, drop shipping, customer support, and support services to us, the merchant. Shopster has changed the dot-com business concept into newbie-friendly ecommerce business, and is one of the hottest growing business trends right now. Shopster even provides statistics that can help us plan the growth of our business, choose products, and market our site. With the average household purchasing $3,649 annually over the Internet, and growth projected to be 30-80% by the end of 2010, this is just the beginning of a trend that is expected to increase over the next four to six years, making now the best time to become an online merchant. One of Shopster’s benefits is that we can choose from such a wide range of brand name products to sell. We’re uncomfortable selling things we don’t know anything about. They make it easy to choose products we’re comfortable with, and could answer questions, knowledgably, when customers call for more information–and they do call. In the introductory materials, Shopster gives suggestions for promoting our site. It explains how they ship using our store brand and gives us full access to our customers’ contact information. This information is important for us to encourage future sales by building and retaining customer loyalty. Since Shopster gives us a web site that we can design to reflect our brand and identity, we won’t appear to our customers to be “another Shopster site.” Shopster provides the product photos, their price to us, and we choose the markup that gives us the profit we need for each product. They provide the payment system that accepts credit cards and PayPal, a most valuable service, as this is hard to set up, costly, and takes a lot of research to get the best deals. Shopster has also done the work that helps us place our site high on the search engines. If we joined just for the training Shopster provides, we’d get more than our money’s worth. The annual cost for a site on Shopster is about what we paid for our training course in catalog sales nearly 30 years ago. Only with Shopster, we also get a site, access to products and open a business to make back far more than the cost of that program through product sales. The value of the services Shopster provides would cost many times more to do individually, and take months, if not years, to work out a smooth-running business. Independently we’d have to do all of the services ourselves. Some of these activities are: • Store inventory, including paying for storage space and designing an inventory management system. • Set up credit card services, including initial fees, monthly fees, and per-sale fees. • Negotiate purchase and drop ship contracts with suppliers. This is an ongoing process, always searching for better arrangements. • Purchase and store packing materials for each product in out inventory. • Pay shipping costs (although we usually pass these on to the customer.) • Develop a website and database that can take orders (shopping cart), capture customer information, track sales, repeat customers, print shipping labels, take to UPS, Fed Express, USPS, etc. or arrange for them to pick up, and all the other customer management systems. • Work out costs of delivery to and shipping from a home business, as they are usually higher than for business addresses. • Possibly arrange a business location if zoning won’t permit your retail business to be run from your home. Especially an issue if you live in an apartment or homeowners association controlled housing. You might as well have a walk-in store at this point. • Would have to pay someone to design the website. This would cost a couple thousand dollars, and often requires a commitment to ongoing maintenance, upgrades, etc. costing more money down the line. • Manage the entire business, and day-to-day activities ourselves. • Probably need employees to handle accounts payable and receivable, or even stock inventory. With an employee or two come payroll expenses, IRS tax reports, possibly health insurance options, especially if we provide them for ourselves. Laws require that we extend such benefits to all employees, even if they pay the full premium. However, we have to manage their enrollment. • Figure out how to assess the competition and compete effectively. That’s only part of what it takes to set up an online store. It’s easy to see how much Shopster saves us by providing all of these services (and more) for a membership fee well under $700 a year, with an option to start a simpler store for under $400 a year. We don’t need employees because Shopster frees our time, and allows us to take care of the minimal number of tasks that make our store unique. We’re approaching full-time retirement within the next few months. We want a simple way to augment our retirement income, not another full time job. Shopster makes this possible. Shopster’s FAQ page, alone, has nearly five times the content that I can include in this article. That’s just one of the pages of information they offer about their program. It’s worth taking a tour of this well-established business, checking out all the links and looking over the many options they offer. Among them is the absence of an ongoing contract, a month-to-month membership (with a discounted annual membership option,) and freedom to cancel at any time. So, there really is very little risk in giving them a try. Certainly, it is far less risk than investing time, energy and money to set up an independent store. And if that isn’t enough, Shopster offers you a risk free 7-day trial, a hands-on experience of their full services, so that you can see how this would work for you. You can check out all that Shopster has to offer, and even try the risk-free, full-version 7-day trial by visiting http://makecashanywhere.net/?q=content/shopster-overview.