New Services From Solid Cactus

You wouldn’t know it from reading me, but there are multiple platforms in which to open your online store.  I’ve never been afraid to mention that I use Solid Cactus for much of my design, call center services, and more.

Well, until now, Solid Cactus has focused on Yahoo store design, but have recently expanded.  Now you can take advantage of their extensive experience in store design to build or improve your eBay Pro Store, Amazon Webstore, or Yahoo store.

I personally have used so many services from Solid Cactus, I can’t count.  So I can tell you from experience, if you need any help with building or improving your store, marketing, customer service, and more, I know you’ll be pleased by checking out Solid Cactus.  Give them a call and see what they can do for you at 1-866-943-7513.

What is MAAP?

Many suppliers will mention MAAP when setting up an account. They may even ask you to sign an agreement stating that you’ll abide by their MAAP policies. Well, what the heck is MAAP and why is it important to me?

What is MAAP?

MAAP stands for (I believe) Minimum Allowed Advertised Price. Basically they are saying that you can not openly advertise the price of an item lower than the MAAP requirement. Suppliers and manufacturers use this in an attempt to protect their products from discounting which aims to protect their brand’s reputation. They don’t want retailers selling their products for dirt cheap because that will eventually cheapen the brand and make it harder for anyone to make any margin on the products.

Why As A Drop Shipper Should I Care?

Because if a supplier has a MAAP requirement, and you are found violating it, you run the risk of loosing the privilege of selling the item, or in extreme cases, risk a lawsuit.

Is it legal?

In a word, yes. Keep in mind that a supplier can not tell you what you must sell an item for. That is called price fixing, and it is 100% illegal. But there is a big difference between price fixing and MAAP. Price fixing dictates sales price (again, illegal), MAAP dictates advertised price. You can still sell the item for whatever you want; you just can’t openly advertise it for less than MAAP.

The way around it

Ever go to an online store and it says “call for pricing”? Or something like: “the price is so low we can’t show you. Add it to your cart for the price (you can always remove it later)”? Well those stores are going around the MAAP requirements on those products. They are not advertising the price, but will tell you if you ask, either by calling in or adding it to your cart (considered intent to buy). The call in method is relatively simple to implement if you have a call center or some kind if customer service. The add to cart method is a little more difficult and would take some extra coding or software to work on most store platforms.

Conclusion

My feeling is that MAAP is very confusing to the consumer. Most don’t even know what it is. So sites that use one of the above methods probably lose some trust. It’s hard enough to get customers to buy, but when you add an extra step, many will just go somewhere else. In practice, I generally just put the actual price I’m offering. If it happens to be too low, I just move the price up to MAAP and move on. Consumers like to know their price up front, and any time it seems to be hidden, you’ll lose more than not.

More Thoughts About Content

As I stated the other day, it’s great when your supplier gives you descriptions of their products to use on your site.  Beyond the duplicate content issues we discussed, there are a few more things to think about regarding your drop ship store.

Edit The Descriptions

Even though those descriptions are given to you to be convenient, you still need to read through them.  I have found numerous errors throughout ones I’ve been given.  I have one supplier who puts “checkout our entire line of wholesale merchandise” at the end of every product description.  Obviously not a statement I want on my retail store.  If I hadn’t read through the descriptions, I may never have known.  Other things I’ve seen are broken and incorrect html tags (why were they even there in the first place), and completely incorrect statements (a monogrammed item stating that it can be engraved with two lines of 20 characters).

Proofread The Descriptions

Sometimes these descriptions are poorly written.  Incomplete sentences, incorrect punctuation, and poor adjectives affect your credibility.  Remember, it doesn’t make any difference who actually wrote the content, if it’s on your site, it reflects on you.

Well What If I’m A Terrible Writer?

Ideally, you’ll be able to make revisions yourself.  Especially in the beginning, the more you can do yourself, the better (and cheaper).  However, if you truly are the worst writer in the world you may want to hire a copywriter.  I’ve personally used guru.com to find professionals willing to rewrite product descriptions.  Now I consider myself a decent writer, but just don’t have the time, patience, or creativity to write hundreds of product descriptions.  I’ve used a copywriter who would edit and rewrite product descriptions for around $1 each.  Totally worth it for me.

Conclusion

Remember, every part of your store is a reflection of you.  The more professional you can look the more sales you can get.  Well written and unique product descriptions are an integral part your image.

Beware Duplicate Content

One of the things that a good drop ship supplier should provide are product descriptions of their items.  Which is great.  Frankly a supplier who isn’t giving out product descriptions is risking some low sales.  Why?  Because it takes me some time to get new products up on my site.  Sometimes, a long time.  That’s a lot of information to organize, upload, etc.  And for me, thinking of clever product descriptions for each item is the most time consuming.  If I’ve got to write them all from scratch, well I just might pass.

Be careful what you use

It’s not all smooth sailing, however.  The problem with these descriptions are that they are offered to everyone.  So any number of sites could have exactly the same descriptions.  Which leads to duplicate content.  A web search for duplicate content will bring up all kinds of information.  But basically, search engines give weight to original content.  So, whenever more than one page on the internet has the same content (product description in our case) you run a serious risk of that page being ignored by the search engine results.  Of course, it’s tough to sell an item if the search engines don’t show it.

What’s a happy balance?

Personally I do use supplier descriptions, particularly at first.  When I add a new product line, it is important to me to get the product up and live on the store as quickly as possible.  As I said before, writing unique descriptions just takes too long.

However, I do go back later and make revisions where it make sense.  I won’t necessarily edit all of them, but popular and good selling items I will.  Writing original content is a great project for when sales are slow.

The Importance Of Site Design

For a new retailer, one of the biggest decisions and expenses will be setting up the website. Nowadays, there are tons of places to purchase a domain name and a million different ways to get that web store built. It will be tempting to use the “free tools” included in some e-commerce packages. These will help you set up a very basic store, with very few, if any, bells and whistles.

When I started my first store, I decided not to go that route. My reasoning was, and still is to this day, that to obtain an order online requires someone to trust your store so much that they are willing to type in their credit card number. I feel that for someone to take that risk, the store needs to look professional. I never wanted to look like some guy in his garage running a web store, even if I was. This meant that I’d either have to learn web design real fast, or I’d have to hire a pro.

 To make a long story short, I hired a professional. But as far as you are concerned, whether you are talented enough to do it yourself, or you will be hiring also, make sure to put the time and money in to make the site as professional as possible. Remember, chances are you don’t have a print catalog, and you don’t have store front. The website is your only connection to the outside world. Make sure it’s done right the first time. Your business will 100% depend on it.

Tags: drop ship, business, ecommerce, site design, website