エピソード

  • How EBiz Scams Affect YOU | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/19
    Everybody who decides to open a home-based ECommerce business is going to come across a huge variety of scams. It's unavoidable; there are literally thousands of people out there who will lie to you and try to cheat you out of tens of thousands of dollars. Learn what happens, how to avoid it, and what the true cost is. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Everybody who decides to open a home based e commerce business is going to come across a huge variety of scams. It's unavoidable. There are literally thousands of people out there who will lie to you and try to cheat you out of tens of thousands of dollars. They know they're lying, they know they're cheating. They know they could be prosecuted and sued for what they do, but the money is so good for them that they just can't resist. You're listening to this podcast, which means you either have an interest in starting an online business, or you already have an ECommerce business. If you're just starting out and you haven't spent any money yet, you're one of the very lucky few who just might make this happen without getting screwed to a wall financially. If you have an existing eBiz, there's a 97% chance it isn't making you any real money, then an unbelievable 90% plus chance that you've been cheated out of at least $15,000. Possibly as much as 35 to $40,000. I've been very successful in online business for over 30 years. I've been teaching online business since 2009. I easily have over ten thousand hours of ECommerce mentoring under my belt. More than 80% of the people I've taught had been cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars by multiple ECommerce scams. These eBiz scammers run in packs like rabid wolves. They hunt together to take you down and pass you around in order to squeeze every last dime from you. For absolutely useless apps, tools and services that will never work. Does that sound like a conspiracy theory? If you're one of the very few who hasn't been nailed by this stuff, yet, it may sound like that. But to the more than 90% of those who listen to this podcast who have spent money with these dirtbags, you already know, don't you? The minute you sign up for a free trial website, an eBiz app or tool, attend a "mastermind" webinar, sign up for a mailing list, go to a hotel seminar or take advice from a public "experts" forum, these people have you hooked. More importantly, they have your email address and possibly even your phone number, if you gave it to them. If you didn't, they'll try to look it up online through various phone location services. So how do they hook you? They make promises they can't keep. Please understand this. Nobody can promise you success. Nobody can guarantee that you'll make money, not in any kind of business, not ever. But these people will do that all day long. They'll show you fake websites that they claim make millions of dollars. They'll show you bank statements that are Photoshopped to look like they have money coming in every day. They'll give you testimonials from people who claim to make tons of money from their systems. Those people work for them. They're not real eBiz owners. They will absolutely guarantee your success in a very short period of time and tell you how easy it's going to be. They'll tell you that they'll do most of the work for you. Then they'll actually go online with you and help you apply for 40 or $50,000 worth of credit cards that you then max out with them. And they'll tell you it's okay, because they'll promise you you'll make all that money back within a few months and pay off those cards. But it won't happen. They'll tell you it's okay to take out a $70,000 mortgage on your house and spend it with them, because you'll make the money back in a few months. But it won't happen. I'm not just speaking in general terms here. Everything I've said has actually happened to people I've personally worked with in my Education, talked to over the phone, or have met in person. All of it with those actual numbers. Keep these following things in mind. Write them down, stick them up with a fridge magnet, whatever you have to do. Anybody who tells you that Amazon, eBay, affiliate marketing, template based websites, SEO apps and tools, private labeling, importing from China, using AliExpress, outsourcing your marketing and graphics, or that you'll make good money quickly online in any way, is absolutely flat out lying to you. I will guarantee that. So, like I said, better than 80% of the people listening to this podcast have already been burned this way. If it happened to you, I give you tremendous amounts of credit for even being here at all. Most people just curl up into a ball and sob for weeks. Then spend the next 10 years trying to dig themselves out of all that debt, working three jobs and selling half their possessions. If it's not happened to you yet, be very aware that when you step into home based ECommerce, ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    9 分
  • ECommerce Sales Tax - What to Know | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/19
    Every couple of years, somebody somewhere does something that brings the idea of an Internet-wide sales tax back into the news here in the US. This naturally causes people to freak out left and right. Why? Because most people are seriously misinformed about why this might happen, how it might happen, and what effect it may have on home-based ECommerce businesses. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Quick disclaimer: I'm not a legal professional, and the information here is my personal opinion after nearly 50 years in business. A scary rumor has been making its way around the Internet for many years now, and a lot of companies with extremely shady morals have been profiting heavily from it. Here's the rumor. As a home-based business owner, you have to collect and pay sales tax in every state where you sell a product from the minute you start selling online. Those shady companies I mentioned have been charging thousands of dollars for ‘systems and tools’ that are supposed to figure out and pay all those sales taxes in all 50 US states for you. The truth is, however, that you may not have to "do" that especially when you first start out. Home-based business owners historically couldn't charge sales tax in states where they didn't reside, due to the principle of nexus. Nexus refers to the "connection or sufficient presence" a business must have in a state for that state to impose its tax obligations on the business. Until 2018, it was effectively illegal for a home-based business owner to charge sales tax to residents of a state in which that business owner did not have a physical presence or business license. A home-based business owner would have had to file for a Sales Tax ID in every state in the US in order to do that. You couldn't get a Sales Tax ID in a state where you didn’t have a licensed business or any kind of physical presence. Collecting sales tax in a state where you don’t have a license to do so was, you guessed it, illegal. However, the legal landscape regarding nexus and sales tax collection has changed to some degree. The Supreme Court of the United States case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., decided in June 2018, brought those changes to the previous nexus rules. In this case, the court ruled that a physical presence is no longer the sole determining factor for establishing nexus. The reason for this case being brought before the Supreme Court was that South Dakota was sick and tired of big online-only companies like Amazon, eBay and others selling products to their residents without charging sales tax and paying that sales tax to the state of South Dakota. As a result, the Court established a new standard known as economic nexus, which considers a business's economic activity in a state as a basis for imposing tax collection responsibilities. Under this standard, even if a home-based business owner does not have a physical presence in a particular state, they may still be required to collect and remit sales tax if they meet certain economic thresholds set by that state. These thresholds typically involve reaching a specified level of sales revenue or completing a specific number of transactions within the state. The Wayfair decision was driven by the rise of e-commerce and the need to level the playing field between traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and online businesses. The Court recognized that modern technology allows businesses to conduct substantial economic activities in states without a physical presence. In the wake of the Wayfair ruling, unsurprisingly almost every state began falling all over themselves implementing economic nexus laws that require out-of-state businesses, including home-based businesses, to collect and remit sales tax if they meet the state's economic thresholds. This expansion of nexus has affected home-based businesses to some degree, as they may now be subject to sales tax obligations in multiple states, again, depending on their level of economic activity. It's important for home-based business owners to remember that Government being Government, compliance with laws in all kinds of different states other than your own can be messy. But…do NOT buy into any of those online services who tell you that they’ll "do it all for you”. Those people are nothing more than morally bankrupt opportunists using scare tactics to push very expensive junk software on unsuspecting business owners. Keep in mind that first, in order to be required to pay sales tax in all 50 states, you’d have to be grossing at least 5 million dollars a year in sales. In South Dakota, for example, economic nexus doesn't kick in until you either make over a hundred thousand dollars from South Dakota residents or complete at least 200 transaction with them in a given year. If you learn and build this business right, you can reach those levels. So when you do get there, talk to your Accountant. They’ll ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    5 分
  • Google Can't Teach You ECommerce! | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/19
    Google is a search engine. It's not a business owner, and it cannot teach you how to be a business owner. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT I spend a great deal of time teaching the Ecommerce business to all kinds of people, through my FREE Ecommerce Q and A Meetings, my Personally Mentored ECommerce Education, my videos, podcasts, articles, eBooks, and much more. I've been doing that for most of the 30 plus years that I've been successful in online business. I tell people that they can call my cell phone directly, for FREE, if they have questions about selling online. I tell them that I answer my own phone, and I'll answer their questions. Most people's response to that is surprise. How could I possibly spend that much time answering the phone? After all, I send emails about everything I do to a huge number of people. But you might be surprised to learn that I really don't get that many phone calls. Why? Because people don't believe I'll actually answer the phone. They think that offer of a phone call is some sinister trick to get them to call into a sales floor so that some fast-talking salesperson can sell them a whole bunch of garbage. Look, I totally understand why people think that way. Pretty much every MARKETER in the Ecommerce space does exactly that when they offer a phone number. But I'm not a marketer. I'm a BUSINESS OWNER, an EDUCATOR and a MENTOR. There's a BIG difference. So I don't play those stupid games. I answer my phone myself. And I answer people's questions. Free. Anyway, the reason I mentioned it is because when I do get calls, sometimes it's really obvious that I'm talking to someone who thinks Google can teach them ecommerce, or that AI can do all the work for them. The people I'm talking about start asking me a never-ending laundry list of GENERAL questions about ecommerce processes, and ask me to WAIT while they take NOTES! I can actually hear them typing on their keyboards in the background. I know what they're doing. These are people who are trying to get me to give them a step-by-step list of the things they need to do to build an online business the right way. Then they figure they can type those steps into YouTube and Google or an AI, one at a time, read some random information and set up a business successfully on their own without any help. People who do that are fooling themselves. They're also HURTING themselves. They're going to waste unbelievable amounts of time and money trying to slog their way through all the bad information, fake tools, scams and other bogus e-blabber they're going to find in YouTube, Google and AI bots. I can tell you from long experience, that this is a rabbit hole that will take them years to climb back out of, and they'll never get a business going that way. Not successfully. How do I know that? Because I've taught thousands of people the right way to build this business over the years. And hundreds of those people have told me that they took a deep dive into that same self-teaching rabbit hole, lost a lot of time and money, and spent years trying to find their way out. There are several reasons people do this, so let's talk about those for a minute. One. They just got laid off and they need to start a business quickly to make money. If that's the case, they need to go look for a job, and quickly. Selling online is NEVER a short-term solution to a financial crunch. No matter what the bubblehead gurus out there want you to think, this business is not fast and it's not easy. It'll take time, work and a good deal of learning. Two. They've been scammed in the past by the huge number of dirtbag ebiz marketing thieves online and refuse to ever trust anybody again. I UNDERSTAND that. ...Probably more than 90% of the people I've taught in this business have been cheated somewhere along the way before they found me. They don't want to get scammed again. And they're resigned to just trying to figure it out themselves. And three, there are people out there who don't understand the value of real information. They believe all information should be free. They feel entitled to it. And they think that just because the search engines exist, everything you find there is real. But it ISN'T. I've been in business overall for nearly 50 years, since I was a young teenager. I busted my butt to get where I am. I've lived through all the learning curves, the successes, and the failures. And that 50 years of experience is something I paid dearly for. I've learned things in that time that you'll never find in the search engines or in all the books you can possibly read on the subject. All that experience and knowledge is tremendously valuable, because it allows me to teach people to cut through all the crap and get straight to the core of what they need to know to do this right. Learning how to start a business from a successful experienced business owner is worth a LOT....
    続きを読む 一部表示
    6 分
  • Business Insurance - Do You Need It? | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/18
    I often get this question in my EBiz Insider Workshops: Do I need business insurance for my ECommerce business? Well, if you ask an insurance salesperson, the answer will always be a resounding YES!...because you're talking to an insurance salesperson. In reality, things are a bit different. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT People sometimes ask me if they need business insurance for their ECommerce business. Well, if you ask an insurance salesperson, the answer will always be a resounding yes. Because you're talking to an insurance salesperson. In the real world, things are a bit different. Keep in mind that I'm not a legal professional. So this isn't meant to be legal advice. If you want legal advice, talk to an attorney. My advice in this area comes from nearly 50 years of actually owning and running businesses, and it's my personal opinion. There are times when I've had business insurance, and times when I haven't. It depends on the circumstances. The most common type of business insurance is liability insurance. An insurance salesperson will tell you that you need this in case somebody gets sick or is injured by something you sell, or somebody's injured on your business premises. In my businesses, I've had offices where my employees work, and where potential customers and other people come to meet with us. I've always had liability insurance for any office space I've ever had, where other people work or visit. On the other hand, if you own a home based business, in my opinion, you can rule out liability insurance for your business premises. You won't have your internet based customers traipsing in and out of your home. They'll be buying from you online and won't even know where you live. So the chances of one of your customers being injured on your business premises by tripping over your cat or slipping on a patch of ice on your front porch is nil. It won't happen. Another potential liability is one of your customers getting sick or being injured by something you sell. When it comes to that scenario, follow these simple rules. One, never sell anything that people eat, drink, put on their skin, or feed to their pets. Two, never sell anything that explodes. I've never carried liability insurance on any of the sites I've had where I've sold physical products online, because I've always followed those rules. Is it possible that someone could hurt themselves with other products you sell? Sure, there's always that chance. If you sell clothing irons, and some guy tries to flatten his arm hair using a hot iron, that's going to hurt. If somebody has a knot in their shoelace that they can't untie, and tries to cut through it with a skill saw you just sold them, that's gonna hurt. So you really can't protect yourself all the time against every possible stupid human trick that the species can conceive of, and there are a lot of them. However, it's also very unlikely that anybody would try to sue over something like that or ever be successful if they tried. Let's look at more likely scenarios. A lot of the products that are sold in the US these days are made in China. With such lax regulation in Chinese manufacturing, there's always the possibility of lead paint, cheap and brittle plastic that breaks easily and can hurt somebody, or any number of other product problems that relate to largely unregulated manufacturing processes. This is yet another reason (in a long list of reasons) not to buy products directly from China. Forget importing directly from China; it's far too expensive anyway. Don't waste your time and money on AliExpress or anything like it. Check out my other episodes to learn why those are such bad ideas on o many levels. If you're going to sell products online you want to deliver safe, quality products to your customers and greatly minimize any need for liability insurance. That means you always buy from reputable US based wholesale suppliers that are licensed by the product manufacturers. Generally speaking, even if the products are made in China, reputable US-based wholesale suppliers do not import the cheap, dangerous stuff. They don't want that liability either. Also, if somebody does get hurt using a product you sold them, and you bought it from a reputable US source, any legal action is more likely to go after that source instead of your home based business. Liability lawsuit attorneys look for people with the mega deep pockets, like the manufacturers and suppliers. In the more than 30 years I've been in the ECommerce business, I've never known or heard of a home based business owner who was sued over a product liability issue. The only exception I'd caution you about, is if a product you sell is suddenly subject to a product safety recall. If you know that and you keep selling it anyway, that could be a problem. Your supplier will notify you if any of their products that you sell are ever hit by a safety recall. If ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    7 分
  • Setting Up Your Business Name | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/18
    There are a lot of mixed-up perceptions out there about what you should name your business and how you should register it. That can cause you a lot of problems down the road. If you do those five things, you'll be fine. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT There are a lot of mixed up perceptions out there about what you should name your online business and how you should register it. There are, of course, all the self-proclaimed but terminally self-interested EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you have to spend tons of money to let them register your business for you in some other state, and spend thousands of dollars doing so. Please don't listen to those people. In case you're not aware, Google and YouTube are packed wall to wall with newbie marketers calling themselves gurus who are simply affiliates of the many scams that exist in this business. In other words, they're only after your money and couldn't care less about your success. I'm here to talk about the truth, not the scams. When it comes to setting up and naming your business, first, I have to state for the record that I am not a lawyer or an accountant. What I'm telling you is not to be treated as legal advice. These are my experiences and opinions after over three decades in online business for myself. With that being said, here are the facts as I've experienced them over and over again. When it comes to setting up your business within the United States, always set up your business in the state you live in. The so-called experts tell you to set up in states like Nevada or Delaware or Wyoming to take advantage of "amazing secret tax breaks" and other such drivel. While there are some differences in corporate law in those states as a home based business, those differences aren't going to matter to you at this point. Make no mistake, you're going to pay taxes, and you're not going to escape that fact, no matter where you set your business up. When you grow to the size of Nike or Netflix, okay, you might want to consider some of those Nevada, Delaware or Wyoming perks. But until then, keep it simple and keep it local. It's much easier to deal with a business setup in your own state, and it's much less expensive to deal with your accounting when your business is in your own state. In some states, an accountant can set up your business properly. In other states, an attorney is needed. In all states, you can actually do it yourself, but you shouldn't. If you do it yourself and you make a mistake, most of the time that mistake won't be noticed at first. By the time it catches up to you, possibly even years later, you could find yourself owing penalties and fines that could cost you tons of money. Governments "love" penalties and fines. You need to locate an accountant or attorney near where you live, not in some other city. Having the ability to easily meet in person with the accountant or attorney who manages your business filings is a huge advantage. Make sure you shop around. The fees for setting up businesses are set by your state, but the costs you pay for your accountant or attorney are set by the accountant or the attorney. Some are way more expensive than others for exactly the same work. Don't be afraid to come right out and ask what they charge and then shop around until you find that balance between a reputable professional and the fees that they charge. Remember, the initial business setup fee isn't the only fee you'll pay them over the life of your business. You need to make sure you get a good hourly rate on your accounting and legal advice, because you'll need more of it in the future. It's actually best to find one of these professionals in a small practice. The big firms charge you for all their overhead expenses, and you don't need to pay for that. When you do this, consider the type of business entity very carefully. The legal professional you choose will give you good advice on this. My personal advice would be to go with a limited liability company known as an LLC. There are three main types of business entities that can work for a home based business. A DBA, also called a sole proprietorship, is the one that most people choose. It's quick, it's cheap and it's easy. However, with that type of business, your personal assets are exposed. That means that if you ever do have any serious legal issues with your company, the men with the black ties and the calculators can show up and take your car, your house and clean out your bank accounts. It's not worth the risk, no matter how small that risk may be. The next business type is called an LLC. You can think of an LLC as kind of a halfway step between a sole proprietorship and a full blown Corporation. It has legal protections in place for your personal assets, but it's not as complex or costly as a full blown Corporation is. The LLC was created in Wyoming in 1977 and has spread across all the US states since...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    9 分
  • Liquidations - Good or Bad? | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/17
    There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT There are a lot of so-called EBiz "gurus" out there who tell you that you can make a killing online buying and selling liquidated products. They tell you that you can buy them for pennies on the dollar, then turn around and sell them at retail on eBay, Amazon, and so on. To most people who don't have a lot of experience in retail, that sounds pretty exciting. To those who DO have experience in retail, however, buying and selling liquidations is about as exciting as putting on a $3,000 pair of Nike sneakers and accidentally stepping in a mud puddle. First, you have to understand that there's a lot of risk involved, even if the "liquidation" price seems low. Liquidated products (also called “secondary market goods”, to make the whole thing sound a little less horrifying) come from lots of sources. They COULD (rarely!) be factory overruns that never left the manufacturer or last year’s models that were never sold at the retail store. Much more likely, though, they're customer returns to big-box stores, used products such as old computers or other outdated electronics, incomplete or damaged scratch-n-dents, etc. It's hard to tell what you're actually getting, because the descriptions of the ORIGIN and CONDITION of the liquidated products are often vague, or even flat-out misleading. There are lots of web sites that advertise liquidations, acting as brokers. The web sites themselves, though, are simply paid advertising platforms. No matter how good their reputations, they do not control the actual liquidation sales themselves. Most don’t even check out the legitimacy of the liquidators advertising on them. That’s on your head; you’re the one who has to make sure you’re not getting burned when you buy. You could easily end up with a waste factor of 20 to 30% or more. Waste means products that are damaged, dented, non-functional, dirty, torn or generally useless for one reason or another. Of course the damaged boxes that contain the waste will almost always be hidden out of sight in the middle of the pallet. On top of all that, always remember that liquidated products are liquidated in the first place because nobody ELSE could sell them at retail! Second, if you're buying liquidated product pallets, you're most likely trying to sell those products on eBay or Amazon. If you've been told that selling on EITHER of those platforms is a good idea for a home-based business owner, go get some of those $3,000 Nike sneakers and look for a mud puddle. At least that won't be as disappointing as finding out that there are no profit margins left for home-based business owners on eBay or Amazon. (For more info on that sorry state of affairs, check out my Podcasts and Blog Posts on eBay and Amazon). Third, no matter where you try to sell liquidated products, the fact that you're carrying physical inventory is going to hurt your business. Selling online SHOULD be a situation in which you NEVER actually touch a product. You should NOT be storing, cleaning, packing and shipping somebody else's leftovers one at a time for a miserable profit. That's NOT an effective business model. Fourth, the only people making any real money in liquidation are the brokers. The ones you buy the pallets from. The bigger brokers buy TRUCKLOADS of liquidation pallets all at once at REALLY low prices from big companies that couldn't sell the products for one reason or another, SIGHT UNSEEN. They do NOT inspect those individual pallets. Then they unload them on YOU at a profit without even looking at them, and YOU'RE the one who gets to deal with all the heartache of trying to sell that junk at something approaching an individual profit margin that MIGHT get you a beer and a bag of chips if you're lucky. Look, if you're going to be in business, BE IN BUSINESS. Forget about the gimmicks and all the other crap that sounds too good to be true. It IS too good to be true. Get away from eBay and Amazon. Learn how to plan, research and start your own website, where you actually are your own boss. Sell NEW products that people actually WANT from legitimate manufacturers and wholesalers. Use drop shipping so that you don't have to invest any money or handle the products physically. That's how the people who make money in this business actually make money in this business. Anybody who tells you different is lying to you. Simple as that. For much more no-holds-barred, real life EBiz information, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com. Thanks for listening,...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    5 分
  • Site Templates: Should You Use Them? | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/17
    Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you cannot simply use an ECommerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, guess what? There are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you can't simply use an e-commerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, there are tens of thousands of them out there. Why? Because EASY. I say this over and over again in my podcasts, my articles, my books, my blog posts, my ECommerce courses...I repeat it so often, because it's so important. Whenever anybody tells you that anything in business is EASY, they're lying to you. They just wanna to get into your wallet. Telling everybody that this business is easy is like having the master key to every wallet on the planet! So because of EASY, every day more and more people get suckered into the idea that they can take a pre-designed website template full of random pretty pictures, slap some products on it, and start selling like there's no tomorrow. No, no, NO. This business is retail marketing. When retail marketing is done online, some of it is based in technology, yes. Hence websites. But about 90% of retail marketing, both offline and online, is based in Psychology. That's what marketing is. Psychology. If you don't understand the psychology of retail marketing, you need to find someone legit who's willing to teach you. That's not easy, because there's only a very small handful of people in this business who are legit. Like me, for example. This is important, because this stuff really is make-or-break, seriously. Here s just one of the many things you need to understand about retail Marketing in relation to psychology. We'll focus on this one because it relates to website templates. Demographics. I'll bet you've never heard that word from the online con artists that wallpaper YouTube. People like that don't even know this stuff. And if even if they did, they wouldn't teach you, because when you know what you're doing, you don't need their useless, over-priced apps, tools and amazing systems . So anyway, demographics. It's not enough to just put products out there on a website with random pretty pictures, not by a long shot. What you really need to know is who is buying those products. Why? Two reasons. One. You can't sell the same product to all age and gender groups successfully at the same time. No professional marketer ever tries to do that. Two. Different age and gender groups respond to different styles marketing. So in order to be successful, you need to understand who your best, most likely customer is. This is called creating a Consumer Persona, or Avatar. It's a very important, detailed process. Creating that Consumer Persona through careful demographic research tells you what style of marketing that particular demographic responds to. That allows you to properly create the style, graphics, typography, messaging, and social phraseology that you use to attract and communicate with your potential customers. Look, I know that sounds all fancy and stuff. It really isn't. Owning a business isn't EASY, but this stuff isn't rocket science either. It's just learning the details, like anything else in life. But it does illustrate the fact that you will never find a pre-designed e-commerce website template that is already built exactly right for the combination of the products you sell and the expectations of the demographic who buys them the most. Fancy, pretty website templates are created by graphic designers. Graphic designers are not Retail Marketers. They're GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. Don't get me wrong here. It's good to use a website template. There's so much coding in them that you don't want to build the site completely from scratch yourself. However, any website template you ever use for an e-commerce store will have to be modified visually and structurally to be an experience that your consumer demographic will respond to and buy from. This means people like the bubbleheads on YouTube who bounce up and down and say things like "I just built a professional website in ten minutes with Stix!" are not going to be helpful to you. Not EVER. So remember, templates in general are a good foundation to start with, but putting them online straight out of the box is very, very BAD. If you want to learn a lot more about how this business REALLY works, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    5 分
  • What Happened to eBay? | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast
    2024/08/17
    From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. Unfortunately, Meg Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. Be sure to Subscribe to the Show! Find much more TRUTH about ECommerce on my site. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Let's talk about the question that more and more eBay Sellers are asking more and more every day: What happened to eBay? To do that we have to start with a little history lesson. From the late 90's into the late 2000's, eBay was actually a decent place to make some money. It was just people selling stuff to people, and all was right with the world. I was very involved with eBay back then. I was an eBay Developer Partner. I was a speaker at their national eBay Live conventions. I spent years as a regular guest on eBay Radio. When eBay wanted info and content on Wholesaling, they called me. In about 2006, they asked me to write a book about how to find stuff to sell on eBay, and I did. It was published by McGraw-Hill and is still in bookstores today, although I would not recommend it now, because eBay has gone seriously downhill since about 2009. I firmly believe that the driving force behind all the things that were GOOD about eBay in those days was Meg Whitman, eBay's CEO back then. On her watch, the eBay Partner Program was created. eBay Educators were trained and certified to help potential sellers. Outreach programs for disadvantaged people who wanted to start a business were created. The eBay Radio Show began. The "eBay Live!" national convention was created. The 'eBay Bible" was written. I met Meg Whitman at the eBay convention in Las Vegas in 2006, when I was there as a speaker. Very smart person, and very interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, Ms. Whitman left eBay in March of 2008. That's when eBay started to slide downhill. eBay is a price-driven marketplace. It's like a flea market, actually. Everybody who shops there is looking for deal and bargains; they all look for the lowest price. That was okay when it was just people selling to other people back in the glory days. That marketplace tended to correct itself with respect to general pricing. After Meg Whitman left and the new management took over, it seems that the people running things got greedy. It started to look like everything was about earning more money for eBay in any way possible, even if it was at their Sellers' expense. The 'eBay Live!' conventions were shut down. The training and partner programs were shut down. eBay University was shut down. Regulations got more regulatory. Customer Service got less customer servicey. Fees went up, more and more each year. eBay stopped backing up their sellers as much as they used to during problem resolutions, and started siding with the buyers much more often. Sometime in about 2009 I was contacted by eBay and asked if I would work with one of their groups, to teach them how wholesale companies operated and how to properly communicate with them. I figured, "Great, eBay wants to learn more about how wholesale works!" That couldn't be a bad thing, right? So I did what they asked. Later on, I learned what they had really been interested in. They had started a project which, if I remember correctly (don't quote me on this) they internally called the 'Enterprise Project'. They basically opened a back-channel into eBay and began contacting wholesale and manufacturing companies, and invited them to come in and sell directly on eBay. Under assumed Seller names, so that nobody would know who they really were. In other words, eBay was no longer just people selling to people; it became more and more about wholesalers selling to people, but most people didn't know that. The effect is that eBay has been flooded with wholesalers who can sell at much lower prices than individual eBay Sellers can. That's a terrible thing for eBay Sellers. In fact, more and more eBay Sellers are complaining that they can't find cheap enough wholesale sources of products to beat their competition on eBay and make a profit. Those Sellers blame their wholesalers for that. The reality is that eBay Sellers simply can't compete against other 'Sellers' that they don't realize ARE wholesale companies. As I said earlier, eBay has always been a price-driven marketplace. People looking for the lowest prices. Searching for what they want, then clicking the "Sort By Lowest Price" button. So of course eBay Sellers can't compete, because the wholesalers will always have the lowest price! It's important to understand that the worst place you can possibly put a home-based retail business is squarely in the path of the most bargain-hunting consumers. That's a given no matter where you're selling because home-based business owners need real profit margins (at least 20%) to sustain a business, and 30 to 35% to grow that business. That doesn't happen in ANY ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    6 分