Need partners for dropshipping sites

[juztin]

Just a quick info about me.

I am a young entrepreneur from Montreal (Canada) and currently working full time at a web dev company. I ve been in the online business since 2005. And yes, like anybody else who started in this field, I ve made many noob mistakes but I ve learned alot from them.
I ve learned not to:
- Hire friends...yes even your closest friends
- Spend your earned money on the spot like it was a big accomplishment
- Outsource tasks that you can do yourself
- Trust dropshipper companies
etc.

I've spent the money I earned in restaurants, traveling and other useless stuff when I could actually invested the money in the company and make even more. I always thought you can run a business alone while having a full time job... I was dead wrong. There are so many tasks to do that it will eventually discourage you at some point.

Many people will start an online store thinking they can make tons of money based on the cheap cost of their items. Little do they know they need to sacrifice time and give full commitment in order to achieve such goal.

These are what I think are the keys to success with online busineses (ecommerce in this case):

1- Have a strong team highly motivated as you are. I teamed up with a few of my friends that do not have the same view as me...except for money. Those people will give up easily and will even bash on you at a point to see you fail. I believe the motivation is different for each person.

2- Dont use crappy templates for your business. If you do, make sure you tweak it as much as you can to make it stand out of the crowd. You need to attract customers visually in order to make them stay on the site. Like anything in life, people tend to trust something by the appearance.

3- Make sure your site is secure with SSL certificate and that your admin side is highly protected. I ve visited many websites where you can easily access through www.domain.com/admin...At a few occasions they didnt even bother changing their default username/pass that is admin/admin. You need to show your customers that your business is secure and legit. You can show a security seal on the front page and checkout page to show that their security is your main priority.

4- Get a 800 numbers. It is pretty cheap nowdays and make it look like you are a big company. You need to level up your game and show that you are a serious company.

5- Be up to date with the latest technologies. If your business is online, you need to know what going on in the online world...Just dont jump on the first wagon as a follower...Use your own judgement of what is good and what is crap.

6- Have a strong marketing team. If people dont come to you, you need to go to them. You really need to be creative and think out of the box. One the main key of marketing is planning. Get to know the new trends, get ready for the holidays or any other big events. For example :

Students are going back to school again very soon. Prepare your campaign ahead of it. Get your contents and banners ready, know where and how you will run this, sync your campaign via social networks if needed (timing plays a crucial role in marketing). A successful marketing campaign is the one that will have the most impact at the cheapest cost. Just do the same thing for Black Friday, Christmas, father's day , Independance day etc.



7- I know many people hate this but "the client is always right"... You need to have good customer service towards your clients. I know sometimes we are sure the client is lying or just try to get free stuff from us. Always be helpful and try to find solutions. For example:

A client ordered a phone from you but it is not working well where he is located. Let's say he ordered a 4g phone from your HK contact and his phone is not compatible with his provider. You can always help him run another rom on the device in order to fix it. He dosent know how? assist him. This situation had really happened to me. This client eventually paid me extra to customize his device.

If the client is not happy with a product try to find any solutions you can think of, give free stuffs, specials price on the next purchased etc.

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I will stop this here because I am going away from the main reason behind this post. I have found a way to dropship many products from China to the rest of the world. For a while ago I thought that since many of those products are not my niche I should just shared it with people on the board. I ve changed idea

What am I looking for? I need a team for an online store. I already know I cannot make it successful only by myself.

I basically need:
- a web programmer
- a designer
- a seo expert

The goal:
- To create and run 2 or 3 eCommerce sites. They will be created from scratch and will be probably running under Magento.

What are the products that we be selling:
- clothing ( no brand names or replicas)
- electronics accessories (iphone/ipad covers, laptop bags/sticker, camera bags etc)

The price of the products are the same as those on ebay and even cheaper.
As for the shipping, we will be using the cheapest mail method. For an iphone cover that worth 5$ the cost of shipping will be around 2$ and will take around 2 to 3 weeks. I believe people dont mind waiting a little bit longer for an inexpensive item.


PM for more info if you are interested by this.

(Contactez moi si vous etes de Montreal)

[crowdlanced]

Hi

We are a web design firm based in Toronto. Could totally do what you are asking for but it would be a paid contract instead of unpaid partner. Please let me know if you are interested and I will be glad to provide a design and development consultation for free, just to get an idea of what you need and how to grow the business

[juztin]

Im sorry, I am not interested in any paid contract. Like I said in my post, I am looking for skilled partners.

On a different topic, crowdlancing is really big in China. I suggest you taking a look at some web crowdlancing sites from there. It might give you inspiration to your project. You might wanna work a little bit more on your site's design though... just a friendly tip.

[crowdlanced]

Thanks for the tip. I am a mandarin speaker and I know which sites you are referring to and have done extensive research on them. They are quite big like you said, but most of them are not crowdsourcing, but freelancing in the name of crowdsourcing, and most jobs are "I need to get 100 people to each send a greeting text message to my gf" type of stuff. I actually got my inspirations from competitors in North America and Austria. Thanks for the advice and best of luck for your business.

[juztin]

I will suggest you to take a look at "the pig network" it is a very interesting concept. I thought about running something similar for North America but it is a lot of work. It is a very unique concept with many possibilities. I am actually using that network for most of my design tasks. People will use freelancing sites and pay 50$ for a design. On the pig network I will be paying 50$ and get 20 designs....crowdsourcing is the future for sure.

[crowdlanced]

lol at least I know we were talking about the same site now. Yes I agree with you that its a very unique concept. In fact, most Chinese big online players were exact copies of something happened here in North America. There's a facebook, then there's a chinese facebook (renren), there's google, then there's chinese google (baidu), there's groupon, then... etc. Crowdsourcing is different, the "pig network" was created two years prior to crowdsourcing first appeared in English vocab.

Our original plan was actually to build a client base here in North America and then build a designers' portal in chinese. We posted a few projects on chinese platforms and abandoned this idea because there's too much communication problem and cultural differences. I am glad it worked out for you, and yes, I can see how crowdsourcing is on its way to completely reshape the design industry.