I want to add a store to my web site. What shopping cart software should I choose?

If you'd like a Forbes-listed, Marketer of the Year as your mentor... feel free to set up a 10 minute call with me. If you look at my reviews and do some research on me, you'll quickly see why, if you want an empire, you should get my advice. My average client grows by approximately 1,400%. That's insanity.

As your question is a little open-ended, I’ll avoid going too in-depth, but I’ll try to give an overview based on my own experience running E-commerce stores with multiple dropship and non-dropship suppliers. The first question you need to ask yourself are your reasons for wanting multiple suppliers rather than just one. This will give you an overall criteria to assess whether or not you need a particular supplier in your network, because more relationships = more time and resource to manage which inevitably equals more cost. The main reasons are 1) Availability of new Products New suppliers will allow you to broaden your product offering. I would tend to avoid any suppliers that carry a very narrow range of SKUs (product lines). The exception is suppliers that sell a unique product that will sell significant units at a volume, or an average amount of units at high margins. 2) Redundancy In the event a supplier of a key product runs out of stock, increases their prices or fails to maintain the service quality you’ve agreed upon, it’s useful to have alternative options. If anything, it gives you confidence to negotiate on price without fear of losing everything if it all goes wrong. 3) Cross country / state routing Having multiple suppliers set up in all of your key countries will greatly reduce shipping costs and time-to-customer, which in turn increases customer loyalty. Finding Suppliers and Original Products From experience, the best dropship suppliers are those that don’t advertise the fact they dropship. In fact, the suppliers who will usually put the phone down on anyone who asks that question will usually mean you’re onto something, as the barriers to entry for that particular niche are likely to be high. Also, original products don’t have to be products that aren’t sold anywhere else, just products that aren’t widely available to resellers. This means getting to know your niche, finding out what’s in demand, and making contacts amongst sellers. Here are a few places I’ve found successful: - Trade Shows and Exhibitions. As well as being a tax deductible business trip (the kind of ‘business trip’ where the nights are more important than the days!), Exhibitions and Trade Shows are packed with new product ideas, and manufacturers and retailers keen to make more sales. Try to find overseas exhibitions; as well as the benefit of seeing a new country under the guise of work, you’re also likely to find products that currently aren’t being sold in your home-territory, giving you a significant head start. Frankfurt in Germany is the exhibition capital in Europe and well worth visiting if you’re based in the US and there’s a relevant exhibition taking place. - Niche / Industry Print Magazines. Assuming the newspaper and print magazine industry still exists when you read this, the classifieds at the back of these publications usually feature small independent manufacturers with good products and poor marketing skills. - Private Advertisers on related blogs and forums. Use a tool like Whatrunswhere or Adbeat to find advertisers in your niche who produce a product. Many will already have an affiliate program in place, but will often also consider a dropship arrangement if you speak to the right person. Technology There are platforms such as Hybris or Saleswarp that can do clever things with supplier management and inventory load balancing, but I’m assuming you’re looking for an overview at this stage and nothing too in-depth. Personally, I’ve always started with a one size fits all solution (basic supplier chain management built into the ecommerce platform) and as the business grows I’d usually move to something more custom to manage things like - Location based order routing - Inventory on hand management - Delivery tracking and reporting - Supplier Payments The cost to have something similar developed will be relatively expensive, so it’s worth starting lean and using something off the shelf in the early days. Agreements I could talk about SLAs and aiming to establish exclusivity or territory rights, but apart from being expensive to setup, it wouldn’t be realistic to expect this until you have some reputation in your industry. In the early days, it’s simply a matter of selling in volume, paying for your goods on time and not being a jerk when you need something done. Taking your supplier’s sales rep out to lunch once in a while never did any harm either!

Apple specifically precludes anything that can't be delivered via the app from using in-app purchases. So you're free to tie a credit-card to services and real-world fees (think Uber) without paying Apple any transaction fees. Here's Apple's documentation on what they support (and don't allow) for in-app purchases. https://developer.apple.com/in-app-purchase/In-App-Purchase-Guidelines.pdf Happy to help in any way I can. I run a mobile-based startup myself.

This really depends on the type of e-commerce platform and the platform on which it is built. For my e-commerce clients, with less than 1,000 products, the best business plan reference book would be The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. However, you must first understand the triggers you would need to captivate and persuade your audience to purchase. For that, I would recommend Fascinate by Sally Hogshead. When you start to get into the larger e-commerce retail websites, you run into more dynamic data and database strategies to ensure that your website runs smoothly and can be indexed by the search engines properly. The book recommendation would depend on what platform your website is built. However, Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug would be a good starting point as the business plan would be contingent on the flow of the website and customer purchase power. If I can further help you in any way, contact me. I'm always here to help.

The quickest path to cash is almost always consulting. Be very specific about what it is you can offer. Don't just offer "business consulting". Find a niche and serve it. Reach out to your network, including friends and family and ask if they need or know of anyone who might want to hear about what your consulting has to offer. That will be way faster than trying to go at it from scratch or cold calling. If you call 100 people in your network this week, you will have a consulting gig within 3 weeks. Good luck, and let me know if you'd like advice on entering a digital marketing/lead generation consulting niche. I've grown from zero to $8,000 of monthly recurring payments in the last 40 days! Dave