How do I go about finding a mentor for my new drop-shipping venture?

Heard good things about GoodsCloud (www.goodscloud.com)

I'd ask Rocco Baldassarre. He is the best online marketing consultant I've ever seen and can surely give you concrete advice. Said that, my advice would be a) your own e-commerce store so you can drive traffic to it without losing money on commissions b) learn from best selling products (you can see sales ranks of competing products if you register as an amazon affiliate marketer; it's free) and copy their structure, split test regularly Hope it helps!

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.

I agree with some of the recommendations above; 1) Focus on making sure your XML sitemap is accurate, and make sure your weightings (server priority weights) are set correctly from parent to child (category > sub-category > product detail). 2) Submit through Google webmaster tools 3) Submit partials in increments (again, good suggestion at 50k/time) and pay close attention to your index rate to see how fast these are picked up 4) you can brute force a lot of these crawls by submitting and re-submitting your sitemap(s) - as often as every day 5) For very important URL's that are not getting picked up a handy trick is to tweet them out from an account that has a positive share of voice (more followers than following)