If you participate in Amazon FBA make sure to set Replenishment Alerts for your products. You can set a different threshold for each product. This is an important habit to keep and you can easily set replenishment alerts in Seller Central. This way you’ll always have ample time to send products to an Amazon fulfillment center before your products sell out. (more…)
When it comes to inventory management, cash flow is king. If in doubt, liquidate stale inventory and invest that money into expanding product opportunities that are working for you. It may be a hard thing to do but sometimes you have to cut your losses to get ahead.
We have focused on this approach lately and it is really working for us. Unfortunately we learned this the hard way by trying to stick to stale inventory in the hopes of one day making a profit. What ends up happening is that inventory gets more stale and loses even more value. Don’t let this happen.
Many small business owners have a hard time getting a business loan from a traditional bank. Many have turned to alternative funding sources to finance their business. While one must be very careful when dealing with these types of companies, some alternative lenders have become popular among small businesses. One is Kabbage.com and the other is Cancapital.com. While I’m not endorsing either company, if you’re having a hard time funding your business, these lenders may be able to help. Make sure to review the terms of the loan before you borrow any money.
Sparklines are a great way to analyze large volumes of data and make sense out of it. It especially works well when you’re trying to figure out product sales performance on a weekly basis. Here’s a great video from Business Insider about sparklines!
Click on this link to watch the video: Sparklines Video
Online retailers are always looking for ways to increase sales using whatever tools or strategies available. It’s important to identify new products that can sell well and deliver healthy profits. The problem is that finding these top-selling products can be difficult, especially in very competitive categories. One strategy is to look at a metric Amazon.com provides called the Sales Rank or more recently called the Amazon Best Sellers Rank. While this is not a foolproof method, it does allow you to gain insight into how well a product is recently selling within specific categories. (more…)
I was searching the web and I came across a video advertisement from Webtrends. I found the video to be informative and I appreciated their thesis about the importance of delivering relevant, real-time messages across all platforms where customer interactions take place. To be successful, a brand needs to deliver the right message, to the right people at the right time. The key is to learn how to acquire customers but to do so in a way where they become engaged with your brand. Customers who are engaged are much more likely to be loyal to your brand. Brand loyalists, in turn, tend to buy more and tell others about their great experiences turning their friends into potential customers as well. (more…)
The Importance of Analyzing Your Business on a Continual Basis
The frequent and continual analysis of business performance is one of the most important duties in business. Business review helps one uncover an incredible amount of intelligence about what is working and what is not working. Without this type of review, it is difficult to asses a business’ true health. This is because without business reports, the best thing you’ll have to rely on is your best guess. Making business decisions by guessing can lead to lost opportunities as well as a lot of stress. Making informed decisions leads to profits and happiness.
There are many types of reports you can look at. I list just a few examples in this post to give the reader an idea of where to start. I’m sure in your own business you can come up with many creative types of reports to generate and review. (more…)
Your site should remain fresh by incorporating new designs often so when customers return they don’t see the same old thing every time. If you went on a date with somebody and every time you went out they dressed in the same close, you would start to wonder if this person is worth going out with. The same is true for a website. You should try your best to keep things new on your site as often as you can. For example, change the deals and promotions posted, rearrange some of the design to make navigation easier, add new features, etc. The point is to keep customers interested and engaged so they look forward to coming back to your site to find something new each time.
Re-Targeting: How Does It Work?
Did you ever have an eerie feeling that an ad was following you across the sites you were visiting on the web? Well, it probably wasn’t your imagination. You were being “followed” by that ad thanks to a marketing technique called “Re-targeting.” If performed ethically and correctly, re-targeting can be a great and effective marketing tool because it allows a marketer to display highly tailored and relevant ads and landing pages to different users. For a marketer, this can result in a more worthwhile investment in marketing dollars. For a shopper, this can be an opportunity to see ads presented to you that are highly relevant to your interests. (more…)
In business you need to be able to find and capitalize on hidden opportunities before anyone else does. Google offers a great tool called Google Insights for Search that allows you to find hidden opportunities. Google Insights for Search shows you what people are searching for, where they are searching and when. This lets you spot trends and find out what people around the world are interested in. For example, you may be a surf board manufacturer and you’re interested in finding out where surfing is most popular? With this tool you can see what geographies top the list for the search term “surfing” so you can target your marketing dollars to those locations. (more…)
Pezlogic.com was created to give my readers an inside scoop on ecommerce and technology. I wanted to have a place to share my thoughts about new technologies as well as to give my readers some insights on how we run our online business. Friends and colleagues frequently ask me technology-related …
