Imagine for a minute that you’re searching the Internet for a hand painted kids step stool. You start clicking through the search engine results and you see some blah-blah sites, and some nice-looking sites. Then you hit that one. That site that looks great, has all the right colors, and seems very professional. You instantly picture a huge corporation and a warehouse behind this website. Suddenly you get that warm and fuzzy feeling that sparks you to jog down the stairs, grab the credit card, run back upstairs to the computer and buy that kids step stool from that site. Now, what you don’t know is that behind that website may or may not be just some average Jane who takes orders and drop ships those kids step stools – having a cup of coffee while in her robe, in her home office. Or who knows, it may be a huge company with that warehouse. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you never pictured Jane in her home office when you saw this great-looking, professional site. Nope, you just saw “professional” and it triggered a buying impulse in your brain.
The beauty of the Internet is that it finally leveled the playing field between the big corporations and the small home office. The common thread is that first impression… That site with the right colors that sparked you to feel like you can definitely trust this company with your personal data, and know that your hand painted kids step stool will arrive as promised. That’s what you need. I searched for months, and tried several different ecommerce solutions before finding InstantEstore. They provide you with a complete turnkey solution where you just load your products in and you’re ready to start taking orders. You have to have a professional first impression. You can’t have an amateur web site that’s clunky to navigate and expect potential customers to think, “I must go grab my credit card!”… It’s just not going to happen.
I utilized InstantEstore for three years with my drop ship store and they were amazing. The templates look very professional and they operate flawlessly. Two very important features to your potential customer. You can tweak and completely customize nearly every single part of your site with the admin backend. Loading products is very simple. A very important factor is the search engine optimization (SEO) that you have at your fingertips with their solution. They even have a feature that makes SEO a complete no-brainer by telling you exactly what you need to have in each field. If you follow their advice, your products will be all over the Internet and high up in the search engine results.
You could always pay for a custom site but I assure you it will not be as cost-effective as InstantEstore. And the times I did need support from them, they were top notch. There were times when I needed a feature added that I was willing to pay additional for, and they’d reply back with, “Please have a look at your site and see what you think.”…. and didn’t charge for it. They truly love what they do, they’re amazing at it, and it definitely shows. Simply send them your domain name that you registered, and they’ll have it set up and ready for you to load products up. They offer a bunch of default templates to choose from, but for that “wow” factor we talked about earlier — you know, the one that made you run downstairs and grab your wallet — I’d opt for the customization and logo creation. I had two different custom designs from them and both were perfect, and each had exactly what I asked for. I could not think of a single thing that I’d ask them to change.
Once you have your store online, you’re ready to move on to the next step, Step 5: Picking Your Drop Shippers (details coming next week! But you can get a great head start by visiting our drop ship guide)