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Carrying around a laptop and using it whenever and where ever has not been that desirable for many people, they feel burdened at the idea of taking care of their luggage and concentrating on their laptop’s screen at the same time. Mobiles have solved this issue. A mobile version of your online wholesale directory or website will be in access of your target customer no matter what time of the day it is and what his location is.

Customer’s Convenience

Regular Smartphone users find it very hard to visit and browse the websites which do not have a mobile version and hence skip visiting them. If your website is one such websites, no matter how much value you offer to your client, he will not be comfortable in availing your services through his phone, which is his prime tool for online shopping.

Reliable payment mode

Unlike e-commerce, transactions made through mobile phone promise more protection. It is because the scammers have not yet found their way in to break the security barriers of the Smartphone and we hope that they never do. Reliable and easy means to make online payments for wholesale products has made M-commerce a great tool for young and old customers alike.

Saves time and power

Smartphones are very handy and the technology has made them even easier to use. This process of making Smartphone more desirable for the people is on and many new features have made these phones indispensible for the users. Using Smartphone is easier that using desktop or laptop and it also saves energy.

In India, infrastructure is the first huge hurdle. Power supply is inadequate to meet the demands of industries in achieving high capacity utilizations. Due to frequent power cuts, manufacturing units and service industries without their own captive power plants are able to achieve only 60% to 80% of their full capacity. These power problems affect not only production but also constant communication between the suppliers and the sellers.

The second significant hindrance is the communication with the government officials and politicians, most of whom are corrupt. Unless bribes are negotiated and paid, nothing moves easily. If foreigners want to trade with suppliers from India, they should be ready to understand the subtle communications conveyed by those in power. The recent failure of a communication satellite of India and the 2G mobile phones scam has made communication between India and overseas even tougher. 3G technology and broadband Internet are yet to establish themselves at adequate levels in India. Unless, these communication channels and power supply improve and political interference and unnecessary regulations are reduced, trading with Indian suppliers would remain a major issue.

On the other hand, the success story of China wholesale trade growth in the past few decades has a strong resemblance to the tremendous growth that Japan achieved between 1960s and 1990s. Hence, many economists express doubt whether China would be able to sustain this growth or not like Japan. Further, majority of Indians have English as a compulsory subject in schools and colleges, even if they study in their local languages. In contrast, vast majority of Chinese are yet to learn English, with Chinese being the major medium of instruction. Hence, communication with most Chinese suppliers and labourers becomes difficult for foreign buyers. This would take time to change.

The first step is to decide whether you want to be a general clothing wholesaler or you would like to specialize in a particular niche. If you choose to be a general clothing wholesaler, you would sell clothes of all genders, ages and types. On the other hand, a niche wholesaler specializes in a particular area of clothing products. How you set up your clothing wholesale business will be determined by your decision at this stage.

In order to  become a clothing wholesaler you should  first have before hand experience of clothing business and most of all you should have enough experience to distinguish the quality of clothes. The next step is to look up in yellow pages and other online directories to locate clothing wholesalers and manufacturers in your area. You can contact or visit them and obtain sample items to determine whether the merchandise meets your quality standards or not. Studying the business of other wholesalers will also help you to fix proper prices for your clothing items. You should also get detailed information about their return policy, restocking fees, shipping, ordering deadlines and quality guarantees.

The next important step is to introduce yourself to your customers by the use of different marketing techniques. You should establish business relationships with the clothing retailers, commencing with the locally owned retail stores, as they are convenient to work with. Make sure you possess samples of your clothing merchandise and price list for immediate sales. It is advised that you should start with a small inventory, and gradually add merchandise as you grow with time. This saves you from being stuck with outdated wholesale products and enables you to manage your business conveniently. All these steps can collectively enable you to make a good start as a clothing wholesale supplier.

The first and foremost reason of failure of ecommerce website is the unprofessional design or layout of website. Unprofessional design makes it difficult for users to easily through the website. The simple solution is to make the website user friendly. User-friendly interface attract users and retain them as they like the experience they had on your website. Amateur wholesalers and distributors thinks that having a complex design attracts users; however, the case is vice versa.

Shopping process is also one of the reasons of failure of ecommerce website. If the shopping process is too long then users would not like it and never again deal from your site. Keep the shopping process shorter and minimize it to one or two pages. Follow the thumb rule that shorter the shopping process, the better user experience. Bad or no marketing campaigns also result in failures because when people doesn’t know about your website then how is it possible that they will deal with your ecommerce wholesale website.

Without customer’s feedback, the wholesalers will be unable to amend the flaws in their website. Therefore, provision of feedback in every section is also very important. Customers also feel safe with websites, which offers feedback option. Only getting feedback does not end the game, the wholesaler would also need to act on valuable feedback and reply to customers positively. Lack of security is also one of the reasons of online business failure. The current online world is full of scammers, in order to get rid of them the owner would need to apply strict security measures that will keep the business and customers’ information safe.

At the end, they could not comprehend this difference and I had to cancel my order. Well, the reason to cite this incident over here, is just to let you people know that this order cancelation did not make me any significant difference. The thing is if the company could reconfirm my address or deliver the order just for the sake of address confirmation which could cost them hardly few dollars. If they did so, probably they could win several more orders from my side, my family, my relatives & friends over the next few years. But they preferred to cancel the order instead of delivering product to a confirmed address.

I have also encountered a good online wholesale trade company to which I ordered some digital timers for my business but when I received, I found few of them faulty. They could not update time automatically but in the busy schedule I forgot to send them email. Later after two and a half month, I sent them an email regarding my issue and they told me that I have passed the refund time. But still just to make their customers happy, they were ready to send me few digital timers again without obtaining their previous timers. This is a wonderful example of superior customer service that appealed me so much. No doubt, whenever I need to buy wholesale products, they are the first name I will shop.

All that matters for a business is to give a wonderful experience in the first go and treat them more cautiously than your existing customers so that they can be converted into returning customers. Customer service department plays a major role in converting your one-time customers into returning customers.

The calculations:

Let’s start this with an example, if manufacturers sell a handbag at a fixed price of $17 and add an additional amount of $3 as shipping charges then the total amount becomes $20. Whereas, if they sell a handbag at $20, it means they are covering the shipping charges within the asking price and offering free shipping service. Although the selling price is not arguably increased but it certainly adds up huge profit margin in their business when they will sell dozens of items everyday.

It shows if customers get entice by free shipping, they do not notice the small difference in the asking price. While if you make your reputation as a reliable supplier, majority of people will prefer to come to you.

Free Shipping Argument:

Many people may not agree to the point mentioned above and they argue that suppliers with “real” free shipping offers will earn more profit. If you are running an online store, then you must be focusing on SEO as well to bring your page closer to appearing on page 1 rank. These all efforts are to match best with any users query against your projected keyword. Once you are closer to the user, large numbers of buyers will certainly pick you.

It means free shipping offer can increase your profit margins in e-commerce business as well as the number of customers whom you want to entice.

The magic of dot com world is no more just a magic, it is today’s biggest reality. Several business models of e-commerce world are being implemented by wholesale businesses to achieve success. The advantage out of all is to spread wholesale business to the global market at minimum possible cost to get the maximum benefit.

• A wholesaler can manage his supply chain in a better way with the help of e-commerce strategies. Being a wholesaler, you can ensure a better coordination through out the supply chain from the manufacturer to your customers. You can monitor all the tasks from the buying of material till the selling of products to the customers on internet. Different wholesalers dealing in different products can utilize the internet powers for the hassle free supply chain management.

• Another e-commerce strategy that can be very effective regarding wholesale business is customer services. It is to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction by providing customer-friendly services and solving any issue regarding your products if they have. You can take your customers views about your wholesale business services (such as in-time delivery of products) as well.

• Major issue that most of the wholesalers face is the inventory management. E-commerce strategies help wholesalers in managing the inventory and warehouses. Wholesalers are usually unaware of the stocks and quantity of products in the warehouse and so they spend enough in purchasing more wholesale products that leads to higher expenditures and poor management. E-commerce tools and software help wholesalers to keep a check on the quantity of wholesale products and lower down the inventory costs.

There are several e-commerce websites that are facilitating the online business transactions by providing user-friendly applications and easy browsing features. Different kinds of e-commerce software, secure payment methods assist these websites to perform better in selling and purchasing of wholesale goods. If you are a starter just, then take advantage of these effective e-commerce strategies in your wholesale business.

Several times it happens that we keep on searching one domain name for long hours and we do not find anything in the end. I came to this clue that million entrepreneurs have captured billion of domain names. A parked domain mostly contains one page which indicates that the website is either under construction and meant for further development. There is no time limit for the page to be developed but the page must be revamped on yearly basis. This thing has made the whole system choked up and making the common people messed to find the particular domain searched.

The only strategy behind domain parking that entrepreneurs put some ads on the landing page and make some dollars from that domain when few people search that web address or click on those ads. It looks ridiculous that entrepreneurs have captured a complete domain and do not have any plan to develop it in coming years. Another issue that is related with development of page is payment of the hosting fee. Once you pay for the hosting services, the host will provide you enough space for the website and will fulfill your special requirements regarding your domain. Once host worked on the domain, it will be no more parked domain.

Another purpose for which people use domain parking is entirely for “reselling” the particular domain to the buyer for heavy fee. This was a good business in the staring days of internet when larger brands wanted to grab the particular domain names for business. Another purpose of parked domains is to redirect the traffic from a particular website that is quite similar to your web address like (for example) businesstoday.net to businesstoday.com.

I hope the purpose is clear now that why entrepreneurs emphasize to park domains. Your views are welcomed on this topic.

It is also true that we can get the better ideas while looking at illustrative examples of other ecommerce websites. Let me summarize few points to improve the effectiveness of an ecommerce website.

Homepage

The homepage should be excellent and well organized. A customer should not feel messed up at the landing page but the homepage should be very effective. All kind of content should be well organize, visible and easily accessible to clients.

Categories Outlook

Ecommerce websites are established for online sale mostly that is why the purchase process should not be complex such as entering a delivery address, payment method and then confirming the order. The process can be simpler like there should be a slight but comprehensive description under each product displayed along the option to “Buy” and break the purchase process into small portions.

Featured Product Photos

There should be a category of “Featured products” of the day or week that are hot favorite sold products of the time. These products should be categorized and highlighted with the images, these images should not be plain but from multiple angles and vivid description.

Automatic Confirmatory e-mail

Once a customer has placed his order, an automatic confirmatory email should be sent out to him that should be brief, straightforward and representative of company. This thing is quite minor but will enhance the customer’s trust and he would love to come again to have business with you.

Colorful Appearance

Last but not the least, the website must look alive, colorful and pleasant but at the same time it should be elegant with user-friendly features.

Let’s construct a database of statements that people consider as the most important in generating customer satisfaction. I am going to start it with a general example, just imagine that you put a query on any business website regarding their product (functionality or design) that you are considering seriously to purchase. And you recheck the website twice, thrice or even more times in a week but there is not any timely response from them. What would be your response? I think you may not like to visit their site again or may defer the idea of purchasing the good from them. Isn’t it?

Therefore I think that a business should respond to a customer before time as soon as possible. Business Owners that consult me for improving their repute in business circle and I suggest to them deliver customer satisfaction through your website and improve the response as much as possible of your website. Now here comes the next question, how is it possible? When you improve the customer services it means you are depicting the best business practices and showing the internal processes of business are running smoothly. You can use number of ways to improve the customer satisfaction being online, such as:

Mostly customers are online now and they want to search the goods or services being online rather than going in the store. Therefore keep your website updated and keep your customers up-to-date about latest products and related queries. If they put any such query online, try to respond them within 10 minutes so that they will know that they are being listened. Next point is, make your “Contact Us” page available on the Main or Home Page of your website. Always encourage them to ask you more by writing “Contact us for further information”.

One advanced step that you can take is to provide your customers with the facility of online chat to provide in-time and better support in asking about anything related to your product and services. You can make “Feedback and Suggestion” page to take their opinion and being actively present over there. Another option is “F.A.Q. Page”, where you can provide comprehensive and detailed answer to such questions that can be asked by customers. If you can afford to hire experts, you can start forums or blogs page with your website’s Home page where you can understand the relevant issues and improve your performance and can give stated instructions to your customers.