Starting an E-Business on a Shoestring:
Step 9. Deliver Products and Services Efficiently
Issue 102, August 6, 2001
Step 9 in our series of "Starting an E-Business on a Shoestring" has to do with delivering products to the customer. In this issue:
Select a Low-Cost Way to Store Your Products
Select a Low-Cost Way to Ship Your Product
Digital Delivery System Options
How to Select a Fulfillment House
I hope you enjoy the articles on 4 ways to store and deliver
your products, as well as shorter pieces on Priority Mail delivery, digital
delivery, and outsourcing the whole process to a fulfillment house.
Last week I published the e-book version of A
Merchant's Guide to E-Commerce Payment Gateways
(www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/gateway.htm). It sells for $29.95 and includes 90
payment gateways from 27 countries, with candid user comments from 72 readers in 15
countries. The report also includes a chapter entitled, "At What Point Is
a Merchant Account Better Than PayPal or CCNow?" If you are considering
developing an e-commerce site, then you need to purchase
this e-book. Or, for a limited time, you may receive it as free subscription
bonus (along with two other e-books worth a total of $87.85) when you subscribe
to or renew my e-commerce newsletter, Web Commerce Today (www.wilsonweb.com/wct/).
My book will be published by John Wiley &
Sons this fall: Planning
Your Internet Marketing Strategy (ISBN 0471441090). It is now available for pre-publication sale at Amazon.
Please sign up for it now. You won't be charged until it ships to you in early
October, but your pre-order will give the book a big boost with Amazon -- and
this morning Amazon US was selling it for a full 30% off the retail price of
$19.95. That's hard to beat. Available at Amazon stores in:
US | UK | Germany | France | Japan
Incidentally, I'm looking for reviewers for my forthcoming book who have a relationship with a periodical that regularly publishes their reviews. If you are a business book reviewer, please
e-mail me and let me know about
you.
Strangely, one of the most important issues concerning selling tangible
products is where to store them where they are ready to ship. This article gives
the four primary alternatives, and the pros and cons of each. Read the Article
Select a Low-Cost Way to Ship Your Product
Too many companies offer only a high-priced overnight courier such as FedEx
or UPS for product delivery. But you'll sell more products by offering your
customer a slower, but lower cost alternative. Read the Article
Digital Delivery System Options
Delivering your product via the Internet is the merchant's dream. But fraud
issues require that you get specialized software to do this automatically. Here
are three options. Read the Article
How to Select a Fulfillment House
Instead of trying to warehouse, pick, pull, pack, and ship products yourself,
you can outsource this to a fulfillment house. Here are fees to look for and
questions to ask. With two small business firms to consider. Read the Article
Academic Courses and Textbooks in Web Marketing and E-Commerce
This summer (June-August 2001) I asked readers of my e-business newsletters to help me compile a list of courses, textbooks, and professors in the fields of Web Marketing and E-Commerce. Any such list, of course, is incomplete, but here is a beginning. If you'd like to list a course that isn't here, please submit it to my survey form.
Each month our team of link editors scours dozens of online periodicals and resources to find
key information on e-commerce and Web marketing. With so much new literature
available to you, how do you find what you need quickly and painlessly? Here's a selective and searchable database of article and resource links to help your
research and keep you up-to-date in the field. (Links gathered in a given month are usually available during the second week of the following
month.)
Search our database by keyword:
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commission, with a 10% Second Tier. If you signed up under my previous
program, please sign up again TODAY, and let's earn some money together. :-) http://wilsonweb.com/affiliate/