Merchants need a lot more than just a feature-filled website shopping cart and the best free shopping cart software available to succeed. They need an edge when it comes to products. An edge could mean better pricing, a more accommodating return policy, better customer support, more efficient after-sales service and, of course, the latest item in demand for a particular niche.
But how does one go about finding out about new products, fads and such? Are there any free tools available to help merchants keep abreast with current news regarding products and related industries? We shall attempt to address those questions in this online shopping cart tutorial installment.
The Present
Well, the first thing to remember is to always keep an open mind about things. If you can’t be the first to spot a potential best seller or hot-selling item then at least be quick enough to react and ride the wave before it crashes. A good example is the vuvuzela – a horn used widely at African and South American football events. The controversy surrounding it only increased its popularity among worldwide audiences resulting in massive orders for this “Made in China” instrument.
Many street merchants as well as a few online merchants had already foreseen that this plastic horn, with the ability to deafen a person when unmodified, would be a big hit during the World Cup. Not only did they stock these horns, they also made it available in various participating country colors, which makes it appealing to a wider market.
If you were running a sports store with a steady stream of visitors, and you found out about this instrument on the first day of the World Cup, you might still have had time to get a few of these wholesale and sell it on your site just to make a few extra bucks.
The Future
In fact, many online stores are already providing variants of vuvuzelas for countries that did not even make it to the 2010 World Cup. There are even designs for popular teams but I get the feeling some stadiums might not take too kindly to these noisy instruments and could end up banning it.
Fortunately, this instrument is not very expensive and, due to its current popularity, can fetch quite a profit.
Old Is Gold
If you are stuck with leftover stocks of vuvuzelas, fret not, just remarket them as World Cup souvenirs. You might even want to sell it with a nice display box to bump up their perceived value.
Tools
One of the ways of getting the latest information or news about the latest products within a certain industry is by subscribing to news portals related to the industry. Another way is by keeping tabs on what top competitors are promoting. Either way, you can use notify.me or Google Alerts to help you garner all the latest updates in just one place.
notify.me is great for sourcing information from specific sites while Google Alerts scrapes the Net for news related to search terms which have been keyed in and sends the updates directly to your Gmail account.
We hope you have found this installment of our online shopping cart tutorial useful. Give us some feedback on this article, and if you like, let us know what you’d like us to blog about in our next online shopping cart tutorial.
Recent Posts:
- Get A Custom Designed Website + Branding Solution With InstanteStore – From Concept To Creation
- Why Aesthetic Visuals Matter on Your Website and Social Media.
- How InstanteStore Helped Sagiri Dayal Launched A Successful Online Store With Immediate Sales
- SCAM ALERT – Fake Company Asking People To Send Them Money For Tasks
- How To Setup Stripe Account For Ecommerce
