Magento

Hello all,

I am a former ebay affiliate who’s been a victim of the recent mass assassination of affiliates in the ebay partners network. Although I only started affiliate marketing this year, starting with them when they were still with CJ and up until now, I’ve made as high as ~50k a month in revenue, minus the 10k or so spent on marketing.

Having been kicked out of epn, as countless others were under a nebulous pretense of our traffic not being “engaging” enough, I have decided to go into the eCommerce market. I have been researching, learning, making mistakes for the past few days in an attempt to get started on this fast and be on my way to hopefully more success without the risk of being at another company’s mercy.

So far, I’ve concentrated on what dropshipping has to offer and have found it difficult ot discern who is trustable out there and who is to be avoided. I have learned to stay away from Doba and Simplx. I have heard good things about the Salehoo directory. I’ve also looked at the wiki section of this site for some good places to look....but the list isn’t very extensive.

So let me cut to the chase. Is there anyone who has enough experience and expertise on this forum that can help me get started with Magento? I want to do various niches, but I’m not sure if there are enough quality sources out there that dropship and provide their respective catalogue to upload to an eCommerce site. I found it a little difficult to upload some csv files that I got from one of the sources I signed up for, to test out some features. I can’t say I know the process of updating products, setting up a store, or dropshipping that well, but I’m trying to learn.

Asking for help is usually my last resort lol but I’m kind of stuck. It’s like learning how to walk again.

Everyone new here or can anyone in here help me. In return, I can help you in marketing.:D

Your help is appreciated. Thanks.

Hi Hersh,

You can check the following company. They have a list of dropshippers, and are also able to custom build a .csv full of products that you can upload straight into Magento.

http://inventorysource.com

helpinghandhost - 28 August 2008 09:36 AM

Hi Hersh,

You can check the following company. They have a list of dropshippers, and are also able to custom build a .csv full of products that you can upload straight into Magento.

http://inventorysource.com

Sweet. Thank you! I don’t know how else I could have found them. Search engines are full of spams and this site never showed up.

I just registered with them. My final question: since I’m new to this, do you think if I market products as well as I did with ebay, the potential is just as great or if not greater?

A post I ran into the other day on some site wasn’t very encouraging b/c they said there is no business in dropshipping and that affiliate marketing is inifinitely better. I think if it’s doable, I can get it done though. I just don’t want it to be a moot endeavor.

There are many people who’s income is from dropshipping alone. If you market your products well enough, find a good niche, and find a good dropshipping company there’s no question you can be successful too.

I think the earning potential is higher than ebay if you have a steady flow of traffic, as a merchant accounts fees are a lot less than ebay’s and that’s key with dropshipping.

The best place to find sources for products is WorldWide Brands.

I wouldn’t recommend Magento for what you are trying to do though. It’s got major problems in the areas you need, such as no vendor or manufacturer data, no drop ship notifications, really bad import and export, and no dynamic datafeeds support, and the content management system is built for static content.  The SEO features are half there, and the pages generated are pretty large.

helpinghandhost - 28 August 2008 03:27 PM

There are many people who’s income is from dropshipping alone. If you market your products well enough, find a good niche, and find a good dropshipping company there’s no question you can be successful too.

I think the earning potential is higher than ebay if you have a steady flow of traffic, as a merchant accounts fees are a lot less than ebay’s and that’s key with dropshipping.

Yes...just to clarify, my success has been with ePN as an affiliate marketer, promoting ebay products using methods such as 1st teir and 2nd tier search engine ppc marketing and using BANS plus a few other methods. I’ve never had an ebay store. So on the marketing end and finding niches, I think I may have had a headstart on that.

I don’t know what the potential in ebay stores is...since I’ve never had the experience, if that’s what you were talking about. Otherwise, ePN had been good to me in helping me go from 0 to multiple 5 figure a month income in only 3 months. Too bad the new management at ebay is screwing everyone over and arbitrarily shutting down money makers.

joyously - 28 August 2008 05:31 PM

The best place to find sources for products is WorldWide Brands.

I wouldn’t recommend Magento for what you are trying to do though. It’s got major problems in the areas you need, such as no vendor or manufacturer data, no drop ship notifications, really bad import and export, and no dynamic datafeeds support, and the content management system is built for static content.  The SEO features are half there, and the pages generated are pretty large.

What would you recommend then? osCommerce? ZenCart?

I suppose I could go with that and once Magento is up to par, I could use their migration tools to migrate.

I’ve used VirtueMart with Joomla.....and I have a beautifully built script based on that, but I’m not sure if there will be a way to migrate that later on.

Hersh, what types of products are you looking to sell? Honestly, any product distributor worth their salt will do dropshipping (they may charge you a fee).

Let me know via a PM what niches you are looking at and I might be able to help