I’ve been trying to make a go of three web shops now for a couple of years with little success.
My three sites include:-
www.bargain-deals-4-u.com
An American online Shopping Mall selling a huge selection of goods at hugely discounted prices, including jewelry, tools, toys, electronic item and much more. This is the site that I expected to succeed the most due to the excellent range of goods available in the shop. However, so far to date, I have had very few customers.
My second site is:-
www.great-deals-4-u.co.uk
This too is an online Shopping Mall but this time a British site selling a vast array of goods at very reasonable prices, including gifts, cameras, tools, GPS and much more. This site, in contrast to my American site, caters mainly for the UK market and although it doesn’t contain such a selection as my American site it has produced more sales.
My third and final site is:-
www.onlinedvdsales.co.uk
An online DVD store selling a huge selection of DVDs and CDs at greatly reduced prices. This site is relatively new and so far I have had limited success with this one.

All in all I am not particularly happy with the way these shops are performing. I have tried to do all that the ‘experts’ recommend as far as providing links to my sites but progress seems to be extremely slow.
I must admit, I have been neglecting all of the sites recently because I have other projects that I am seeing to at the moment, but I would have expected greater success by now due to the amount of work I have put into them in the past.

However, I keep soldiering on. If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate the information.

Since my last posting I have been busy creating another online shop. This time I have opened an Online DVD Shop where it is possible to purchase DVD films at very reasonable, reduced prices prices. My aim with this site is to provide customers with quality DVD's at discount prices. So. if you require bargain DVDs then check out this site:

www.onlinedvdsales.co.uk

www.Bargain-deals-4-u.com is my American website that sells all kinds of items at very reasonable prices. There are great bargains to be had om jewelry, tools, outdoor equipment, toys and gifts. Everything is sold at great discount and the stock items are constantly being updated to give a huge choice of quality products. Our fine jewelry items are a particularly good buy as we can supply exceptional quality diamond, gold and silver bracelets, necklaces, earrings and bangles at huge discounts.

I have been trying for about a year now to set up two webshops: www.great-deals-4-u.co.uk and www.bargain-deals-4-u.com. The first is an Online Shopping Mall and the second site is an American Onlune Shopping Mall. Let me start by explaining my experiences with E-bay.

There is a lot of hype from companies on the web offering to provide you with drop shipping stock, some very good, but many very bad. For those of you who don’t know what drop shipping is, put simply, it is when you market products that someone else is going to supply and ship for you. You don’t actually have the stock, but you rely on your dropship supplier to ship the goods to wherever you stipulate. You receive the retail price and cost of shipping from your customer, and you have an arrangement with your supplier, to pay him at a “discounted” rate. The difference between the retail and “discounted” prices is yours to keep.
I have put discounted in inverted commas because very often the discounted prices are not sufficiently competetive for you to gain sales at a profit.

Anyway, back to Ebay. When I first started dealing with drop shippers I decided that I would first sell items on Ebay. This was expected to show me whether I could make a profit or not, and it would also save me the expense of setting up a webshop unecessarily. Unbeknown to me, Ebay doesn’t like dropshippers, even though many suppliers claim you can make huge profits by selling their wares on Ebay.

At first everything went well. So well in fact, that I started up my own Ebay shop. I loaded my site with masses of items from dropship suppliers, such as plasma screens, TV’s, tools, etc. I should mention here that the suppliers I was dealing (and still am incidentaly), have proved to be very reliable. I invested in all the webtools to make my life easier and improve my sales, and I also spent a lot of time making my webpages on Ebay looking attractive for buyers. In all, I spent quite a lot of money and a considerable amount of time on my enterprise. I ended up completing nearly 300 transactions without a single complaint. Then suddenly Ebay shut my shop down. They requested all receipts for the items that I was selling, copies of utilities bills etc. etc. I packaged masses of pages together, downloaded from my dropship suppliers websites, including proof of my memberships etc. and sent the whole lot off to Ebay in Ireland, as requested, at great postal expense. I heard nothing from Ebay for some time so I contacted them again and promptly sent off all the required information again and again until eventually I gave up. They were always claiming that they hadn’t received anything or that they required more information and so on. The truth of the matter is they don’t like dropshipping, which I have since found out.

The moral of this story is that if you intend to dropship and sell on Ebay then I suggest you don’t, as it could end in tears. I found out the hard way and it cost me a lot of time and expense.