In an effort to improve the existing services at Inventorysource.com, we proudly introduce ‘Advanced Inventory Control Tools’ to better manage your Inventory Data Feeds and get you complete control over your wholesale drop ship product data feed formatting.  Using the new tools is very simple, and following the instructions below will make customizing your wholesale dropship product listings, regardless of your ecommerce platform, a piece of cake! Read on...

To gain access to the new tools login to your Inventorysource.com account and click ‘Custom Price Settings’. On this page click on ‘edit’

After you click on edit you will get the following screen with the access to the newly added toolset:

We would start with:
‘Edit Category Mappings’

The Category Mapping Tool allows you to have total control over what categories load to your website and the format they appear.  This is very important when selling from multiple suppliers.  One supplier might have a category called "Laptops" while the other supplier might use the term "Notebooks".  You can select the format you like and have future products load with the specific naming format you provide from your wholesale dropship suppliers.  Also, some suppliers have large catalogs and you might want to still have the automation service, but customize your website for a more niche or specific product type.  You can use the filtering tool to exclude whole main categories or remove an subcategories that you feel might cause a distraction on your website.  This custom tool is an amazing feature. 

1. 
   You can block categories that you have no interest in selling like "Display Cases" at both the Main Category and Sub Category levels.  You can create a unique structure that allows products from multiple distributors to form a cohesive catalog navigation.  You can change the capitalization format for your category display or improve the category naming format.  You can even use the tool to help trim a large catalog down to the specific items you prefer simply to help save space on your hosting account.
   
   When you click on ‘Edit Category Mapping’ you will see the following screen:

Here on this screen checking on ‘Exclude from update’ will make sure that the checked category is never added/updated on your website. You need to make sure that if the category is already present on your website after you save changes on this screen you will need to manually delete the category from your Store’s Administration.

1. Checking on ‘replace with Manufacturer name’ will replace the name of the category with the name of the Manufacturer supplying the products under that particular category
2. ‘Replace with Custom Category’ fields are used if you need to change the name of the top level category given by the supplier. For eg. In the screenshot above If we want ‘Fragrances for everyone’ (top level category from supplier) to show as ‘Unisex Fragrances’ on the website, we would need to write the name in the box provided.

‘Edit Price Overrides’
The Price Override Tool allows you to remain competitive on your wholesale drop ship product prices, while still saving you time.  The global price setting tools allow you a wide variety of price setting options from tiered structured to cents ending values.  However, you might not want everything on your site to sell at a 10%  or $10 margin, and price tiers might not allow you to be as specific as you like on some hot selling items, brands, categories or even to more closely match a steep discount that your supplier might have provided to you for your reseller account. You can instantly set a general price strategy for all of your products with the Custom Price Setting Tool in your account.  This new Edit Price Override Tool allows you to select specific wholesale dropship items with their own price or their own custom markup.  This means your general price setting will be applied to all products, and any product with this specific price will have that unique structure applied.

This screen is reached when you click edit on ‘Custom price settings’ shown above. Click on ‘edit price overrides’ to gain access to this filter. The page would look like this:


Let’s start with ‘Current Price Overrides’. This would show if you have any price overrides defined in the past. The area below called as ‘Add new price override’ will add a new price override for the SKU you will choose and this price override as the name suggest will override all existing price settings for this particular SKU. See below an example when a SKU is entered and the options you can explore:


Here for this particular SKU we can enter a unique price markup that would be applied to this SKU ONLY.
We will now jump to the third new advanced product filter called:
‘Edit Product Filters’
The Product Filtering Tool allows you to trim your catalog in seconds. 
When you have thousands of products on your website from your supplier it is difficult to allow new products to load while still removing some product types from your store.  This can easily be done in bulk with the category tool, but what if there are some specific product issues you want to avoid.  The product filtering tool allows you to further customer your wholesale dropship website catalog across all categories with a few easy options.  You can block products that do not have a valid image file from the supplier from showing on your site.  You can prevent issues with very low dollar items, such as some parts that some suppliers sell.  This option might allow you to customize your price settings to still use a percent margin markup up without a fixed dollar addition applied without fearing any issues from selling items which might only be a few dollars in cost.  You can also exclude large cost items from your site if you want to specialize the product price range for your catalog.  Also, some users prefer to display MAP items while others would rather focus their catalog listings for products where they have more room to customize their full profit margin range or discounts.  The Product Filtering Tool allows you more options to list the products you want to sell rather then just listing all products from your supplier sources.

You can reach this tool on ‘Custom Price Settings’ page as shown below:



Upon clicking ‘Edit Product Filters’ you will see the following screen with advanced control options:



Let’s learn how to use each of the four options:

1. ‘Exclude SKU’ will exclude that particular SKU from the daily update process, will deactivate it from your store, and will make sure it is never added back on the website.
2. ‘Exclude Brand’ will ensure that the selected brand and all associated products that match that value for the brand are not added to your store. Please note if it’s already present on your store these products will be deactivated. With some suppliers you might find they list some products with the short version and some with the long long version of the brand name.  You can exclude both with this tool as needed.
3. ‘Additional Exclude Options’ is used if:
   1) You need to exclude all products without images on your store.
   2) To exclude any products which have MAP price condition applied so that only those products remain on the store which do not have MAP price associated with them.
   3) ‘Enable exclusion of products priced with MSRP lower than’ and ‘higher than’ are used if you do not products from a specific price range removed from your store.
   4) You need to apply filter directly on the data feed to have the products block if the available quantity falls below a certain value. Eg: You can have any products with quantity available less than 10 excluded. In this case you will enter '10' in the field.

During your first few months with your site it is important to focus on beginning to build the traffic to your website to help generate sales leads.  Some new ecommerce store owners focus on paid ad campaigns.  While they are many benefits of the paid CPC and PPC approaches, as they generate instant traffic, but there are several things you can do to begin to build traffic to your site without needing to spend money or use your marketing budget at the start of your business.  This simple guide is meant to give you a few approaches that you can use to help promote your ecommerce drop ship business without impacting your budget or start up cost.

1- Submit Your Ecommerce Wholesale Drop Ship Website URL To Google:
This is a simple step that all users should take, but it is often over looked by new ecommerce business owners.  You do not have to pay to have your site indexed by search engines; however, it is helpful to let them know your new site is now online.  The world wide web has millions of new pages, content, and sites activated every day so let them know you are the new site on the block to help them find you more quickly.  For example, you can submit your site to Google within seconds just by submitting this form: http://www.google.com/addurl/ 

2- Submit Your Drop Ship Store URL To A Forum:
A forum is a website that allows users to post questions and respond with comments.  Forums can be found on running a business, marketing tips, particular product types, or just of a personal nature.  Some forums allow you to post a link to your website when asking a question or giving a response.  Other forums do not allow you to post the link, but you can list the link in your signature (your name that appears at the bottom of each post).  It is important to read the rules of the forum before you begin.  A post from a forum allows you to have an inbound link to your site which improves its SEO and it also allows you to help people find your site directly.  If the question is about a brand, product, etc you can provide some comments and post a link to something on your site that is topical.  When you post to a website forum, you want to make sure you are being helpful and responding directly to the conversation.  Think about it this way, if you were at a cocktail party and people were talking about needing to get a new laptop, you would be more welcome to the conversation if you added some comments about price vs features, one brand's reputation for quality vs another, or simply provided some details on one of the newest models.  After you added some of these details and then told them they could find these items and more on your website they might be more appreciative and responsive.  This is a much better approach then jumping in and out of conversations regardless of their topic and simply saying they can get crazy deals at your URL.  The same attitude is true for forums.  People will pay attention to helpful posts more then "spam" and as you post more you might become an expert to many people needing an opinion they can trust.  Also, some forums will remove your posts if too many users complain.   So, just thinking about your forum behavior as you would in person behavior and you should easily be able to join new forum communities to help provide traffic to your website for free.

3- Create A Free Blog To Help Build Traffic To Your Website:
If you already have a well indexed website it is easy to add a link to your ecommerce website to help initiate indexing and natural traffic.  However, for many new drop ship resellers, their website might be their first attempt at an online presence.  You know getting inbound links to your website is important and content is important for natural SEO, such as forum links.  A blog is another easy way to accomplish both.  You can use free blog services from Google (https://www.blogger.com/start) or Yovia (http://www.yovia.com/ ).  A blog allows you a online platform to easily write articles, add content, and create links to websites, such as your new ecommerce drop ship business.  If you are unsure of what to write about, think about ways to help people find products on your website.  What search terms would people looking for your products use?  What products are people looking for?   You could do a new post to your blog each week.  Think about the brands that are on your website and tell us more about some of them.  From this page you can use the blog tool to link to the page on your website that shows these brands.  Do you have a popular category for Bluetooth items, DVD Players, Silk Flowers, Beer Pong Tables, etc?  Tell us about this category, some of the product features, how they are used and link back to that category on your website or individual products on your website.  Did you get an alert about new products that have been added to your website?  Write a few details about this new item, why someone would want it, or how it is used.  Another easy approach is to write a blog post that simply compares too items like "iPod Nano vs Microsoft Zune: Which MP3 Player is better?" or "Which is the best digital camera brand, Sony or Fuji?".  A post comparing a few products or brands allows you to easily talk about the different features of the two products as well link to multiple pages of your website.  It allows you to help guide a potential customer to the product they need, and shoppers will often purchase from the site that helped them to select the item they needed.  If a customers knows the exact product they want, they might simply pick a product by price from a shopping comparison engine.  However, most people use search engines to ask questions and learn more.  If your post tells people about how to make a particular cocktail and then have links back the bar supply products used for this purpose, you can help encourage an instant purchase.  A blog allows you an easy way to add content that can be indexed by a search engine.  It allows you to help inform the public about the items you sell and how they are used to help encourage direct purchases.   Most important, the blog is an easy way for you to control inbound links to important pages on your website with relevant links and content.

4- Edit Wholesale Dropship Products Content:
With the automated data solutions from Inventory Source you can have the products load to your website with the content directly from the supplier.  While we have improved many of the description options and other product values, there are still some easy ways to help improve your traffic to your site and to convert sales.  The suppliers buy the products and ship them, the value you add as a reseller is to help sell these items.  However, some resellers never spend time improving some of the product details to help sell the items more efficiently.  You can start small.  Pick five items a week from your website.  Look at the title and the description.  You might be able to add more details on the product or more information about how it is used.  You can add some content about the brand.  You can talk about how it is the newest model in some line of great products or simply add a few lines about how this brand and this product are what you yourself use.  By adding just a few lines to a few products you can improve the relevancy of your website and product pages and improve your natural search rank.  You are creating new content to get indexed by the search engines, you will begin to have more relevant content then other resellers of the same product, and you will be able to provide more information to your customers about the item and help convert a sale.  Most of the titles and descriptions from your supplier will be great, but improving just 5 products a week can begin to have an impact.  Do not wait for your supplier to always hand you the most detailed content.  This is not their area of expertise, but this is a great way for you to add value to the supply chain for your drop ship products.  You can focus on new products, products you are familiar with, or the products that you place on sale or feature on the main page of your site.  This task will only take you a few minutes a week, but will begin to pay dividends for years for your drop ship website.

5- Meta Tags:
Meta tags are HTML tags that help you control how some search engines may index your site, by using the keywords and descriptions you provide.  The three basic meta tag components are the main site title, description, and key words.  The keyword and description meta tags that you include in the html of your pages, provide information to search engines that will not be displayed by web browsers, but often display in some search results.  Keywords are the search terms your visitor enters into the search box when trying to find your site. It is very difficult to get high rankings based on keywords, so don't get too involved with keywords. Instead, you need to think about key phrases.  The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself, friends and family, what words they would give a search engine when looking for your site and by searching for sites with similar content to what you have.   You do not need to have an exhaustive list of keywords or a length title or description.  They should be brief and relevant to your website.  Each shopping cart platform has different steps for adding these tags, so you would want to check with your how to guide or follow up with your website platform support for details on how to add the main site tags to your ecommerce drop ship store.

If you do not think twice about rising and repeating with shampoo, why would you not take the same approach to improving the natural search rank of your wholesale drop ship product reseller website?  During the first few months of your site you do not need to spend a large marketing budget to generate traffic.  Just spend a few minutes each day or each week trying to make small improvements to your website and its natural search capabilities.  You can work on adding in bound traffic with links and forum posts.  You can add to the content and relevant links coming from your blog or even post appropriate links to your site with comments on other blogs.  More over when looking at your website look for a few products each week to see if you can add any additional terms or phrases to the descriptions to help sell the item, differentiate your listings from other resellers, or add terms that will be important in search results.  These are just a few examples of some basic efforts that you can apply to helping your website stand out from the crowd, generate natural and direct traffic, and help convert your traffic to new sales as you grow your online wholesale drop ship website.

6- Generating Live! Links
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