Finding A Product To Sell Online – Don’t Marry It, Test It

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Just because a product sells like gangbusters on someone else’s site, don’t assume it will sell on yours.  Your product has to fit in with your overall expertise and what your site is about in order for people to go there and look for it, much less buy it.

Even if a product fits your site and its personality like a hand in a glove, don’t assume it will sell.  The pricing may not be right, the market may be saturated, the stars may not line up right.  Who knows why some things sell on any particular site and others don’t?  You can’t be clairvoyant: you’re not a mind reader, you’re a web marketer.  Everyone has 20/20 hind sight.  That’s why the best plan is to just put up a product and test it out.  It either sells or it doesn’t.  Sometimes you can tweak it…tweak the price, tweak the offer.  But often people just aren’t interested in buying that product from your site and that’s all you really need to know.  And there’s a very simple way to figure this out.
Whether you wish to sell ads related to your content, or join an affiliate marketing program or sell your own products on your site or on Amazon or eBay, there are a lot of moving parts to get right on a website and you will need to make a lot of right choices along the way.  The way to do this is by testing: testing ad placement and color, testing content, testing product categories, testing various suppliers and vendors, testing affiliate marketing programs to see which ones work for you.

Those who take the time to test everything they are doing are the ones who eventually become successful in whichever field they choose.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested.  I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero.  I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing.  I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in  the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company which sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience.  All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads, text ads sold from my site, and some proprietary ad networks. It just took time and testing.

Same with a Job Board or employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com.  I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demograhic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site, and why should they, as they would be creating their own competition?  Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well  for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and  b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.  It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successsful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

There are many product testing examples as well. Mom-and-pop team Cheryl and Gary Casper started small, like many do on eBay, first looting their own garage, even snatching up VHS copies of their daughter’s Cinderella and Sleeping beauty then moving on to sell their neighbor’s cast offs.

As they learned about online auctions and particularly the eBay environment, the Caspers moved on up the selling food chain.    They now sell $15,000 to $20,000 a month in goods on eBay.

How did they do it?  Trial and error.

After their home started overflowing with neighbor’s cast off products, the Caspers turned to drop-shippers–companies that charge others to sell their products then ship directly to buyers. Although this looked good at first – removing the risk of buying the merchandise, the inconvenience of storing it and the hassle of shipping it—there were definite drawbacks. The Caspers were selling about 40 TVs a week but about half of those arrived damaged at the customer’s home.  The Caspers needed more control over the quality of the product which was shipped to the customer.  They also set out to identify a product category which was less crowded and more profitable than electronics on eBay.

The couple used eBay itself as a research tool, and began going to Chamber of Commerce meetings to find people or companies with products to sell.  They discarded many possible products including Star Wars light sabers and gumball machines.

Ultimately the Caspers decided on auto floor mats, an item with as much as 75 percent profit margins, even after paying the dealer.  The Caspers put as many as 50 mats up on eBay, at $16 to $125 each. Once or twice a week, They buy the mats they’ve sold from a Houston-based auto surplus company.

“If I only wanted to make a few hundred dollars a day, I’d be done by noon,” says Cheryl.

So, the  best advice is probably to use  your common sense to figure out what would be a good product or service for your site to offer.  Don’t spend an excessive amount of time trying to ponder all the variables.  Just put it up.  If it makes money, keep it, if it doesn’t drop it.  That’s the benefit of testing.  Oh, and if it makes money, expand it. That’s the road to success.

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