According to Internet World Stats there are more than 1.1 billion people currently online, around the world in 233 individual countries. Depending on where you get your information, global Internet sales exceeded $200 billion for the first time in 2006.



If you have started your own online business and you have yet to make your first sale or you are still struggling to find your first $1,000 in revenues, you might be asking yourself, "Why not me? Why can't I cash in on this Internet commerce stuff?"

The answer to that question could very well be that you have been given bad information, and you are fighting an uphill battle that cannot be won on your present course of action.

Take for example the person who was talked into spending $2-$10,000 to have an online shopping mall designed and built for them, full of electronic products that are available for resale. How many other people have bought into the same package as he has?

We took a quick run on Google with the keyword search:

"playstation 3" ps3 console "buy now"

Google shows 45,800 pages offering the Playstation 3, with the option to "Buy Now".

Focus On The Positive

We bet the online mall seller did not share that short bit of information with the person who purchased their first online shopping mall.

We also bet that the shopping mall seller was very wise to share only the advantages of having your own online shopping mall:

* Access to 10,000 of the hottest electronic products available on the Internet today;

* Customizable website layout;

* Customizable product selection;

* Set your own prices;

* Built-in shopping cart to process purchases;

* Your own merchant account;

* Profits sent straight to your bank account;

* Your own domain name;

* Search Engine friendly interface; and

* Information about how to promote your shopping mall.

That last bit might be a bit on the short side, and more importantly, it is probably the standard information package given to one thousand other "merchants" who bought the same shopping mall package.

What The Shopping Mall Owner Was Not Told

What the shopping mall seller forgot to tell their customers is that there are 45,000 other places online for people to buy the same electronic products.

They also forgot to mention that "search engine friendly" and "search engine optimized" are two entirely different concepts. "Search engine friendly" simply means that the shopping mall seller made a website whose code can be read by the search engines, and that the shopping mall seller really does not know what it means to be "search engine optimized."

Shopping mall owners frequently do not know that 1.4% of all online transactions in 2006 were estimated to be fraudulent, according to eMarketer.com

New shopping mall owners also do not know that most online shopping malls are still struggling for their first customers.

Pricing Pressures

The shopping mall seller may have also forgot to mention that there are websites on the Internet whose only purpose is to permit online shoppers to select a store based on the lowest price on a particular product and the amount of stock on hand. Here are some examples:

* PriceGrabber.com

* NexTag.com

* mySimon.com

* PriceRunner.com

As long as consumers know about these kinds of websites, and the dozen or so just like them, then consumers will be buying their electronic products, based solely on price.

We are consumers; we did it. When we needed some new monitors for the office, we shopped using NexTag.com to find the best price with shipping, for the monitors we needed for our office.

Fortunately for most shopping mall owners, if a customer buys from a store once, 33% of those consumers will buy from a store twice.

When we needed another monitor for our growing office, we went back to the website where we bought our first two monitors. The price of the monitors had gone up between our first and second purchase by a sum of $20 each, but we went ahead and stayed with the store where we purchased our first batch of computer monitors.

In Over Their Heads

Shopping mall owners do not realize that they have entered into the toughest market in which to make money online.

They don't know that the biggest Internet retailers have huge brand names behind their stores, such as: Walmart.com, Amazon.com, Overstock.com, Sears.com, and BarnesAndNoble.com.

They have also never been told that that small product shopping websites that do well financially can usually tie most of their sales success to their participation in Ebay and other auction websites.

There Is An Easier Way

We advise our subscribers that if they want to get into a product-driven Internet business that there are two ways to do that.

We advise to either create your own product, or to get involved selling products through Ebay and other auction websites.

We also advise that we don't like an auction business if you are going to turn every spare corner of your house into a storage area for your products. We advise that if you are going to get into an auction-driven business, then you should work with drop-shippers, so that you do not have to buy-and-hold the products that you will be selling.

A drop shipper is a wholesale product supplier who is willing to ship individual orders. Drop shippers typically don't have minimum purchase requirements. Most drop-shippers will also address the package to the end-consumer, and they will label the return shipping address with the name of the retailer who bought the product from them.

Fortunately for our subscribers, we discovered in our research that there is a company who has been Ebay-certified to drop-ship products for Ebay sellers. We recommend this type of service highly.