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Wholesale Furniture Brokers (WFB) Announced on August 4th the Buy-out of Technical Partner and Shareholder Sequestra Solutions Inc.
By Anonymous August 17, 2004 -- Wholesale Furniture Brokers (WFB) announced on August 4th the buy-out of technical partner and shareholder Sequestra Solutions Inc.(www.Sequestra.com). WFB founders Sunny Dhaliwal, Sergei Tashlikowich and Dave Zirnhelt bought out Sequestra's stake in Wholesale Furniture Brokers for an undisclosed amount. When asked to comment on the decision, WFB President, Dave Zirnhelt stated, "WFB wouldn't be where it is today without the contributions of Sequestra Solutions but the goals of the two companies simply grew in different directions. In the best interest of both businesses, an amicable agreement was reached."
Now, SilverServers Inc. is the sole provider of technological applications for www.GoWFB.com, helping the expanding company meet the demands of their growing customer base. "SilverServers has far surpassed any professional expectations we could have had of them", says Sean Power, Director of Information Technology for WFB. The new site has additional features that the old site was simply unable to support, giving WFB customers additional options in getting immediate information.
The enterprise level solutions that Sequestra provided have been replaced with open source software. "The open source community is built on businesses like us who share our solutions and successes in order to create better products. By working together we can create the best products, and the best value for our dollar, which helps keep our costs low and results in added savings for our customers", adds Power. This, and many more features, is making www.GoWFB.com a fast growing hotspot in the online furniture market.
The change from the old site to their new site has improved customer navigation and increased the ease of shopping for furniture online. According to an independent measure of site speed by Alexa.com, www.GoWFB.com is much faster than its' predecessor, www.WholesaleFurnitureBrokers.com . Where www.GoWFB.com loads in 1.1 seconds, www.WholesaleFurnitureBrokers.com was at 2.1. That is almost a 100% increase in website speed which has a huge effect on the ease of navigation and customers are clearly responding. Since the launch of the new site, WFB has experienced record-breaking peaks in their daily traffic.
"This is a mix of successful online marketing and, more importantly, an increase in repeat visitors", says Jeff Penner, WFB's Director of Marketing.
Wholesale Furniture Brokers created their new website with their customers in mind. "It is important to make sure that any technologies incorporated into the website must be easily accepted by the end users", SilverServers Inc. President Mickeal Maddison points out, "Our goal is to provide (WFB) with the right connections to Internet software and hardware that will make their website effective." As time goes on, WFB and Silver Servers will be constantly updating the site to meet with the demands of the growing online shopping community.
"We have a strong presence in the search engine rankings and are getting record number visitors viewing our brokers' furniture every day", says Power. This exposure makes Wholesale Furniture Brokers an active marketing program for their independent warehouse outlets across the U.S.
About WFB
Wholesale Furniture Brokers (www.GoWFB.com) is a private company based in Kamloops, BC (Canada) and represents the online marketing for warehouse furniture outlets. Founded in August 2000, WFB started its innovative click-n-mortar services two years later.
Using the www.GoWFB.com web site, online advertising, and an eBay strategy, WFB produces profitable leads and sales for affiliate 'broker' locations. The warehouse outlets are not fancy, and customers know that they pay for the value of the products themselves, as opposed to expensive merchandising. Additionally, the customer has someone in his or her local community to deal with.
WFB's partner warehouse brokers are located in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Carlsbad, Connecticut, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas / Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Fairfield / Hartford County, Houston, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Lubbock / Midland, Memphis, Miami / Ft. Lauderdale, Minneapolis / St. Paul, Orange County, Philadelphia, Portland / Vancouver, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco / Oakland, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Seattle / Tacoma, St. Louis, Ventura County, Washington, DC / Baltimore, and West Palm Beach. For an updated list, please visit http://Stores.WholesaleFurnitureBrokers.com
This article courtesy of http://wholesale-profit.com/.
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The Wholesale Misconception
By Chris Malta "The Wholesale Misconception" Again, wholesale is a relative term. Yes, genuine wholesalers DO sell at significant discounts below Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price. However, you have to watch what you sell. Electronics, for example, are a very tough market, because EVERYBODY is trying to sell electronics on the 'Net right now. All these people are so busy trying to undercut each other that they have driven the "market price" of these items down so low as to make it very difficult to make a profit, even at wholesale. Chris Malta is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. He has worked with computer Systems for 18 years. He's been involved in eCommerce systems, networking and site design for more than 6 years. He's taught college-level computer courses in Western NY. He developed The Drop Ship Source Directory, and he and his partners at Worldwide Brands, Inc., publish the Directory and run eCommerce sites of their own using Drop Shipping as their only business method.
One thing that’s constantly misunderstood by people trying to run a home business on the Internet is the word “Wholesale”.
Some people think that working with a real wholesale supplier means that they will magically be able to sell products for less than anybody else on the planet, for ever and ever. They’ll be the only one who ever gets such good prices, and they’ll earn millions because no competition can touch them. They’re retire happily in a couple of months, and buy a big house in Beverly Hills, complete with a butler, a private chef, and a little satin doggie bed in every room for the casual use of the family Basset Hound, Duke.
Then they find that they may actually have to compete with companies who have more buying power and get better price breaks, and suddenly the honeymoon is over. They run around screaming that the supplier is not a real wholesaler, and is cheating them. The sky is falling, and it’s time to get Duke to the storm cellar because all their dreams are being blown away by bad, BAD people who claimed to be wholesalers, and really are NOT!
The truth is that they’ve simply been confronted with a perfectly normal aspect of retail sales that they had not anticipated, and need to be educated about.
Even when using genuine wholesale distributors, you're going to find some stores selling products at a "retail" price that is lower than your distributors’ "wholesale" price. There are VERY good reasons why you'll see this happen, and it's extremely important to understand why it happens and what to do about it in order to sell successfully on the Internet or anywhere else.
As I said, it happens for a variety of reasons; the most common of which is that the retailer with the "lower than wholesale" price is a large retail operation that bought THOUSANDS of the product at a dirt-cheap quantity price break, and also qualified for huge manufacturer's wholesaler rebates. You can't compete against that with a home business; no one can.
The term "wholesale" is relative, no matter who your distributor is or how you find them. What you're getting as a small business is a supplier's genuine "first level" wholesale price.
For example, one factory-direct supplier we work with has an initial wholesale price for 1 to 36 dart boards. Then the second price level is reached, and there's a lower price for 36 to 72 boards, for example, then a lower price for the next higher quantity level, etc. When dealing with single item orders in your home business, you are obviously going to be getting the "first level" wholesale price.
For example, if the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for a VCR is $149, and it is available at "wholesale" for $69.00, that's a 54% discount off MSRP. That's a pretty good profit, right? However, with everybody getting roughly the same price break, there are a lot of people out there who are ruining the market for everyone else by selling that product for, say, $79, thinking they will undercut everyone else and make money by selling volume. Pretty soon, everyone else sees this, and tries the same thing. Eventually, the Internet "market price" for this VCR BECOMES $79, and everyone is flooding the market with it at that price. That's only a 13% percent profit margin, and that product is no longer worth the effort for anybody.
So, even though the product IS available initially at a great wholesale price, its market value is ruined by those who (wrongly) assume that the only way to sell is to have the absolute lowest price anywhere.
Sales is much more of an art than that. If selling something were simply a matter of the absolute lowest prices, Wal-Mart would be the only store on the face of the Earth.
Without going into too much detail, sales is a mixture of choosing the right product, or combination of products, for your web site. It's presenting a clean, attractive, focused site. It's giving the customer some little value-added bonus at your site. It's providing the absolute best customer service that you can. All these things help a customer to trust you, and when they trust you they are willing to spend a little more to buy from you.
One of our retail sites is www.ElectronicDartShop.com. We sell Arachnid Electronic Dart Boards there. We sell ONLY those products on that site; just 14 of them. Our site is clean and attractive. We have a page listing all the rules for all the dart games that can be played on those boards. We pay very careful attention to customer service. And guess what? We are NOT the lowest priced store for those dart boards, by any means. Yet we are one of the highest-volume Internet dealers of the products around, according to the factory. Why? Our customers trust us, and are willing to pay a little more because they feel they will get more value from us than they will from some guy who just throws up a cheap-looking site full of all kinds of unrelated products and only pays attention to price-cutting.
In fact, a few days ago, I went online and bought a couple of SmartMedia memory cards for my digital camera. I could have gotten them for a very cheap price that I found on the 'Net, but I chose to pay $5 more each for them because the cut-rate site looked cheesy, and I was not sure I could trust them. I was more than happy to pay the extra ten bucks total when I found the same products at a higher priced site. The site was well-built, easy to navigate, and went out of it's way to explain it's customer service policies to me. I'd rather spend an extra ten bucks and be confident that the cards would show up at my door than lose thirty bucks plus shipping to a site I didn't feel I could trust.
As a small business owner, you should remember to choose comparison areas very carefully. Too many people simply go to the big search engines and look for the absolute lowest price on earth, and then give up on selling that item if they can't beat it. That's the wrong approach, as I've mentioned above. You need to be comparing prices against sites that will be seen in the same places that your site will be seen, and even if your prices are higher, you can bring in sales by building a clean, focused site. Alternatively, you can simply sell the models that others are NOT selling. After you begin to earn some profit, you can then start to buy and stock the better sellers in quantity, lowering your price, if you really want to.
Even then, you're going to run into stores that stock a lot of merchandise, and are getting price breaks on greater quantities. This allows them to sell at a lower price.
Go around them. Sell models that they don't, from the same brand names. You don’t have to purposely go head-to-head with the big superstores. They don’t carry every product ever made on earth. Sell something in the same general brand and product lines that they DON’T have the shelf space for!
Besides the reasons mentioned above, there are also too many people who buy entire pallet loads of last year's closeouts, liquidations, and refurbished goods, and claim that they are NEW. They get that junk at "rock bottom" prices, and of course, sell them dirt-cheap, fooling the customer (and other Internet retailers) into thinking that they have the corner on the best wholesale prices around, when they DON'T.
The important thing is to work effectively within the framework of available products and prices, and work around those who have millions of dollars available to stock inventory. That's what THEY did in order to EARN those millions in the first place. You can do it too. I know it's frustrating to be just starting out, and thinking that you can't succeed because of competition from large stores. That's just not true. We're succeeding at it, and so are thousands of others. You just have to be willing to be flexible, and to make serious decisions for the good of your business. You may have to give up selling certain products that you personally like, in order to make money on other products whether you like them or not. You’re in business to make money, not to satisfy your personal taste.
One thing I tell people all the time is that it’s very important to “jump through the hoops” and form a LEGAL business. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the ONLY way to work with GENUINE wholesale suppliers.
However, anyone in business will tell you that the hoops never end; not for home businesses, and not for big businesses either. Even the big guys spend much of their time "hoop-jumping" in order to be successful.
Imagine how the purchasing agents at CompUSA feel when they spend a million dollars on 19" monitors so they can sell them for $329, and a week later, they find that Best Buy spent three million buying up the same monitor at a better price break, and is now advertising them for $298. Suddenly CompUSA can't compete.
Should they throw a tantrum, and berate the wholesaler for simply performing the normal function of a wholesaler?
Of course not. They can simply stop advertising that monitor by itself, and bundle it with an entire computer system that has it's own serious price breaks, and move the monitors that way. Adapt and improvise.
There are no magic bullets, even though there are plenty of people who will tell you that there ARE. Don’t believe them! When you’re in business you will always have to compete. It's all part of sales, on the Internet or anywhere else.
Chris Malta
WorldWide Brands, Inc.
For more information, visit http://www.YouCanDropship.com
This article courtesy of http://wholesale-profit.com/.
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Wholesale Marketer Invited to Join the PayPal Merchant Advisory Board
By Anonymous Orem, Utah June 15, 2004 - Wholesale Marketer announces that they have been invited to join the PayPal Merchant Advisory Board. The PayPal Merchant Advisory Board was established in February of 2004 to help PayPal better understand its customers' needs and improve their customer service. Wholesale Marketer is proud to be selected as a representative company that will help increase PayPal's understanding of customer needs.
"We are thrilled about PayPal's invitation to join its Merchant Advisory Board. Wholesale Marketer is always striving to improve the services we offer our members. Now we have an excellent channel with which we can express our members' specific needs to PayPal," said Brandon Williams, Principal of Wholesale Marketer.
Wholesale Marketer is based out of Orem, Utah and has thousands of members that purchase products from the Wholesale Marketer website. Many of those members transact their product purchases through PayPal. With Wholesale Marketer becoming a part of the Merchant Advisory Board they will be able to better serve their own members' needs, and be able to continually improve the services that Wholesale Marketer offers to internet entrepreneurs.
Recently Wholesale Marketer has been getting attention from several large companies due to the unique and quality drop ship services that it offers its customers. Wholesale Marketer has been increasing their services over the past six months and will soon be unveiling several additions to their drop ship service.
About Wholesale Marketer:
Wholesale Marketer provides drop shipping services. Our technology interfaces with different distribution partners, and through our virtual inventory we offer hundreds of thousands of wholesale products for drop shipment directly to end consumers. Wholesale Marketer's value is that through our proprietary technology, we aggregate these products and standardize the fulfillment processes into one easy-to-use, convenient drop shipment administration system for the benefit of our users and our partners.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Ryan Roberts
Wholesale Marketer
http://www.wholesalemarketer.com
This article courtesy of http://wholesale-profit.com/.
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