Sell Needles, Not Haystacks

What are your needles?

I recently came across an article at Top Rank Online Marketing called 5 SEO Tips for Online Retailers. Like many of Top Rank’s articles, this one has great points, and two of them  — add fresh content to your website, and, eliminate repetitive copy — really got me thinking about the notion that if you sell drop ship products online, you should be selling needles, not haystacks. Let me explain.

Haystacks are easy to find and identify. The biggest haystacks contain nearly every product ever created. Doba, with our 1.4 million wholesale drop ship products, is quite a large haystack in and of itself. But the key to selling online is to find your needles (and I say your needles because what you view as an opportunity might not be so to some other online retailer). Successfully identifying, sourcing, and marketing your needles is the key to being a profitable online retailer. Your experience and interests, the business model you deploy, your marketing tactics, and timing — don’t forget about timing — all influence which products are considered needles worthy of a spot in your pincushion.

In essence, you need to always wear your needle goggles. The good news is that for many start-up and medium-size online retailers, Doba has haystacks full of needles, along with the tools to find and market them.

"It’s not sound strategy to take on thousands of products and blast out your own haystack to the world."

While we provide the technology, insight, and education for you to be able to identify and leverage the needles found in our virtual inventory catalog, we don’t do everything (which takes me back to the article I referenced at the outset of this post). One of the most important things you can do for your business and the shoppers you hope to attract and turn into paying customers is this… make the products you find and sell from drop ship suppliers — like those found though Doba — your own. Change the product descriptions; edit them; add to them; and, in the process, make them your own. Apply your own unique selling proposition to the products you promote. It’s not sound strategy to take on thousands of products and blast out your own haystack to the world (Amazon, Target, Walmart, and thousands of other retailers already do that). One needle… one product… something unique that can be successfully marketed, is infinitely more valuable than hundreds or thousands of poorly marketed products.

One macro level complaint about online retailing is the notion that everyone is selling the same products in the same places, and you — the new online retailer — can’t compete. But consider this… everyone has the potential differentiate. And here’s the kicker: Almost all products can be needles in a haystack if you’re willing to do the research and work necessary to make them your own.