Doba's Dropshipping Blog

Angie Taylor, Sales & Marketing Analyst

To do what Angie Taylor does for us here at Doba, you have to be organized. As a sales and marketing analyst, Angie runs reports, handles quality assurance issues and manages all of Doba’s call campaigns. That means making sure our sales reps keep in touch with new and existing clients who might need more information about us. Oh, and she also ensures all of our call content is accurate.

Meet Angie:

Doba: What did you do prior to coming to work for Doba? 

Angie Taylor: I worked at Utah Valley University, running their Institutional Research Call Center. This department was in charge of all official university numbers, so we ran all of the surveys for the university — tasks such as calling all graduates and finding out where they ended up.

Doba: Where did you go to college and what did you study?

AT: I went to (more…)

Two new drop-ship suppliers started up with us in October, and both offer unique gifts for the holidays. Take a gander at suppliers Sundance and Renoir.

Supplier Sundance (active in the Doba catalog since Oct. 27, 2011) is your digital gateway to the vastly popular analog world of scrapbooking. Sundance carries everything your customers need to create unique and charming scrapbooking projects from start to finish. With brands including Doodlebug, Martha Stewart, Stampendous and Jolee’s, Sundance has more than 26,000 products that any true scrapbooker won’t be able to resist.  With the craft and hobby industry in the United States annually selling $27 billion worth of product, Sundance is your ticket to capture a piece of this growing market.

Sundance also has a quick order processing time of two to three business days and a low drop-ship fee of one dollar on all of its items. For more information, (more…)

As we flip our calendar pages to mid-November, the first significant date we see on the calendar is Thanksgiving Day, which occurs on the 24^th this year. What’s not prominently displayed on this monthly chart are football games, raking up the leaves in the front yard, changing the filter in the home heating system or Black Friday.

OK, you don’t expect football, leaf raking or filter changing to be noted on your calendar, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday? By now you’d think calendar makers would be savvy enough to realize this is the busiest 4-day shopping span of the year.

Seems every brick and mortar and online store with a pulse is having its “biggest sale of the year” on November 25, with people (more…)

There’s really no way to sugarcoat it. We’re in the midst of a sluggish economy and consumers are clutching their pocketbooks like shipwreck survivors hanging onto a life raft. But if there were any period of time to be totally immersed in ecommerce, this is certainly that time.

Consider these factors: According to Volusion, a leader in shopping cart software and other ecommerce solutions for more than 30,000 online businesses, retail sales are expected to grow a paltry 2.6 percent this year. However, holiday Internet sales are projected to top $36.5 billion this season — up 12 percent over last year’s $32.6 billion figure. That’s a whole lot of holiday cheer on its way to consumers via express mail.

For those of you who engage in e-tailing, that adds a whole new meaning to the term “holiday cheer.” Of course, how well you do individually beginning on Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving), through Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), and the rest of the holiday season, is completely up to you.

Volusion has created a plan of action that’s (more…)

Selling products successfully on eBay is a battle that involves much more than winning over the hearts and minds of consumers online. And like any other plan of battle, your success depends on how informed and up-to-date you are on a variety of issues.

We here at Doba believe one of the best sources for information about selling on eBay is eBay Radio, a weapons cache of news, data, experienced advice and educational materials. Doba is a proud sponsor of eBay Radio as well as an active participant in its programming. Our own Brandon Delgrosso, Doba’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, is a regular on the show, dispersing information about hot-selling products direct from the Doba catalog.

The host of eBay Radio is (more…)

StoresOnline is a leading shopping cart company that boasts tens of thousands of customers. And the reason it maintains such an impressive customer base is the way it treats those customers. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say the folks at StoresOnline coddle their customers. They handle them with kid gloves. StoresOnline employees carry around pictures of their customers on their iPhones to show friends. OK, that last might be too much of an exaggeration, but you get the point.

So it’s no wonder StoresOnline has been a Doba Certified Integration Partner for almost five years now. With corporate offices in Orem, Utah, this company has more than 15 years of experience in shopping cart applications, and it’s not a bit hesitant about (more…)

If you use Magento’s ecommerce platform to manage the backend of your online store, you now have an easy way of exporting product data from Doba’s online catalog and importing it into Magento Community Edition or Magento Go Edition.

Not familiar with Magento? The Culver City, Calif.-based company develops feature-rich eCommerce solutions that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s Community Edition is available as a free download, while the Go edition is ‘software as a service’ that enables small and independent merchants to quickly build and launch an online store.

Regardless of which Magento product you use, follow these step-by-step instructions to (more…)

Halloween is history and the holiday season is moving ahead full steam with the busiest retail time of the year already upon us. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how online retailers can take advantage of consumers’ everyday needs as well as their holiday shopping requirements.

My wife and I are in the process of moving into a new home, a happy occasion that places us in a bigger space where we’re the boss instead of some faceless landlord with a list of rules and policies. Say we want to paint the walls whatever color we want. So be it. Replace the old carpet with new? Make it so. Hang stuff on the walls? Just gimme a hammer.

As it is with most folks who are making a physical move, this adventure gives us a chance (more…)

Online Retailers who use X-Cart’s shopping cart platform to grow and manage an Ecommerce store now have a simple way of exporting product data from Doba’s online catalog and importing that data into an X-Cart-powered Ecommerce store.

If you’re unfamiliar with X-Cart, the company offers a full range of ecommerce solutions and services for more than 20,000 websites worldwide. Their “Gold” product (X-Cart Gold, v4.4.4) — which integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments — is a high performance customizable shopping cart system designed for most kinds of ecommerce websites, while the “Pro” version (X-Cart Pro v4.4.4) is more of an advanced shopping cart solution, designed as an online marketplace enabling multiple sellers and vendors to offer their products in one online store.

Whether you use X-Cart Gold or X-Cart Pro, follow these step-by-step instructions to create and download a custom data export from Doba for X-Cart:

1. Log in to your Doba account at www.Doba.com. (If you don’t have a Doba account, you can sign up for a Free 7-Day Doba Trial now.)
2. Search the Doba Catalog for the products you wish to sell in your X-Cart Ecommerce Shopping Cart.
3. Select the products you wish to sell by clicking the section checkbox for each.
4. Click the purple Data Export button at the top of the search results. A pop-up window appears.
5. Next, choose X-Cart from the Format drop-down menu (see image below).
6. Click Save and Download to create and download to your desktop a new inventory list with the items you selected, as well as create a saved export tied to the new list, which can be found in the (more…)

When it comes to selling your merchandise online during this fast-approaching holiday season, it’s good to have an overall picture of your game plan. But the truth is, the devil is still going to be in the details. And the details are in the fine-tuning of your marketing strategy.

Below, we’ve tailored a dozen or so tips that might help you increase sales, woo new customers and better target your online audience:

1. You need a plan: Knowing your budget and your goals sets the stage for a successful holiday season. We’re assuming that planning has been in the works for at least the last few months, and flexibility is the key. The good news is this: When it comes to online merchandising, you can make changes to your prices, products and plans all the way up to the moment you push the publish button on your website. That definitely gives you some elbowroom to employ some last-minute genius thinking!
2. What’s the schedule? In this instance, an online calendar is your tool of choice. Use it. Schedule events or promotions or sales before Thanksgiving, on Black Friday — traditionally the start of the holiday season. Get something going on Cyber Monday, and again on Super Saturday — the Saturday before Christmas. Just remember that Christmas is on Sunday this year, which pretty much limits Super Saturday to overnight shipping. Don’t forget Hanukkah, Christmas Day, and the week after Christmas when many people are looking for online bargains. Then wrap it all up with your New Year’s merchandising program.
3. Cater to the shopper: Your target list boils down to four types of shoppers: The Early Bird, Prime-time Buyers, Last-minute Shoppers and Post-holiday Bargain Hunters. Tailor your marketing plan to meet each of their purchasing requirements. For instance, the early birders want to beat the rush, so offer discounts way early in the season (Nov. 1 would be a nice day); free gifts with early purchase; or target businesses to buy gifts for their clients in time for early shipping. For prime-time buyers, you’re facing competition from every corner. Get your online sales list to these folks before they (more…)