Common Sense eCommerce

MonsterCommerce is a long standing, mature provider of shopping cart software. They have been especially popular for home-based businesses using a Drop Ship model. In late 2005, they were acquired by Network Solutions. Now it appears they may be actually winding down their name. In fact, the MonsterCommerce.Com URL redirects to a Networks Solutions page which only mentions MonsterCommerce in footnotes.

This is news that has been bubbling for quite some time. If you have a MonsterCommerce website, you probably already know that Version 4x is being supplanted by Version 7x. As the jump in version numbers indicates, this is not a minor update. In fact, it’s not an update at all but a full migration to a different platform.

I’m a bit unclear on this but it appears that the 7x platform doesn’t carry the MonsterCommerce name any longer and everything will be referred to as Network Solutions. This isn’t surprising considering the big fish / little fish nature of such mergers and acquisitions. I will look into this further and try to get more clarification.

This change is actually long overdue as MonsterCommerce really has an older shopping cart platform with lots of back-end things that need fixing. There are far too many things to discuss here, but most notably is the PCI/CISP compliance for payment processing. If you’re a current MonsterCommerce web store subscriber, you should take some time to read up on the upcoming changes at this forum link (you must log into the forum to read these forum threads).

The migrations will occur sometime in the spring and summer time frame. Network Solutions/MonsterCommerce is giving its current merchants a 30 day window on migration. In other words, the site will be migrated to the new platform in test mode for 30 days before being made live. This will give site owners the opportunity to preview the new site before allowing it to roll over.

If you are considering MonsterCommerce as a shopping cart platform for your home-based business, this would be a good time to wait things out. There are big changes coming with this provider! The times are a changing at MonsterCommerce. New platform for this mature shopping cart provider is in the works.

Ever since I did a partial sign-up for Doba I have been getting spam from them. I never finished the sign up; it was a little experiment to see how far I could get before they asked for a credit card (which I never gave them). Supposedly they have this 7 day trial offer (ooooo boy, a whole 7 days!) and I was trying to see it if was legit or not.I’ve read a lot of complaints about this company and I have to wonder. I see them everywhere — Doba here, Doba there. They must spend a fortune on Google adwords! I have them in my Squidoo Lens too in the places where I cannot edit them. Part of the sign up process had me putting in my email address. In fact, email and password is the very first step along the way. If you read the fine print below the sign up, here is what it says:

Doba will not disclose your email address to third parties. We use email only as a means of communicating with you.

Means of communicating is exactly what they use it for: illegitimately! Here is a snap shot of my Gmail spam box.

All Doba! And Gmail knows Doba is spam; it puts all their emails in the Spam folder straight away. These are not phish emails either; they really do originate from Doba. If you open one of the emails , the only thing in the email body is a hyperlinked image to their signup page. There is no way to ‘unsubscribe’ from their emails. Isn’t that a violation of the Can Spam law?

Am I going to do business with a company that has to resort to illegal spam? Don’t think so. And read what some eBay sellers have to say in the Doba Review forum (link here). Not very favorable and lots of truth in those guides. If you want to do real dropshipping, and make money from it (rather than loose money), you’ll need to work with real wholesalers directly in a niche. Not a middleman. Check out the WorldWide Brands Video Center. Look at Top 5 sourcing Tips, then Tip #2.

Tags: Doba Spam, Doba Scam, Doba Drop Ship, Doba Email

Well I keep hearing buzz about this company - StoresOnline - and have some time today so let’s take a look! It’s yet another Internet company that supposedly has a plug and play website waiting for you where you can just fire it up, load with products, and start raking in money. That is after you pay them about 6 grand for training and start-up materials. It’s just an old scam with a different face. Here is their website:

StoresOnline

The first thing you might notice is the lack of pricing information. This is red flag number one. No available usually pricing means ‘look out’ and run the other way.

Furthermore, there is no live chat and no toll free number. 2nd red flag. There is contact information on their Contact page, but it’s all email, and an 801 (Utah) phone and fax number. The number is not answered after hours.

It looks like you must go through some sort of live seminar presentation to even get to the pricing and structure of the so-called ‘opportunity’. Taking a look at their so-called ‘training page’, it looks as they’re taking the “it’s a dog eat dog world and you need training” approach to selling their ’system’.

Another thing to note is the plethora of reports at RipoffReports.Com (link here). 357 when I checked. And oddly enough, Ripoff reports has this disclaimer at the top of each of them:

Rip-Off Report Investigation: shows that StoresOnline & iMergent is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service. Rip-off Report gives StoresOnline a POSITIVE rating in customer support and quality assurance. StoresOnline pledges to resolve complaints and address any issues from the past, present and in the future - committed to 100% satisfaction - whatever it takes - say company executives.

I suspect Ripoff Report has been sued so many times that they must have to cave in to deep pocketed companies that can pay for waiver comments like that. I’m sorry, but the large amount of negative complaints casts a huge shadow over that ‘thumbs-up’ comment.

Reading through the complaints I see some common threads: high pressure ’seminar style’ sales tactics, an extremely short guarantee window, and a high startup price in the 6 to 7 thousand dollar range.

Now there are some real questions about Ripoff Reports which I won’t go into, but even if we ignore the 357 reports there, that still leaves lots of questions about this company. For example their record at the Better Business Bureau is hardly exemplary and even includes information about government actions against this company (link here).

Back to the StoresOnline page, you can read some testimonials there and of course they sound good. But they are prefaced by this comment:

Testimonial results are not typical and your individual results will vary. Your success depends on having the right price, product, and marketing efforts.

In other words, you will have to work your business and differentiate yourself just like you would in another other business effort. So why do you need to spend $6000 to $7000 with StoresOnline to get that when you can do it yourself for about $800 or less? That’s about how much each of my drop ship websites have cost me to start up (made up of setup fees for the website and merchant accounts, along with money I’ve paid for having someone help me with design).Then of course I have to market them, but you must do that with StoresOnline as their disclaimers says. The places I setup drop ship sites all have built in templates like StoresOnline so why the difference in price?

The difference is: big fat company and lots of marketing overhead to cover! Save yourself the unnecessary expense folks and do your own drop ship site(s); it’s just not that hard. And you will be more satisfied with your efforts and less likely to feel resentful toward a company like this.

Tags: Internet Ripoff Companies, StoresOnline Internet Ripoff, StoresOnline Ripoff, StoresOnline Scam

Starting a Drop Ship business on the web is one way to make money using the internet. It’s particularly favorable for a home-based model because you don’t have to stock any product. Someone else does the inventory management and fulfillment for you.

There are lots of things to consider when evaluating a drop ship supplier. One of them is turnaround time. How quickly can they turn your order around?

I recently had to dump a drop shipper from my list of possible suppliers because their turnaround time was 2 to 3 weeks. Customers typically will not appreciate having to wait several weeks for their order to be shipped. There might be certain kinds of products where this is necessary and acceptable, such as monogrammed or otherwise personally customizable products. But for items displayed on a website, while they can’t “have it now”, they will “want it soon”.

One way to find out what a drop ship supplier’s turnaround time is would be to place a test order. Often turnaround time is missing from their terms and conditions document and the “salesperson’s version” may not be true.

So — when sizing up a possible supplier to do your drop shipping, make sure you find out about turnaround time.

Tags: Drop Ship Business, Home Based Business, Drop Ship Supplier, Drop Ship Home Business

If you browse the web for business opportunities, you will often come across businesses advertised as ‘drop shipping’ opportunities.  Drop Shipping businesses are set up so that someone else does the handling of the product for you and sends the product directly to your customer, without you (the business) being involved in the shipping.  While this sounds great in theory, it rarely works in practice when presented as a service - a common approach for drop ship scams.

The biggest problem with these kinds of services is that the are “middlemen” and the prices they offer are NOT wholesale (even if they say they are).  It’s hard to compete when you’re buying products at retail to re-sell.

Another problem with them is competition. In these scams, everyone who subscribes to their ‘drop ship’ website will have access to the very same set of products.  That means you will have a difficult time differentiating yourself and carving a niche for your business.

The only way to do Drop Shipping as a business is to do the product research yourself, find your own suppliers who will do the drop shipping and get yourself setup with them.  Sounds hard? Well there is no easy money and who said Common Sense E-Commerce would be easy?