A Stores Online (storesonline.com) Review

Today I went to my second Stores Online seminar. There everyone except myself and the person seated next to me, a computer programmer, were cajoled, conned, and pressured into paying $6,000 for tools that are available on the internet for free. Let me give you a quick review of the real facts about storesonline.com and the Stores Online seminar.

An Honest Alternative

What Stores Online offers is real, and the advice they give on building an online business is mostly accurate. If, when they were done, they sent you to sitesell.com, then you would be getting great service. Sitesell will offer you everything Stores Online offers and more for $299/year plus nothing. Stores Online offers it for $359.40/year ($29.95/mo) plus $5,998 up front. Now of course, they also offer a free lunch, a rather excellent sales presentation, and they throw in some intense pressure, including some free insults, if you say no.

The Online Stores Pitch

Here's the idea. You go to the first presentation, and they tell you that your need a good web site, which they can provide. It's $24.95/month, and they say they will give you great customer service and training. In fact, they offer to bring you to their $495 all-day training seminar for free. The training seminar has some great information. It matches all the other information I've been getting the last couple months from successful marketers all over the internet.

When you go to the second seminar, they tell you all the great tools you get when you upgrade to the pro web site for $5,998. Yes, just two dollars shy of six thousand. They go through all-day marketing training in order to show you how much you need these tools.

You do need the tools. There are two problems with what they're saying, however.

  1. The tools are available on the internet for free. You don't need to spend $6,000.
  2. They didn't tell us any of this when they sold us the $24.95/month web site. They told us it would be sufficient for some of us at the first seminar. Today, however, it's suddenly not sufficient—and, in fact, even stupid—to use what they just sold us two weeks ago. Is this honest?

The presentation may be dishonest in these two areas, but it is not unpolished. The sales presentation is awesome. The seminar started at 9 a.m., and by 10:30 almost everyone there raised their hand to say they were ready to purchase the Online Stores pro web site upgrade for $5,998. Wow.

Building an Online Store Without Being Rooked by onlinestores.com

First, the site. If you're going to have a store, you'll need ecommerce software. You'll have to pay at least $20/month for a web site that includes a shopping cart, and lots of companies will provide that.

Next, the tools. My recommendation is simply to host your site with sitesell.com and get all the tools and much of the work for free. Their prices are average, but their results far exceed what's average. You can do it on your own, though, as follows:

  1. Find out what product to sell, either because you're passionate about it or because you know there's a market for it. You do that by researching key words at any of these sites. This key word research will tell you what people are searching for on the internet. You can then do your own searches to find out how much competition there is for those key words.
  2. Once you know what you want to sell, you need to find out how to obtain and sell it. One good web site for that is thomasnet.com. There you can find suppliers of your product and contact them for ways to sell their product. You may have to buy and stock it. Much better is if they will drop-ship for you. This means that your customers order on your site, but the supplier processes the order and gets the product to the customer. Then, you simply collect your portion of the sale price.
  3. Online Stores says you should get products from drop shippers that are basically discount warehouses. Most of the time this won't work. This former salesman in the wholesale and drop ship industries explains why this is true.
  4. Once you have your site up and running and stocked with product, you need to get people to it. There are many ways to do that.

    1. The most well-known way is through search engine optimization (SEO). You make your web site show up near the top of the list on the major search engines for the key words that you chose when you researched what product to carry. www.seochat.com has far more information on that than I could ever give you. There's a lot of free tools to help you optimize for search engines and see how well you're doing, too.
    2. Get links from popular web sites. Here are some sites that tell you how to accomplish this.
    3. Perhaps you can write articles about your product. You're selling it, so you're probably an expert on it to some extent. You can set up a blog about your product, then promote your blog on internet neighborhoods. Promoting your blog is another subject completely. I'll try to get you an ebook on the subject you can download, or you can simply Google something like "drive traffic to blog" and get so much advice you don't know what to do with it.
    4. You can put those same articles up at ezinearticles.com and other sites like it, where ezine publishers look to carry your articles in their newsletter. Each article has a resource box in which the author gets to shamelessly promote his own web site or product.
    5. Finally, you can purchase excellent search engine placement by bidding on keywords. You can do this at Google Adwords, Yahoo, and others.

Again, the easiest way of all is simply to turn all this over to sitesell.com. However, there is no limit to the information that is out there about how to drive traffic to your web site. It will take time and effort, but lots of people are doing it; and they're doing it for a lot less than $6,000.

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