Products that sell best on the internet

Author: Ian McAllister Products that sell best on the internet

Choose the best product to sell from your web site - "You can sell anything online if you know how"

I find that quote impossible to believe as it stands. If you own the corner grocery store, you can "sell" discount coupons to encourage people to walk into your store. However people on the other side of the world would be unlikely to visit you!

Of course, you can do some lateral thinking. If a local cannery supplies tinned gourmet food, you can sell that for them internationally, possibly by online auction with a link back to your web site. You could write a book about how to choose the freshest groceries, what "made in country" really means, and what freebies grocers throw away.

So I believe that you can sell nearly anything online. For instance, if you sell Lear Jets, your site would sell visitors on the idea of filling in a form asking a salesman to call. You'll notice that you would bypass all the problems of credit cards, secure sites etc. Because you are not taking any money on your site.

What is the best product?

The best product to sell on the web is information. Think of it, if you sell an electronic book, how much will each copy cost you? Yes, that's right, nothing. Of course your merchant account will charge you a percentage for each credit card transaction. Here are some benefits for you.

Low cost product.
No packing costs.
No postage costs.
No irate enquires about how much longer it will take to arrive.
No damaged parcels arriving at their destination.
No parcels stolen by postal workers.
No customs hassles in foreign countries.

You have to find a subject that will interest lots of people, so it might be difficult for you to sell a diary of all the meals you have had for the last ten years. Having found a suitable subject from your experience, you can proceed to make an eBook and sell it from your site. Click the "write an eBook" button in the left margin if this could interest you.

Some ideas for products you can make

Click here for an eBook about information publishing.
Click here to learn about money from selling eBooks.
Click here to discover how to make money from eBooks about anything you are passionate about.
Click here to learn to profit from your knowledge. If you are a baby boomer you have knowledge that other people will pay for.
Click hereto learn how to set the most profitable price.

Selling other people's products

If you do a search on "resell rights", you will find thousands of people offering reports that you can resell yourself. The quality of these reports is often poor. A report may be only one page in length. You could merge several reports to make one good one if you are any good at writing at all, and you probably are.

There is some software I use all the time. I think of it as the Writer's Friend. It is ideal for taking ideas from Private Label Rights, resale rights, or even just the web, and collecting them ready for you to use the facts to write an article or book in your own words.

You can also sell goods that are expensive enough to justify postage, packing, and insurance. Here is an idea if you live in the USA (I live in Australia) You can buy goods for perhaps a tenth of their value, then resell them at a profit. If I lived in the USA, I would sell them by internet auction as well as from my page.

You can pay as much as $150 for information about getting things for next to nothing from the US government. There is no need to pay so much. Click here for the new eBook about making money from on-line auctions, which gives you lots of places to get the information free - and it is all in about one page of the 520 page manual.

It is just thrown in to help you find things cheaply. If you buy at 2% of the conventional price and sell at half the conventional price, your customers will get an amazing bargain, and so will you. See the link to auctions above.

Problems of collecting money from your web site

If you plan to collect money from your web site, you will need a secure site, and a merchant account for credit cards, and a knowledge of CGI scripts and forms. I may one day give details in my HTML pages about how to handle the appropriate forms and scripts, but other pages have a higher priority.

You can accept credit cards without a merchant account if you sign up with one of a few companies. They charge you a hefty commission for each transaction. If your profit on each transaction is lower than the commission, avoid using the service. If your profit is many times the commission, then each time you use the service is one more customer that you would have lost without credit card facilities. You've probably guessed that I'll remind you that if you are a member of SBI you can get Store Build It from them, with all the merchant stuff arranged for you already.

Here are some companies

ccnow.com
PayPal
ClickBank
2Checkout.com

"Using the service is actually safer than a check or money order."
- Wall Street Journal talking about PayPal

If you live in North America, you can just put a button opposite each item that you want to sell from your web page. Visitors click the button, pay PayPal, then are transferred back to your web page.

It is because of the difficulty of collecting money from your web page that I favour using affiliate companies - they handle all the collection of money , so you can accept the money without any worries about collecting it.

I say affiliate companies in the plural. The free Affiliate Masters course taught me why you will fail if you stick to just one company. I am following its guidance, to study supply and demand on the Internet, as I build my web site. I am amazed at how many things I was doing wrong. My only consolation is that it is better to make mistakes than to do nothing.