In the past month, the most common objection I am hearing from wholesale prospects is “this is my busiest part of the year, I don’t need to advertise.” Because it is your busiest part of the year is the exact reasons why you should be advertising.

Most companies report their highest margins during the holiday season. This is the time that you do have the little bit of extra income it takes to bring in new customers. Retail stores, boutiques, flea marketers, and more, are always looking for new items to help increase their revenues during this time. If you have a product that is hot during the holidays, don’t you want the opportunity to show this fast selling item to more retail outlets?

Since this is your busiest part of the year, you already know that this is the time for you to increase your customer base. Companies like JP Communications can help bring you those new customers. Once we bring you that new customer, it’s your job to keep them. With that little bit of information in mind, let JP Communications help bring you the new customers so that you can have a happy holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving.
Jonathan

The Off-Price New York Market, held October 8 – 10, 2006 at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania. The regional Off-Price Markets was designed as a no-frills, cost-effective order-writing event where retail buyers could find quality apparel at prices well below established wholesale averages.

“We were extremely pleased with the turnout and buying activity at our October event,” says Show Director David Lapidos. “The Markets are great complements to our national Off-Price Specialist Shows held three times a year in Las Vegas. These are order-writing events where retailers can get immediate delivery on goods to fill in gaps in their inventory, which is always critical around the holiday season.”

Another similar event will be held in January. The New York Off-Price Market will return to the Hotel Pennsylvania on January 7 – 9, 2007. Held during New York’s first market week of the year, Off-Price management is expecting a good turnout and for a fast paced feel of old school buying you just can’t beat New York wholesale apparel events.

The Hotel Pennsylvania won’t be the only hotel crawling with purchasers. “A lot of buyers will be in town for Market Week,” says Lapidos. “In addition, four apparel shows will be running at the Javit’s Center on the exact same dates, which makes it a great week to be in New York for retailers.” Retailers hoping to attend better start looking for hotel rooms soon.

The Javit’s Center apparel shows include the Fame Show, Children’s Club, Accessories the Show, and MODA Manhattan. For more information about the Off-Price Markets, visit their website.

February 2007 Off-Price in Las Vegas Changes Venue

Fate has taken a hand to move The Off-Price Specialist Show from its usual digs at the Sands Expo. Due to one-time scheduling conflicts with the Sands Expo, the February Show will be held in the luxurious Grand Ballrooms of the Venetian Hotel and Casino. A curious press release on the move touts the new convention site’s carpeting and “elegant restroom facilities’. All important qualities for an event fueled by coffee and commerce but I’m sure the hotel has other appealing qualities as well.

“We’re very excited about the February Show,” says Dell Holden, executive vice president of sales and marketing. “Shopping a trade show is tough work. The days can be long and exhausting, so anything we can do to make our buyers and exhibitors’ jobs easier benefits everyone. The Grand Ballrooms are truly elegant. We’ve got all the pieces in place to make the February Show a memorable one.”

The four-day February Show, which will open on Sunday, February 11 and close on Wednesday, February 14, will showcase new and expanded product offerings, including the newly co-located Home & Gift Show, an expanded jewelry pavilion, and access to the new Off-Price Absolute Auctions.

I’ve been reading a book called “Search Engine Advertising” written by Catherine Seda. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to run a successful marketing campaign online: because a lot of us are too busy, or too lazy to pick up a book, I thought it would be nice to share with all of you what I am reading. Here is what I have learned so far:

There are millions of prospects online. Advertisers pay millions of dollars to reach these millions of prospects. Unfortunately, all of these millions of prospects are not interested in your product. Because search engines let the buyer tell them exactly what they want, you need to know your customer. By knowing your customer, you’ll have a better idea of what they are looking for online and where you should be spending your money.

Optimization v. Advertising

Companies spend a lot of money on optimizing their sites for the major search engines like google and yahoo. In short, optimization focuses on designing your pages within to attract spiders. To organically optimize your site, it is necessary to pay an inclusion fee to a majority of top search engines if you want specific pages indexed. While paying this fee, you are not guaranteed of what pages will be indexed by these search engines and you are not guaranteed high rankings on the results pages. If anyone guarantees you placement, run!!!!

When you decide to advertise on a search engine, you are in complete control of everything. You have control of where your company is found on the results pages. You have control of the landing page the prospects find. This means that you have instant visibility of what you want the buyers to see.
You, as an advertiser, have 24/7 control of your campaign. As we all know, you know your business best and you have 24/7 access to change any ad and experiment what is working best for you before you go out and spend the thousands of dollars on trying to optimize your site for the major search engines.

The key ingredient to any successful company is to have a marketing strategy. In you marketing strategy, you should identify the message you want your prospects to know. You should know who your target audience is. You should always define your goals.

More to come in the upcoming weeks:
Jonathan Prescott

Over the years I have worked with wholesale companies in various industries; golf, fireplaces, computer equipment, barbecue’s., etc. That’s a pretty diverse background but all those industries have the same thing in common, they want buyers. Wait a minute they dont want buyers they need buyers! This is the formula for their survival. Now for the first time I am viewing the industry from a new perspective, I am the newest Account Executive for Top Ten Wholesale and JP Communications. The first time I browsed our amazing network all I kept thinking was “Man, I wish I could have used this when I was wholesaling and looking for new buyers!” If you told me I could trade pocket change for qualified buyers coming to my company’s website, I would have broke open the piggy bank immediately! My name is Brian Werner and I look forward to meeting you and passing along my knowledge of this amazing network.

Brian Werner

When you spend as much of your time dealing with wholesale industry professionals like I do it is easy to forget that many people who visit Top Ten Wholesale and Wholesale U are just getting started in the business. It is easy to forget that many of the terms and concepts that are very familiar to the veteran are a complete mystery to the noxiously termed “newbie”.

In the spirit of offering a helping hand to those just getting started in the e-commerce world I like to offer up an occasional primer on some very basic aspect of the trade. Today’s entry; Pay per click advertising.

One of the biggest and most frustrating hurdles for the new e-commerce site to overcome is after all the web site construction is done and the shopping carts installed and filled with shiny new products getting people to come. There are millions of web sites out there and standing out can be extremely difficult.

A way to improve traffic is to enroll in a pay-per-click search engine. The most famous example probably being Google Adwords, a systems used by millions of online businesses, but Yahoo’s Search Marketing isn’t far behind. The engines will charge you a very small fee per visit they generate for your web site. Usually you will bid against other customers for position on the site. The higher your bid the better position you will get.

You should expect to pay fees ranging from a few cents to around a dollar per click depending on the keywords you want your ad to appear with. Pay-per-click ads are among the very best ways to increase traffic to your website, proper bids and a well constructed ad will almost certainly improve your web pages traffic numbers.

In brief, an advertiser simply sets up a pay per click account with the search engine they wish to advertise on and fill out an automated form with the text that constitutes their ad. They then place bids on the key words that relate to the particular product or service they offer. The key words are the search terms that browsers are likely to use in order to find what they are looking for and the bid is the amount the advertiser is willing to pay for every click their ad receives.

How high the bidder goes determines how highly placed their ad will appear amongst the sponsored links that are returned with the search and generally appear either in a side column or at the top of a page of search results. Most advertisers use a key word digger or similar tool to determine the most searched for key words. Key word tools can be found online and most pay per click search engines offer some kind of digging tool for their customers to use.

For example, The Burly Brothers Moving Company might choose to bid on several sets of keywords such as movers, moving companies, and furniture movers. The amount they will need to bid on their key words depends on how popular the key word is and how high a placement they desire and can afford.

To continue with our example let’s assume the Burly Brothers determine that the present highest bid, thus the highest position for the search term moving companies is $.50 per click and the next position is $.40 per click. The new advertiser figures that the second position is good enough and places a bid of $.45 per click. They will now occupy the second position and bump the $.40 bid to the third placement. It should be noted that in most cases, as long as the $.40 bid is not raised, the Burly Brothers would not have to pay the full $.45 they bid. They would only pay enough to top the lower bid, in this instance $.41.

While pay per click ads are not guarantees of success, given the highly competitive nature of the online business world, it is naive to think that just because you have built a website that visitors will come.

There are two things that fascinate me in just about equal proportions, politics and horrible web sites. I have always found that they both provide cheap laughs and plenty of things to legitimately fear. So when I came across this collection of “The Worst Political Web Sites” on CNET I was intrigued.

I would have thought given the absolute professionalism and high dollar stakes of modern political elections that all campaign websites would likely be drab but excruciatingly professional. I was very, very wrong. CNET’s collection contains websites as woefully incomplete or amateurishly painful to look at as anything I’ve ever seen.

In a way it’s refreshing that there is still room in the American political landscape for a blogging dog. Shawn O’Donnell’s pet, Josie assures us of her owner’s many terrific qualities and urges the voters of Virginia’s 1st congressional district to vote for the Democrat. While reading Josie the dog’s blog I learned the disturbing fact that Senator Edward Kennedy had a dog named Splash.

The most common problem shared among the bad campaign sites is simply not really having a website. The idea that any candidate in a modern political election could at this late date have place holding sites or sites “under construction” is incredible. But not nearly as incredible as the Independent candidate for congress in Nevada whose web site’s meta-tags include the keywords, Brittany Spears, car rental, scholarships, and baby names.

The list is a fair mix from both ends of the political spectrum and miserable web design knows no party affiliation. However, I did notice that awful Republican sites tended to offend the eye by their design, garish contrasting colors, sappy patriotic symbols, and lots of underlining and exclamation points. The Democrats, on the other hand, tended to have more irritating flash animation.

Halloween continues to be the fastest growing holiday on the calendar. For many years Halloween meant a healthy boost in sales for candy and costumes wholesalers but lagged far behind other holidays in consumer spending. Things have changed in recent years and now Americans spend as much on the spookiest day of the year as they do on Valentines. Both, of course fall far behind the biggest retail holiday of all, Christmas.

Halloween 2006 is looking like it will extend the trend of years seeing higher than ever expenditures. The average American will shell out close to $60 to celebrate Halloween. Consumers spend the most on costumes, averaging about $22, followed by decorations, candy, and greeting cards. This comes to a grand total indeed of $4.96 billion. Last year we spent a mere $3.29 billion, just lazy I guess.

Though costumes are the most costly individual items, the main growth this year is said to be in decorations. A survey for the National Retail Federation on Halloween retail sales said consumers will spend 27% more than last year. The NRF survey, curiously named the Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, estimates nearly two-thirds of consumers will celebrate Halloween this year, up from 52.5 percent in 2005.

The fastest growth in celebrating is among young adults aged 18 to 24, with fully 85% of them taking part in festivities, up from 66.8 percent last year. This age group is a highly desirable retail demographic, they have plenty of disposable income and have been known to celebrate things. It’s not just the kids either. More than 70 percent of adults aged 25 to 44 will also be taking part in Halloween festivities of one sort or another.

As I was looking into this I came across a list of the top five costume themes for adult men and women. I can in no way be sure of the scientific basis of these lists but found them amusing in any case. It would be interesting to hear from costume wholesalers and retailers with their opinion of the most popular costume themes.

Men
1. PIRATE
2. SUPERHERO
3. VAMPIRE
4. STAR WARS
5. FUNNY (clowns and the like presumably)

Women
1. PIRATE AND WENCH
2. WITCHES
3. SUPERHEROIN
4. SEXY COSTUMES (Whatever that means precisely)
5. NURSE

The reasons for operating a handbag resell business are numerous and well documented. There is little wonder that handbags have become a key niche for online stores and auction site retailers. The demand is high, woman need them for practical reasons and want then for fashion reasons. A change of handbags can completely reinvent a woman’s look. There are wholesale suppliers a plenty and quality, desirable styles are easily obtained at prices that make for good profit margins.

As result of the success of handbag reselling there are so many wholesale handbags on the Internet that many handbags distributors are hard pressed to stand out from the others. Without something extra to turn visitors into customers they will simply move on and buy their handbags from some other retailer or wholesale supplier. A struggling purse merchant is confronted with a choice. They must either offer their handbags at a more appealing price or have a range of styles that far out shine the competition.

Handbags aren’t bought based only according to price. Women are looking for handbags that are durable as well as fashionable and inexpensive. Once a resellers’ client pool has grown several lines of more expensive but durable handbags can attract customers willing to pay more for that good quality. Many people buy from wholesale handbags websites because they can find a wider variety of styles than are available in the boutiques.

By now most people are familiar with Airsoft guns. Everyday camo wearing make believe warriors pour into the parks and wooded areas of the world for a friendly round of combat. They choose up sides, set out courses, ignore the poison ivy, and celebrate the joys of electric and compressed air powered war.

Devotes tell us that the game encourages teamwork, offers a terrific release from the stress of the work a day world, and provides them with excercise in a more entertaining environment than the gym could ever offer.

Airsoft guns have existed in Japan since the 1970’s have begun to replace the paintball gun as the weapon of choice among America’s weekend warriors. The biggest appeal of airsoft guns over paintball is probably that airsoft guns look much more like real guns than do paintball markers and have a more realistic firing action. Airsoft fans also claim that the larger mass of paintballs makes them more dangerous than airsoft pellets.

In the 1980’s the Daisy BB Gun Company released a toy gun that fired a projectile that was safe for people to shoot at one other but it failed to catch on in the U.S. The disadvantages of paintball became an increasing problem for participants and as the demand for alternatives to paintball grew new technologies were applied to air powered guns until now batteries that drive an electric motor that can fire repeatedly power the guns. This advance made the guns fully automatic and brought to feel of modern warfare to the sport.

The wholesale airsoft industry is big business, I recently read of one manufacturer that reports $10 million in earnings for the year. Many sporting good and toy wholesalers and retailers have learned that adding a line of airsoft guns and accessories have provided a big boost to their bottom lines.

The guns themselves range from around $50 for the simplest models up to several hundred dollars for the battery powered, fully automatic weapons. A bottle of 2,000 pellets will cost between $15 and $20 per bottle. The gas canisters cost around $20 apiece and must be replaced frequently. New lines of guns and supplies become available constantly.

The AP just reported that Google snapped up YouTube for $1.65 bil. To date:
1) YouTube has yet to turn a profit
2) Was involved in “litigation” for copyright infringement ( though the AP reports these suits were settled).
3) They are also run by a 29 year old CEO and 27 year old CTO.

Well, they also:
1) Have millions of unique visitors per month.
2) 100% brand loyalty.
3) A platform that makes sharing videos with world simple.
4) Worldwide media attention.
5) A CEO and CTO who live , sleep, and breathe .COM
6) Wild passion about their business.
7) A sense of urgency to deliver products that the users want.
$1.6 billion dollars.
9) A desk full of the most qualified resumes in the world.
10) oh..Did I forget? They now have GOOGLE.

Congratulations Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen! Silicon Valley needs more visionaries that understand usability and what exactly it is that users want. I think this is a great acquisition on Googles part. YouTube will help Google deliver the “world’s information” and add, yet, another platform to deliver adowrds.

Yahoo and MSN are sooooooo far behind. Maybe, just maybe, if they started caring about users and customers instead of margins and revenues, they’d catch up. Fat chance.

Jason