Stores Online uses high pressure sales tactics to sell their user managed web sites with only 20 templates to choose from. The 20 designs are really nicely done, bur to few of them will not give you much of a choice not looking like your neighbors already existing site.
Their import feature to get the products easily into you store is rated very low, and in most cases you will need to hire a person just to be able to map the data feed for your store.
Price is exuberant, expect to pay $5000.00 for a template that you will need to setup yourself. Design your logo, and add all your products in yourself. Don't forget you will need to keep those products updated manually with the inventory list provided from your dropshipper.
Written by Martin Lee
Tuesday, 22 August 2006
This review is about the storesonline workshop that I attended back in May 06. The price of the workshop was $50.
The workshop venue was already full when I arrived with my friend. So full that they had to bring in more chairs and binders for those who were still arriving. This was further evidence of the success of their marketing system.
The main speaker was a person by the name of Kory Thurston. He claimed that he wasn't an employee of storesonline; rather he owns internet business and was paid by storesonline to conduct the workshop. As part of the agreement, he was not allowed to reveal any of his websites to us.
First, a bit on his background. Here's a brief summary:
Many years ago, he attended a storesonline workshop just like what we did. Even though he had no technical skills, he purchased a few websites from storesonline. Thanks to storesonline, he could now work from home and take care of his three kids.
I must say that this was cleverly done to build rapport with the audience. If someone with his backgound could do it, then anyone of us present should be able to repeat his success.
The first part of this presentation was about the required tools and support required to succeed in an online business. Things like website, shopping cart, secure hosting, etc. All of which were provided by storesonline.
He mentioned that there was no need for us to create any new product. People usually buy common items on the internet, not something that they have not heard of.
Kory went on to correctly point out that information was the best selling item on the internet, and also the effectiveness of permission based marketing.
He stressed on the importance of having multiple websites. Having only one site was a big mistake. My personal opinion was that we should concentrate on one site and make it profitable before starting the next. If that one site has a certain theme and doesn't deviate, it's perfectly ok.
In the afternoon session of the storesonline workshop, we were taught five strategies to help us succeed in our online business.
The first was the on the use of joint ventures. Setting up mutually beneficial joint ventures can be a very good way to grow your business.
Kory did not really go in depth into this strategy but he shared one of his methods of doing JVs. Basically, it was to search the search engines for a particular keyword and then go a few pages deep in the search to find a partner to do JVs with.
This was a decent strategy but his next step of this strategy spoilt it all. He told us that we could simply duplicate the entire site (with minor changes), get it to the top ten of the search engines and start making money! He made it sound very easy but it doesn't take a genius to realise straight away that:
1) We will get into potential copyright issues.
2) Duplicate sites are not favoured by search engines and hence do not rank well.
3) It takes good quality (and relevant) inbound links to rank well search engines. If an existing site (with established links) can't rank well, what more about a new site?
He then showed us his tax site where he's using this strategy. I can't find his exact site now but it looks something like
this. Apparently, many people had already copied his idea. But seriously, would you buy from a site like that? For that matter, would it even rank well for relevent tax keywords?
You need to build trust in order to sell anything online!
Strategy two was about search engine optimization. He gave us a few rules for getting our websites ranked well. Keywords appearing in url, titles, descriptions, etc. Pretty basic but useful stuff.
There was a demonstration of a storesonline tool that was able to analyse the top ranked (on search engines) sites and provide a comprehensive report. We were told that with this tool, we could use the report to copy what they did and get our sites ranked in the top ten listings. Would this work? Go figure.
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