New-Rich 4 Steps to Business Automation
Timothy Ferriss suggested in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, a four step process towards business automation that you can use for your e-commerce business website. Using Doug at Prosoundeffects.com as an example, he illustrates the steps taken by Doug as:
- Market Selection
Doug chose music and television producers as his market because
he is a musician himself and has used these products.
- Product Brainstorm
Doug chose the most popular products available for resale from the
largest manufacturers of sound libraries and arranged a wholesale
purchase and drop-ship agreement with them. Many of these
libraries cost well above $300 (up to $7,500), and this is precisely
why he needs to answer more customer-service questions than
someone with a lower-priced product of $50-200.
- Micro-Testing
He auctioned the products on eBay to test demand (and the
highest possible pricing) before purchasing inventory. He ordered
product only when people placed orders from him, and product
shipped immediately from the manufacturers’ warehouses. Based
on this demand confirmed on eBay, Doug created a Yahoo Store
with these products and began testing Google Adwords and other
PPC search engines.
- Rollout and Automation
Following this testing, and upon generating sufficient cash flow,
Doug began experimenting with print advertising in trade magazines.
Simultaneously, he streamlined and outsourced operations
to reduce his time requirements from two hours per day to two
hours per week.
In the third step above, there is a reference to an end-to-end ecommerce solution, Yahoo Store! (now Yahoo! Merchant Solutions). Although yahoo Yahoo Store! is one of the more popular e-commerce solution, there are also other alternatives to the end-to-end solutions including eBay Prostores which is much cheaper, and SiteBuildIt with their superior online business coaching help. Visit our end-to-end solution comparison to get a better idea of the differences between the ecommerce hosting solutions.
