October 2003


   Greetings!

Welcome to the first full issue of the Wholesale Marketer Newsletter, the Marketer Monthly! We hope you find the articles informative and useful. If you ever have suggestions of what you would like to see in the future, please let us know.

  • Protect Yourself Against Fraud
    •   Anyone whose placed an order that totaled more than $500 dollars at Wholesale Marketer lately has most likely been contacted by our fraud department. The rise in fraud cases recently has prompted me to write this article dealing with internet fraud.

    You always hear about internet businesses that try to "scam" their customers and most of us have probably seen several of their "spamvertisements" in our inboxes, but what doesn't get quite as much publicity are the thousands of cases in which the buyer tries to defraud the seller.

    If you do business on the Internet, you're a potential target. Protect yourself as best you can:

    • If you're accepting PayPal payments, make sure the payment is legitimate (see PayPal's Security Center).
    • If you accept credit card payments through a merchant account, be sure to use AVS (Address Verification System)
    • Beware of using escrow services you've never heard of before.
    • Confirm large-dollar purchases before processing them. When people charge thousands of dollars to buy large-ticket items from Wholesale Marketer, we always contact that customer to verify the purchase, and most of the time we require them to pay us by wire transfer. We do this because it helps our members by ensuring they have a valid, "money-in-the-bank" payment from their buyer.
    • Verify orders for large quantities of the same item. They can be legit, but chances are the products will end up being re-sold out of the trunk of a car, and you'll be stuck with a charge- back from the real card owner when he/she realizes that their card number has been stolen somehow.
    • Be aware of protection programs like EBay's Safe Harbor. If you sell on eBay (or even if you don't) I highly recommend reading through the materials at eBay's Security Center
    • If you think you're being ripped off, don't just wait around to hear from someone about it. Contact the bank that issued the card, and the police in the area you think the perpetrator purchased from. They take credit card fraud very seriously.
    Know what you're up against. Believe it or not, there are actually individuals out there who make their entire living by scamming eBay users. Click HERE to see a recent article from MSNBC about one particularly successful eBay scammer.

    Lastly, we strongly discourage our members from selling to customers outside the U.S. There are several reasons for this.

    1. A good majority of these transactions turn out to be fraudulent, and it is harder to verify funds from these customers.
    2. Wholesale Marketer doesn't ship outside the U.S., so you'd have to ship to yourself first then outside the U.S.
    3. Most product warrantees are voided when the products are sold outside the U.S. Our wholesale suppliers are manufacturer authorized to distribute products to U.S. resellers; however, most manufactures that do business globally authorize other distributors in foreign markets. This allows them to price appropriately and market individually to differing markets. If you sell to a customer in another country and that customer has a problem with the product, when they contact the manufacturer, they will be asked for the serial number of the product. If the serial number isn't from an authorized distributor in that particular market, the manufacturer will inform that customer their warrantee isn't valid. The same thing often happens to U.S. customers who buy on eBay from people who've imported products to the U.S. These items are referred to as "Gray Market" items and account for an estimated $40 billion of product sales in the U.S. For more info about the Gray Market, please see the following links:

      Article 1
      Article 2
      www.antigraym arket.org

      In summary, just remember three simple "P"s and you'll save yourself from the headaches of being defrauded:

      1. Prevent it by being informed.
      2. Protect yourself by using AVS and fraud protection services.
      3. Be Proactive in investigating all large and/or suspicious transactions.

      Sincerely,

      Clark Winegar
      Marketer Monthly Editor

  • Wholesale Marketer Headlines
    •    New Billing System - As mentioned in our introductory newsletter, Wholesale Marketer is restructuring its billing system due to member demand.

    The new billing system should be completed by the time our November newsletter comes out, and will give members the ability to pay by credit card or PayPal. It will also allow members to set up multiple billing profiles. You'll be able to choose to pay for your products with one profile and your membership with another. It will also allow you to set up separate memberships for premium warehouses and manage your warehouse access by adding warehouses you want or need and canceling those you don't. All of this adds up to more flexibility and ease of use for our members.

    Link Exchange - For those of you who run your own website, Wholesale Marketer now offers a link exchange program. Remember, many search engines take into account how many sites link to yours when determining your search engine ranking. To exchange links with Wholesale Marketer, please visit our links page.

    More Wholesale Marketer Happenings...

  • Monthly Marketing Tip
    •   In the Marketer Monthly, we will from time to time offer tips or tell you about services we find extremely useful. This month the service is from Alexa, particularly the Alexa Toolbar. We would like to clarify that we are in no way affiliated with Alexa, nor do we receive any compensation from them for telling you about their free service. It is just something we have found to be very useful in our own business practices.

    All good marketing requires a great deal of market research. Alexa is an excellent tool to use when researching your competitors, looking at traffic trends, or just surfing the web.

    With an installed base of well over 10 million toolbars, the Alexa traffic rankings represent the largest and most global sample of internet usage available in the world. The traffic rankings can be seen, on a per-site basis, for free in the Alexa Toolbar and on the Alexa site at www.alexa.com.

    The free Alexa Toolbar has been the choice of smart surfers everywhere for over six years. The Alexa Toolbar provides instant access to Web Search, Related Links, Site Stats, and Contact Info for all the sites you visit! Not only that, you're just a click away from more information like traffic trends and 3rd party site reviews.

    Alexa also offers several tools for webmasters to monitor their own sites and drive even more traffic to their sites, and of course, "Traffic on the Internet means customers coming to your Web site and customers equal money. It's as simple as that." (Quoted from Mark Lewin, Chairman of Paxfire Inc)

    Learn More About Alexa

  • Affiliate Affluence
    •   This is the part of the newsletter where we shamelessly promote our own affiliate program and how much money you can make by participating.

    Okay, so you probably won't get rich participating in the Wholesale Marketer Affiliate program, but you can easily make a couple hundred extra bucks a month by doing nothing more than placing affiliate links where people will see them. If you have a web page, you can put a link there, but even if you don't, you can still put affiliate links in your email signature and make money that way.

    Here are just a few perks of being a Wholesale Marketer affiliate:

    • 20% commission on membership sales
    • 5% commission on sub-affiliate membership sales
    • No joining fees or any hidden costs
    • No inventory to maintain
    • No web site required
    • Individuals or businesses can participate

      Sign Up to be an Affiliate