Greetings / Editor's Note

This time of year, more than any other, business owners are bombarded by statistics and reports about the size, scope, and value of seasonal selling. While growing consumer confidence in the Internet is helping to make this year another strong online holiday shopping season, November and December are not the only seasonal selling opportunities.

In this month's issue of the eNewsletter, we provide insider tips and strategies for making the most of the upcoming holiday selling season, and to help you get a jump on next year (think Back to School, Valentine's Day, Easter, Passover, Spring Break, etc.), we're offering a FREE webinar this Wednesday, November 15, on all things related to seasonal merchandising (not just Christmas). We're also please to announce a new feature to the eNewsletter—Ask the Expert. If you're interested in learning more about UPC Codes, be sure to check out this month's Ask the Expert: Member Q&A.

Finally, as you may have noticed, a lot changed in October... we launched a new and improved version of Doba.com, and we started to guarantee that our wholesale prices are the lowest in the drop shipping space. We hope you like the changes, and we wish you the best—both personally and professionally—this holiday season.

—Doba's Community & Education Staff

Table of Contents

• Holiday Merchandising Quick and Easy
• Free Webinar on Seasonal Merchandising
• The New Doba.com
• Lowest Wholesale Price Guarantee
• Ask the Expert: Member Q&A
• Do You Blog?

Holiday Merchandising Quick and Easy

by Stuart Lisonbee, Educational Specialist - Doba

Getting ready for the holidays doesn't require a complete site overhaul. By implementing a few simple tactics to build on your existing merchandising, you can maximize sales and profits during this, the biggest retail season of the year.

Want to know more? Read our latest article, Holiday Merchandising Quick and Easy.

Upcoming Event: This Wednesday - Free Webinar on Seasonal Merchandising

As a retail merchant, you can't live on one major holiday season a year. Although the upcoming holiday season may occupy the top shelf of your mind, seasonal selling delivers marketing opportunities year-round. In this webinar, titled 'Tis the Season...for Some Serious Selling: Capitalizing on Seasonal Selling Opportunities Throughout the Year, led by eBay University Instructor Steve Lindhorst, we show you ways to update your product line so you stay on top of seasonal selling trends throughout the year. You'll also learn how to identify predictable seasonal trends and develop a powerful sales strategy that boosts sales throughout the year, not just for the upcoming holiday season.

You'll also discover how to:

• Identify specific seasons and their associated merchandise.
• Identify secondary products associated with various times of year—for example, batteries for Christmas gifts; posters for dorm rooms at back-to-school time; and fun-in-the-sun products for the vacation season.
• Use big-box department stores' marketing dollars for your benefit when identifying trends.

Each year, the online marketplace becomes more robust, and sales grow. Don't sit on the sidelines watching and waiting for next year's "holiday season." Take advantage of each seasonal trend and ramp up your marketing efforts to maximize the opportunities throughout the year! Sign up today!

The New Doba.com

by Wade Preston Shearer, Creative Director - Doba

As part of our ongoing effort to make our services as powerful and user-friendly as possible, we are thrilled about the latest upgrade to our website. Extensive research, planning, and development have gone into making Doba.com the poster child for simplified online retail merchandising.

The biggest change is the dramatic improvement to how you browse and search for products. New features give you immediate access to products from anywhere on the site:

• Jump directly to subcategories with "heads up" subcategory lists
• Dynamic submenus simplify product navigation
• Search from any page on the website
• Revamped home page provides quick access to Doba's main features
• Expanded search results, sorting, and pagination give you more control over product searches
• Browse by brand to find best-selling brand-name products

We are also very excited to announce our new dynamic catalog menu which allows you to burrow down through products, expanding and collapsing subcategories, to find exactly what you want without having to wait for the page to reload. With our new product profile page you can quickly gather the information you need, including prices, suppliers, and individual product details.

Outside of the catalog, we reorganized sections, added various at-a-glance informational features, and streamlined many utilities making Doba.com faster and easier to navigate:

• "Latest news" section added to the home page keeps you informed
• "Breadcrumb" navigation that allows to see where you are, and just as important, which page you came from
• The My Account dashboard offers quick access to your account details
• Our new Education Center provides the information and tutorials you need to get up and running in a hurry and maximize your sales and profits
• Consistent navigation for public and private views reduces the learning curve
• Log in form moved to the "quick bar" for easy access

Lowest Wholesale Price Guarantee

At Doba, we carefully select drop ship wholesale suppliers who offer the highest quality products and services at the lowest prices. Even so, members occasionally become concerned when they notice a merchant offering a product at a retail price that's lower than what the member is paying for the product from one of our drop ship wholesale suppliers.

The concern is valid. After all, why would you pay more for a product from one of Doba's drop ship suppliers if you can get the same product cheaper on the street? In this article, we answer that question.

Retail for less than wholesale?!

Yes. Some retailers can offer products for less than you pay for identical products from a Doba supplier by implementing any of several retail strategies including the following:

• Selling at a loss to draw customers to their store.
• Buying large quantities to qualify for lower wholesale prices.
• Selling at closeout to clear inventory.
• Jacking up shipping fees.
• Selling products that have been returned or "gently used."
• Buying cheaper wholesale products from suppliers that offer fewer services.
• The retailer is selling grey market goods—products sold through distribution channels other than the channels authorized by the manufacturer.

Retail merchants constantly employ numerous innovative pricing strategies to gain a competitive edge. Doba and its drop ship wholesale suppliers have no control over this aspect of the retail business—competitive pricing, sometimes to the point of taking a calculated loss, is part of the nature of retail merchandising.

Drop ship wholesaling the Doba Way

When you order a product from a Doba supplier, you get more than just a low wholesale price. Our price is a fully loaded wholesale price that covers not only the cost of the product, but also a host of valuable services, including:

• Access to 250,000 name-brand products.
• Ability to order one quantity of an item at a wholesale price.
• Easy-to-use tools to push product images, descriptions, and prices directly to eBay and other select eCommerce-enabled websites.
• Toll-free telephone and live chat support.
• Fraud protection.
• Access to world-class education through webinars, teleseminars, articles, and newsletters.
• Inventory management that slashes inventory overhead to zero.
• Blind drop shipping directly to your end customer (U.S. only).
• No supplier branding or fliers are attached or included in the package your customers receive.
• Shipment tracking on all orders.

As a retail merchant, you know that a low price isn't everything. Our members find great value in these additional services and benefits.

The Doba Lowest Wholesale Price Guarantee

We are confident that our prices are the lowest of any drop-ship product sourcing company for identical products and comparable services. To back up our claim, we now offer the Doba Lowest Wholesale Price Guarantee.

If you find a drop ship wholesale supplier offering a lower price than Doba's PrePay price for an identical product, along with services comparable to those offered by one of Doba's drop ship wholesale suppliers, we will extend your Doba membership by two full months for free.

We're so confident that our drop ship wholesale suppliers offer the lowest fully loaded wholesale prices in the business that we have no reservations about offering this reward to any members who can prove us wrong.

For details on terms and conditions and to submit a report for consideration, visit the Lowest Wholesale Price Guarantee home page.

Ask the Expert: Member Q&A

Starting this month, we will feature one question from a Doba member answered by one of our in-house experts. If you have a question related to eBay, drop shipping, or running an online business, email your question to education@doba.com. If your question is highlighted in an upcoming issue of the eNewsletter, you will receive two free months worth of all your Doba-related services!

This month's question is one we hear quite often:

Question: "How can I get the UPC code for product x?"

Answer: That's a great question. A few sales venues on the Internet require UPC codes for new products that you want to list. Being able to obtain the UPC code for Doba products can open up a whole new world of selling opportunities to you.

Currently, we are working with our suppliers to provide us that information so we can include it on product description pages, as well as in the Data Export Tool.

For now, you can use any of two easy methods to obtain UPC codes for most products in the Doba catalog.

First is the Internet UPC Database. It's a website setup by someone as a hobby. All UPC codes are submitted by members, allowing others look them up with a search query. But because it is a free service without any checks in place, errors are always a possibility.

You can expect that the search results will be very non-descript, making it difficult in most cases to match a UPC code to an actual product.

The Internet UPC Database can be found at: http://www.upcdatabase.com

The other, perhaps more accurate, method is to upload a file to PriceGrabber.com. You must be a PriceGrabber.com member to do this, but membership is free. When you upload a list of manufacturer SKU numbers, those items will appear in your account inventory. It may take a few minutes or hours for the items to appear, but once they do, you can then do an export of that inventory. This exported file will contain UPC codes for all SKU's that PriceGrabber.com's database was able to match.

Some products will not match up to a UPC code. This is because the SKU does not exist in the PriceGrabber.com database, or the SKU is recorded differently. For example: The SKU listed for Doba product number 42829 is PLA-2280, but is recorded in the PriceGrabber.com database as PLA2280.

Don't forget to submit your questions to education@doba.com for your chance to win two free months of service! (Please note: If you need help right away, contact our support team. You may still submit your question separately for your chance to win, but questions submitted to education@doba.com will be answered only if chosen as the winner for our eNewsletter's Ask the Expert column.)