Constraints and limitations faced by Malaysian IM (2)

An aspiring Internet marketer very often neglects the importance of including the shipping charges in his calculation for the prices of products.
It is not surprising because when they first started they are always brain-washed by the Internet marketing gurus to sell downloadable information products which do not involve shipping.
Then there is another group of gurus who will encourage you to use drop shippers. Drop shippers are whole salers who will deliver the products to your customers directly from their storage space when you place the orders with them. In an ideal environment,working with a drop shipper will save you big sum of money. You don't need to have a store,no need to worry about packing and shipping.
But this ideal situation is difficult to find because reputable drop shippers will be reluctant to work with a stranger like you. Similarly you are reluctant to work with new drop shippers or those who do not have good reputations.Of course,there are some lucky Internet marketers doing successful business with reputable drop shippers.However,many new comers are cheated off their money and went out of business before they meet any good drop shippers.
Therefore drop shipping is not a very good option when starting your business online.
The alternative is to ship your goods yourself. First you must learn the proper way to pack your goods with the right type of protective materials,seal the package securely and label it clearly. Otherwise your forwarder will refuse your consignment because any damage or lost caused by sloppy packing may be blamed on them.
Then you have to look for a reliable forwarder or courier service company.
For large and heavy items you should send through forwarders by sea, while smaller and light items can be sent by courier service.
All courier service companies impose a minimum charge which is in the region of RM100. If the value of your product is very high,the minimum shipping charge will not pose a problem. Whereas for light and low value items,this minimum charge may make the buyer to change his/her mind. This is very common, it all boils down to human nature.
In the beginning I thought our national courier service,POS LAJU, may not be so expensive.But I was disappointed,they do not strive to compete with private companies to provide good service, instead they strive to follow them in charging high fees.
Unless the shipping charges is lowered, we Malaysians will be at a big disadvantage in running our online businesses.

Constraints and limitations faced by Malaysian IM (1)

As my target audience are Malaysians,let's talk more on the Internet Marketing (IM) scene in Malaysia.
The blood line for Malaysia IM is the TMnet which is owned by the Telekom department,which in turns is manned by government servants. Due to the "tidak apa" attitude of the workers,the reliability of the IM infrastructure is questionable. Nobody will deny this.
Frequent disconnetcions,occasional complete breakdowns and sporadic line speeds are the most common complaints of TMnet. It seems the staff are happy if they manage to keep the breakdown rate low,the line speed and line dropping out is not big concern.But these problems affect the online business very seriously.
When the speed is low (lags) the web pages will take too long to load, and visitors will just click and move on to some other sites, there we lost potential customers. Isn't it frustrating after spending money to hire somebody to streamline your web pages in order for them to load quickly and SEO works to drive traffics to your sites,now just because the line is lagging, you lost your customers!
When a visitors click on your site's url which is among the search engine results,a error 404 (page cannot be found) message is displayed because TMnet was down. What would the surfer think, he may think that your site has been shut down due to some reasons! You lost business again. It is very similar to the real life situation when you go to your favourite shop and you find their gates are down, you may think that they are off today, they have moved or they have wound up.
I will touch on the shipping problems faced by Malaysian Internet Marketers in the next post.