If your dropshipping items, typically you will be using a free open source shopping system like zencart, cubecart, magento or oscommerce. Lots of other systems out there but I would say those are the most popular.
To enable you to get ‘free sales’ you need to ensure your pages are indexed on google and other search engines. Free sales meaning that you dont have to spend money on marketing your site to get sales.
Many people who setup a shop to sell products from a dropshipping company import a product CSV or other text delimited file into their shop to populate it quickly with products. Although this saves an immense amount of time (try adding 2000 products manually…..) getting your products into your shop there is a big downside.
If your supplier routinely provides their product CSV file to many shop owners then every single one of them will have the same Meta tags (title / keywords and description). So getting those free sales through google would be a challenge. Google may even consider all those sites as ‘duplicate sites’ and penalise your index ranking. At the very worst not even rank you at all, not all your pages anyway.
So, what can you do about it?
If your using zencart, which is our choosen system based on its flexibility, features and masses of addons, then the job is easy! Although it will take time.
In Zencart you can edit all your category and product pages and specify your own meta tags (title / description / keywords). Even if you just change them slightly then it will make a big difference with search engine rankings.
Simply go into the Menu Item Catalog -> Categories/Products and browse to your category or product and then click the meta tag icon on the far right, change them there and then move onto the next item.
It will take a long time, but its worth doing! Even if you do a handful a day, you will be making all the difference.
iwebshop provide a service to install an addon called easy populate, to allow you to import products from a CSV or other text delimited file.
