Need some feedback on my muse

[badger]

I have been checking things out here for a couple of years now, and I am well aware that digital products are the best, and have the most profit margin. And are harder to knock off. But I am an hands-on sorta guy.

I developed a product that is a manufactured article. It is specialized to the self defense industry and should be pretty practical for the right individual. It is not for everybody, and that is fine because i dont have much overhead to hurdle over to get to break even. It is a sewn product, and the only overhead is raw materials for the first few. I have a friend that will be making them from home, so no brick and mortar or tooling or equipment investment.

My current vision is to put up a website with good copy and pictures explaining the product, with a checkout/shopping cart at the end. My calcs and research is showing that this will sell and I can make money at $47 plus $10 S&H. But I am thinking of advertising it on the site as $67 plus $10 S&H. And at checkout, a promo code can be entered to receive a $20 discount.

The promo codes and discounts would correspond to which advertisement referred the person to the site and discounts could go to the affiliate or advertiser. How do I determine how much to pay each affiliate? (I know $20 would break me) I know that for digital products, clickbank can be used for comparison. Anybody know any good sites for physical product affiliates?

I need some feedback on product testing. I dont want to waste too much time on determining if there is a market, because I really think there is. But how do I test out market pricing?

Thanks for all of the help.

[MarWillis]

The best thing to do is to make the website and test. Just as Sherwood did in the book. Use Wordpress to make a quick website, spend a little money advertising. Then when they get to the checkout link, capture their email for aweber instead of taking payment info.

That way you can send email asking for their opinion of the product, site, or price in exchange for a substantial discount when you sell the actual product.

The money spent testing will make up for the time spent fixing problems after you go live.

Many people here suggest free shipping, I agree with them. I am much more likely to pay a flat $57 on a product rather then $47 plus $10 shipping. In my mind, unless I expect the product to be large, $10 seems to be a lot for shipping. It makes me think that you are trying to make extra money off of me by overestimating the shipping. If the price is $57 with no shipping then it's a non-issue. I just think "Hey, cool! Free shipping!"

[dvdwlsh]

Originally Posted by badger

I need some feedback on product testing. I dont want to waste too much time on determining if there is a market, because I really think there is. But how do I test out market pricing?

badger, if the mixture of your experience and your instinct are telling you the market is viable, go with it and focus on the next step. If that's the case and you're confident in the demand, as you said, you're energy should go into price testing. Choose 3 price points, with enough disparity to give you significant feedback as to market price tolerance. Allocate a budget for Google Adwords and run your ads that push people to your site. You have a few options here...

• Run your ads for 3 weeks at the same ad budget; each week, run it with a different price and compare your metrics. This takes longer but gives you solid data
• In Adwords, Create 3 variations of every ad, each pointing to 1 of 3 different landing pages, varying only by price. This takes the least time, but you're essentially sharing your Google spend across 3 different price-offers

The point is that you should focus on building a killer package around your product and identifying the highest price you can command without losing interest.

Keep us posted.
David

[badger]

Great feedback so far guys!

Thanks so much. It looks like my next step is to get a landing page setup and do some adwords. Any feedback on what budget I should allow?

[badger]

So should the landing page be done in Wordpress, or should I try to get a professional HTML expert to write it for me? From what I have read, it looks like I should be able to get a wordpress landing page done for around $100?

Thanks