Hm.. Where to list?

Hello All,

I am looking for a suggestion about where to list my site. What we do is unique and after hours of looking through the directory, I am still stumped as to where to put it. We build websites for wholesalers who are looking to sell their products online but they do not want to deal with the headaches of doing so. We build the sites, all under our domain, and handle all the service, updating, etc. The sites are owned by us and the suppliers simply ship the product where it needs to go.

So....

Are we a shopping site for our customers? Are we a service to our suppliers? I just don't know.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Well, if you have a physical location/presence where someone can come in and do business, you might be eligible for a regional listing in the Business_and_Economy subcategory of the locality where you are physically listed.

You might want to explore Business/Wholesale_Trade to see if there is a fit there or in one of its subcats, or conversely, you could search for your competitors and see if there is a fit there. Remember, you do not have make a perfect suggestion, often just getting it close is good enough as editors routinely move sites to a "slightly" better category.

I can tell you one thing: in all probability, none of the sites you create for others would be eligible for a listing.

It also might help if the url worked As far as I can tell that url is not valid and therefore wouldn't be considered very long in any category

The root URL works for me but all of the links that I tried timed out. Plerase do not suggest your website in that state.

We prefer not to advise webmasters where to suggest their websites to, but I guess it's a shopping directory - can't tell until it's working.

What jimnoble said

Well jim was able to get farther than I did I checked the url originally with Firefox and then IE6. Firefox timed out and IE returned DNS error. Having checked again, Firefox still times out and won't load but my IE does load the root but sub-pages are returning errors.

It wasn't loading at all for me either when you had problems with it earlier, shadow575. The pages all seem to be loading now (the few that there are).

Mind you, what I'm seeing is what appears to be non-unique content (i.e. a lot of affiliate links and single product storefronts selling things a million other online stores are selling, like the Little Giant Ladder).

I had no problem seeing the whole lot.

We build the sites, all under our domain, and handle all the service, updating, etc. The sites are owned by us and the suppliers simply ship the product where it needs to go.

Click to expand...

Isn't that drop-shipping? Which is a form of affiliate marketing.

What we do is unique

Click to expand...

LOL - thousands of people have websites selling goods that others ship to the customer. What is unusual is that usually it is the original seller who advertises for affiliates whereas you are advertising yourself as an affiliate for the original sellers.

after hours of looking through the directory

Click to expand...

... you shouldn't find anyone else doing the same thing listed.

From your site:
"If you are a retailer who can offer BIG DEALS to our customers and have an affiliate program, we may add your store to the Big Deals Network. "

I did look through your directory and found more affiliate links than you could shake a stick at.

If I were still an editor I would reject the site as I believe it is entirely a mix of affiliate sales content, a type of site editors are instructed not to include.

oneeye (former editall/catmv)

Hmm...

I think there is a little confusion about our site. First, the so-called "directory" is an affiliate set of pages. This can be all but ignored. We used it in the beginning and actually were going to take it away. However, many customers actually like it. Why, I really do not know!

The other pages are listed on the home page. Currently, there are 4 stores listed. These are part of our site, not affiliates sites or separate websites. They are not made for others to use, we own them. We also do stock some product, not all items are dropped shipped, which I am still confused as why any product drop shipped is considered an affiliate. We are taking the sale, processing the order, handling all customers service and returns. Where the product is shipped from should not matter, in my opinion.

If we listed all of our products under one section, it would be easy to classify us as a store. But we are unique with regard to how we organize our products. We do not list them all together, but under separate stores within our domain. We provide our service to some suppliers who do not have much of an online presense and would like to have one. We do not build them a site and let them take it and run it. I hope this helps clear up some confusion.

If our site does not fit, that's fine. For anyone who thinks what we do is not unique, I would love to see some sites doing the same thing that we do.

Thanks for the time.

bigdeals said:

These are part of our site, not affiliates sites or separate websites. They are not made for others to use, we own them. We also do stock some product, not all items are dropped shipped, which I am still confused as why any product drop shipped is considered an affiliate. We are taking the sale, processing the order, handling all customers service and returns. Where the product is shipped from should not matter, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

See Sites Generally Not Included for information on what types of sites are not acceptable and why. Remember, it isn't "where" the products ship from that is the problem, the issue is what is "unique" about the site offering the product?

bigdeals said:

If we listed all of our products under one section, it would be easy to classify us as a store. But we are unique with regard to how we organize our products. We do not list them all together, but under separate stores within our domain.

Click to expand...

"Unique" in the context of content = What is being provided to the visitor of the site, not how it is organized and presented it to them.

bigdeals said:

For anyone who thinks what we do is not unique, I would love to see some sites doing the same thing that we do.

Click to expand...

Ok, for starters:
http://www.littlegiantwarehouse.com
http://www.littlegiantdiscount.com
http://www.littlegiantladder.com/
http://www.babyeinstein.com/
http://store.babycenter.com/categor...er_books/baby_einstein_baby_toddler?stage=all
http://www.colemanpowermate.com/
http://thetoolwarehouse.net/shop/MAN125.html
http://www.ultralitecanes.com/

shadow575 - thanks for the reply, but I think you were confused with regard to

"For anyone who thinks what we do is not unique, I would love to see some sites doing the same thing that we do."

Any sites listed on DMOZ that sells products will have other sites selling products. I am referring to the way we organize our products and the service we provide to the manufacturers who come to us to sell their product. Of the sites you listed, none of them do what we do. Yes, they sell the same products, but that is not what I am referring to. They do not have the product mix or service of specialty sites.

As for original content, what original content does Walmart have? How about Sears? I could go on, but I think you see what I mean...

As for original content, what original content does Walmart have? How about Sears? I could go on, but I think you see what I mean...

Click to expand...

Sears and Walmart have big, shiny stores and massive warehouses full of stuff they're selling. That's quite a bit different from a business who is just selling something that someone else is shipping.

The size isn't important. And the uniqueness of products isn't essential. Sears provides (emphasis: NOT OFFERS, PROVIDES!) services that nobody else on earth does. I can carry or send send my broken mixer to them, and Joe Schmoe behind the counter will fix it. Nobody else on earth pays Joe S. to fix that brand of mixers: his services are uniquely available from Sears. Someone else may do it better, but NOBODY does it like Joe. And Joe is what makes Sears unique. (Well, Joe and a few thousand other people, but who's counting? Joe is ENOUGH to make Sears unique!)

Walmart has John Schwann stocking yogurt in the dairy counter. Nobody else will hire John to stock that brand of yogurt in that place convenient for me to check on the way home. Forget the sheen on the stores, forget the square footage on the warehouses -- John's daily effort to weed out the cultures that have taken a life of their own, and add fresh controlled cultures, makes Walmart unique.

Every real business can PROVIDE its customers some unique service. Whether that service involves manufactured goods -- or baked goods -- is irrelevant. It's the service that matters.)

That's business. Now, information about that real business is the unique content that the ODP prizes. Not the advertising, not the offering, not the products, not the services. The INFORMATION. About the PROVIDER of the services.

So if, say, Walmart broke its site up into fifty thousand separate sites, each with a single product line on it, we wouldn't list any of them. If they contained no information about Walmart, they wouldn't be of any interest to us. And if they DID contain information about Walmart, it wouldn't be unique -- there'd be fifty thousand copies, and we wouldn't know which one to list. So we wouldn't bother with any of them.

Sorry, the "big, shiny" and "massive" part of my previous post should not be misconstrued as meaning that bigness, shininess, or massiveness is necessarily relevant to anything...they're just descriptions of two particular stores.