All of the world's Kratom comes from www.wholesaleshamanicherbs.com. There is an unofficial supplier enforced price floor of $9/ounce and no Kratom vendor goes below this price.
So I have the cheapest kratom on the internet. The google adwords aren't saturated so maybe I can get users for $0.10/click, which would be profitable for me. I've also heard that Google charges low page ranked sites more for Adwords and I suspect my pageranking is low enough that Google might punish me.
Because of how I interpret the laws in the USA, I can sell Kratom only for the purposes of incense. A quick google search will review much use for Kratom beyond this but it makes marketing more difficult. I can't market Kratom as a wonder drug that makes you happy and productive that also might help you lose weight.
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My friends think the website looks like a scam because there is a buy button on the first page. But from an information architecture perspective, I can't justify moving the buy links to a separate page with nothing else on it.
Is your first impression of my site that it must be a scam? Is there anyway I can do to make my site look more reliable?
Who are you targeting with this site - people who already use Kratom but are actively searching for a better price? How many people are searching for Kratom? I know I've never heard of it.
Frankly, I think this is a bit of an ill conceived plan. You're basically trying to catch people who are already using and are familiar with a niche incense, by promising to sell it at a discount. How price sensitive are people using niche incense going to be? Versus trusting a new supplier off the internet? So lets run through it - right now your page would convert someone that:
1) Uses Kratom
2) Sees your advertising
3) Is concerned about saving, er, actually, looking at your site, maybe a few percent on something that costs next to nothing
4) Is concerned enough about that saving to buy off of a new one page site on the internet
All while you are presumably running razor thin margins and paying for the advertising. Razor thin margins could work when you are making up for it at a large volume, but I don't think the market is big enough for that. My father is working on a site that does exactly what you're doing, but for 10,000 products instead of 1 and attempting to catch organic search traffic. Many products haven't ever been sold, and individually the traffic per product is very little, but it's the area under the curve that counts. It's very Web 0.2, but when selling to average people, that doesn't matter.
You might want to consider turning the site into a Kratom info page that only incidentally sells it. Make comparison pages with whatever else is similar to it (types of incense I guess?) that will show up in organic search under other terms. Pages of info or uses or whatever that'll show up in organic search. Your page rather snarkily tells me to learn how to search the internet. I'm sorry, but if I don't take the time to research the product you are selling and find out if I want to buy it, that's not _my_ problem, that's _YOUR_ problem. I clicked on the Wikipedia link and I still don't know what it is... I mean, I know that it's some plant from Asia that can be burned as insence... but I don't know why I would care (sell me on the benefits and maybe I'd try it).
There's another thing you could try, and it'll cost money and probably won't work (but if it does it'll be passive income for a long time). It'll only have a chance of working if Kratom is relatively obscure (one supplier in the world, I'm presuming it is). You'll also have to track things well.
But what you could do is stop selling it at a discount, and bid on ad words for words like incense, pointing to a page saying exactly the problem you're facing. Say how good it is, and that you've got the ability to supply Kratom and nobody really knows about it, but you believe in it so much that you'll personally send out a sample to anyone in the US that wants one. Full instructions how to use it etc. Fulfill 100 or 200 orders and run the numbers. You've paid maybe 1000 x 10 cents to get those people to fill out the form, maybe $100. You've paid for the samples of Kratom, maybe $5 per person. X of those people loved it and will become customers - you've got to work out the gross and net value of each customer, that is, average sale price x frequency of sale x time they stay customers (could be a hell of a long time). There is obviously a bit of guess work here. So there you'd have a $x of advertising expenditure gets you y customers who will on average bring in $z profit each. If you make decent margins (to pay for your time), keep doing this for years and you'll make a reasonable amount from the site. If you don't, try something else a bit radical, or ditch the whole thing and try something else (recommended).
I put the site up without doing a lot of consideration to the marketing, which is a challange. I put it up because Kratom is an extraordinarily profitable product for sellers.
The supplier enforced price floor means that I am not operating on a razor thin price margin. It's close to 100% profit margin. I need not fear someone undercutting me.
Kratom is not an incense, though it can be smoked. I recognize it is confusing, but the current vendors of Kratom claim it is an incense and sold for those purposes only. Kratom is an opiate comparable in strength to hydrocodone. In smaller doses it is stimulating, providing a mental boost similar to caffeine but without the jittery side effects. The main medical uses would be opiate withdrawal, chronic pain management, and treatment of ADHD. Traditionally, workers would chew the leaves of Kratom but now is usually boiled into a tea. If you add a lot of sweetener, it even tastes good. It is high in antioxidants, containing much more than brewed green tea.
The active alkaloid, 6-hydroxy-mitragynine is 30 times more powerful than morphine by weight.
However, I can't tell people that kratom is a drug on my site because it is probably illegal to say so. If I told people that 10 grams of kratom leaf is comparable to 20 miligrams of hydrocodone, I would be selling a drug without FDA approval. Paypal would also ban my account because they want no part of this business. There have been Kratom vendors that made claims about Kratom's use as an opiate on their website that had shipments of Kratom seized by customs. I have spoken to one of the larger retail vendors of Kratom who strongly recommended only referring to Kratom as an incense.
If I was legally allowed to market Kratom as a drug, I would. It's a potent painkiller that doesn't make you tired or slow you down. There is certainly a commercial market for a new, natural opiate but I'm not allowed to bring something like that to market in the USA.
It's a bit of a catch-22 -- if I tell people it's a drug, everyone will want it but I can't tell people it's actually a drug. What I really need here is legal advice telling me exactly what I can and can't say about Kratom, but without legal advice I'm afraid to do any more than give people the tools to find the information for themselves. Does anyone know a lawyer that could offer a qualified view on my business?
I am competing on price and only able to sell to those that already know what Kratom is, unless there's an angle I'm missing here. I've been selling on eBay for a while and a website was the logical way to increase volume. I have some passionate customers, including one who advocated for me on a chronic pain management support group. Most of my customers just email me requesting a PayPal invoice for their Kratom. If I could pull some SEO magic and be highly rated for kratom keywords, this business would be profitable.
Until then, I'm just going to advertise online. Where should I advertise besides Google Adwords?
Hmmm, I get it now. It's a tough situation... if I were you I'd just keep doing it like you're doing it now, maybe even lose the wikipedia link (since it could be construed as a hint), stress that it's an incense only and all other uses may be illegal (or not, maybe it would be better to not mention it? IANAL), and let all your sales come from word of mouth.
After all, do you really want to build a business around this? You're playing with fire. I've read a few horror stories about the FDA freezing entire businesses with little or no chance of appeal. The legendary Gary Halbert (RIP) I believe stopped dealing with anything like this in the 80s because of them. But if you sell it as incense only and explicitly warn against all other uses (and IANAL and IDPOOTV so obviously consult one) you could just keep this as a nice passive-ish stream of income that'll grow naturally for years.
You will probably want to delete all of these comments, too :)
>Until then, I'm just going to advertise online. Where should I advertise besides Google Adwords?
Besides Google Adwords for ads I really like Adbrite.com. Google, Overture, and other ads are just too expensive, the keywords are all bid up to outrageous prices.
On Adbrite you can buy ads on sites for a fixed period of time or you can pay per cpm. I pay about 1 to 3 cents per clickthrough and I have great signup rates from those visitors (high quality people not junk signups).
The Adbrite system is worth spending some time on to figure it out, once you do you will spend far less on advertising then anywhere else that I have experimented with. We may be targeting different markets in that you have a product and I have a service, but if you gave it a serious try I am certain it would work out well for you (and you can share some of that new money with me!).
Thanks for the tips. It's actually more difficult to advertise than I thought, because "kratom" is a banned keyword on Google. I can't advertise on other appropriate keywords like "pain" and I can't use kratom in the ad. So most of the people selling kratom on Google adwords only mention that they sell Kava, which is another worthwhile legal drug that is fortunate enough to have registered supplement status in the USA.
I gotta try and get kratom approved as a supplement by the FDA, the process doesn't look too bad. But if they want to inspect a facility, I'm screwed.
Adbrite won't let me advertise either, even if I claim to be selling incense. I gotta try and get the $5 back from them, because they haven't run a single ad for me. I haven't try Overture yet, I'll give them a try.
So far I've had the best success with Amazon/Clickriver. The minimum CPC is $.10 which kind of sucks, but they let me make really obnoxious advertisements about kratom. They also give you as many impressions as you want. I'm up to 50,000 impressions with a .03% click through rate; it's great that they don't cut or overcharge for low click through ads.
Keep on buying ads like that until you find the right ones, over a few months I was able to find the good sites that had low prices for there ads (far too low, like $5 to $10 a month). Now I get significant traffic for almost no money compared to spending huge sums on Google Adwords. Adbrite is excellent over the long haul.
There seems to be another catch-22 here: if you are too successful at promoting kratom, and people are buying it because of its opiate-like properties, then you're inviting the FDA (DEA?) to schedule it.
Ummm, grow the pie. Make it your life's mission to educate people on Kratom. If more people want it, and they only have two sources for it, then you're in great shape.
My headline is a little misleading. There are many different sites selling kratom at the retail level. There is only one site selling wholesale kratom. Out of all the retail vendors, I have the cheapest price.
If a new wholesale vendor were to enter the market, that wholesaler would be able to make a great deal of money very quickly.
So I have the cheapest kratom on the internet. The google adwords aren't saturated so maybe I can get users for $0.10/click, which would be profitable for me. I've also heard that Google charges low page ranked sites more for Adwords and I suspect my pageranking is low enough that Google might punish me.
Because of how I interpret the laws in the USA, I can sell Kratom only for the purposes of incense. A quick google search will review much use for Kratom beyond this but it makes marketing more difficult. I can't market Kratom as a wonder drug that makes you happy and productive that also might help you lose weight.
-
My friends think the website looks like a scam because there is a buy button on the first page. But from an information architecture perspective, I can't justify moving the buy links to a separate page with nothing else on it.
Is your first impression of my site that it must be a scam? Is there anyway I can do to make my site look more reliable?