With the awesome conversation we had in the phone number thread, I thought it'd be interesting to get this conversation going to see what others out there are doing.

With the two biggest ways to compete on the web being: Price and Shipping cost, how do you all compete against the hundreds (maybe thousands) of your competitors? Do you discount the most? Offer the best customer service? Product mix?

Personally, I have found the best way to compete is product mix and assortment. That is, find a popular niche brand, ppc advertise for it (and it, alone), and initially, sell everything they got (people tend to look online for 'more selection' because that's what big box does). The problem is, there is always someone else doing that too (or eventually is, once they figure out what I'm doing). To combat this, I find that offering complimentary lines helps. For instance, I sell a brand of planner, so I also offer neat little functional notepads sold by another unknown company. This way, the customer usually buys from me, because they can get the cool 'other stuff' in one transaction.

Of course, this only works if the customer is open to buying more stuff (and you sell that other companion stuff well).

So...my question is, how do you guys do it? What's your strategy? What works well for you and what doesn't?

We treat new products as advertising. Hopefully the new product is something our customers really want and will be a big seller, but if nothing else we know Google rewards new content so adding new product lines really seems to help in that regard.