Once there was a passionate wholesale merchandise business entrepreneur who sold everything he owned and a wide amount of the income he made towards searching for ?The Touchstone,? a stone with magical powers, one believed to transform anything to gold. ?The Touchstone? could be found on the far away seashore, among the other stones there. But unlike the other stones, ?The Touchstone? was warm, but not hot. So the man who sought wealth went to the seashore and started picking up the stones, feeling them one by one, and throwing the cold stones to the sea.

He did this for months until one day, he finally picked up ?The Touchstone? but because he had been doing the same thing for a long time, he automatically threw the stone to the sea, just like all the others. It was too late when he realized that stone needed to get hotter and not stay average and warm like all others. Being in accordance with comfort and tradition is evil I tell you that!

So what's the moral of this story? If you do repetitive tasks, you're likely to make mistakes and miss opportunities. Instead of putting your energy towards coming up with ways of growing your business, you're stuck doing repetitive chores. If you want to have a profitable business, the money can be found in planning and setting your goals, not doing repetitive tasks. No matter if it's wholesale merchandise up loadings to eBay or selling regular widgets, the rule of automation applies.

This is why it's important that you automate as much as your business as possible ? from updating your product line, upgrading your services and even setting a blog no matter what kind of commercial tangible business you own, call it what you want, it's a necessary profitable commodity. For instance, you can automate your invoice and payment confirmation follow-ups by using an auto responder program or service online.

Even if you have to pay a monthly fee for an auto responder service, it is money well spent because you can pre-load your auto responder account with customized codes to recognize the specific purchase of specific clients and personalize it as much as it is needed weeks in advance! If you use a company or program to take care of delivering your customers payment and delivery confirmation to your customers, it means you don't need to be in front of your computer checking your e-mail every ten minutes to see if the customer already paid if eBay as example is one of your main income sources.

The Internet has grown so much in the last few years that you can do practically any repetitive task with the help of software, scripts and other websites that will do these tasks for you. Automation presents another way you can be profitable online: You can supply the software, scripts or website services that will do the repetitive tasks for other e-commerce stores.

You are actually creating a stream of income for yourself since these people's businesses will grow and they will want more of their tasks automated. If you have a team of programmers, you can respond to a need and be able to provide that need in a reliable. Well, so it happens in the wholesale business.

In this day and age, the last thing a customer or prospect wants to hear from you is an excuse that goes something like, ?It may take me a while to get this delivered to you because I'm doing things manually.? Give your customers and prospects what they want when they need it. This means automating the repetitive tasks like delivering mailed tracking information, payment confirmations and back end similar offers. When you automate, you save yourself time and you also lessen your chances of making mistakes, be it wholesale merchandise or other online projects.