Taking the Plunge

Yes, it can be initially scary to become involved with drop shipping. Take a look at any of the drop shipping forums and you will soon notice that other drop shippers are reluctant to give out information, if not entirely hostile towards new comers. The reason is that they do not want another competitor in a tight market. However, when you work with a true drop ship supplier, you do not have to worry about scouring the forums for product tips and pricing information as all the information you need is readily provided on the website.

Therefore, becoming involved with drop shipping with a true drop ship supplier is not a blind plunge at all but an easy and gentle dip. After all, drop shipping companies are interested in getting as many drop shippers going as they can. In addition, they will be more than happy to educate you on how to be successful. The more successful you are, the more successful they become. With a true drop ship supplier, you can be assured that all the resources you need will be easy to understand and readily available.

Finding your Life Boat

After you have been introduced to drop shipping by a true drop ship supplier, the added benefits of extra research tools and resources become readily apparent. It may be scary to become involved in such a competitive market. However, true drop ship suppliers strive to make every one of their clients successful. The small fish in the big pond still has something smaller to eat. That is to say, no matter how small your drop shipping business is in the beginning, a true drop ship supplier can help you to find your product niche and turn a tidy profit.

Becoming the Big Fish

One of the key aspects of a true drop ship supplier is their avoidance of simple middlemen. In fact, true drop ship suppliers are interested in fellow business people rather than simple middlemen for the sale of their products. You will likely need to get a sales tax number from your state of residence to begin drop shipping with a true drop ship supplier. However, this is not an inconvenience. Getting a sales tax number is one of the first steps towards building a successful drop shipping business. If you deal with a true drop ship supplier, they will treat you like the big fish you will someday be, not the small fish you currently are.

1. Low Fees – Unlike the costs associated with new businesses, drop ship businesses carry very low fees. If you choose a free drop shipper and list your goods on marketplace websites, you can often turn a profit in just under an hour from the creation of your business. Although paying the minor fees associated with paid drop ship companies is advisable because of the extra features, you may be able to sell your first product at the cost of only a listing cost.

2. Drop Ship Selection – When you do business through a drop ship company, you have access to a much wider selection of products than you would have had if you had just gone into business by yourself. You have access to all the products offered on your company’s website and can sell an assortment of products that often rival many online businesses.

3. No Special Skills – Almost anyone can get into the drop ship business. You do not have to have any education in business or marketing to be successful (although it certainly can help). If you choose to pay a low start up fee for a better drop ship company, you have access to many of the tools that you will need to run your business. Using these research tools will give you all the information that you need to be successful.

4. No Special Tools – All that you need to run your drop ship business is a connection to the internet and a computer. You will be able to perform all of the functions of your business with only these items. In fact, some drop shippers claim to have made a fortune by just visiting the coffee shop with their computer for a couple of hours a day.

5. Research is Simple – Any research that you need to do to become more familiar with your product is very easy to do and often accessible from the website of your drop ship company. Any additional research that you can do about your product is easy to do online or in a local store.

6. Your Efforts Determine Your Reward – At any normal job, you could likely work very hard during your regular work hours and still get paid the same amount as the coworker that spends his shifts playing solitaire on his computer. However, with drop ship businesses, your profits are usually determined on the amount of work that you do. The more you work, the more money you make. As you get better at the business, the value of each hour of your time will gradually begin to increase as well.

7. Pick Your Products – When you invest in a drop ship business, you can choose to only sell the goods with which you are familiar and have interest to almost eliminate product familiarity research. It can be very gratifying to interact with people who share your interests while making money.

8. Work From Home – If you have children or just like to spend time on the couch, owning a drop ship business can be the perfect job for you. You do not need to commute to work or leave the house when the weather is bad outside. People that stay at home to take care of children can still make a living with a drop ship business.

9. Leave the Customer Service to Professionals - If you just quit your day job and never want to have to handle a customer again, starting a drop ship business can be perfect. Any issues that arise during shipping or payment are typically handled by the drop shipping company. As the only issues that are likely to arise with online business customer support are shipping times, payment issues and merchandise quality, you can be assured that each matter will be handled well.

10. You Can Buy Your Own Products! – An often overlooked benefit to starting a drop ship business is access to cheap merchandise that would not be available at that price otherwise. This is a great benefit if you choose to sell products in which you have interest like movies or video games. Without a drop shipping membership, these prices would be almost impossible to find.

Why Start a Drop Ship Business?

These are just ten of the reasons to start a drop ship business. You can be assured that there are a great deal more. The simple fact that you can make as much money as you like and work as often as you want is often enough to convince people to give drop ship businesses a try. With the abundance of free trial offers and money back guarantees with companies such as Doba and World Wide Brands, you can simply give the business a try and discover the many fantastic reasons to start a drop ship business for yourself.

Timely Shipping

One of the most important aspects of drop shipping is shipping time. If products do not arrive in a timely manner, customers are not happy. If customers are not happy, they will not return to do business with you or refer other potential customers to your website. If a drop shipping supplier does not offer timely shipping, they are not worth your time. As a general rule, your customers usually expect to receive their product within 2 weeks of payment. This is not unreasonable and most drop shipping companies can accommodate such needs.

Some excellent drop shipping companies also have the ability to offer even faster shipping times for additional fees. These times can include overnight, second day and three day delivery. If you find a drop shipping supplier that offers such delivery times, this can be an added bonus. A specific drop shipping supplier that offers similar shipping flexibility is World Wide Brands.

Reliability

If you cannot rely on your drop shipping supplier to deliver your goods on time and deliver products that are free of defects, you should not trust your drop shipping company with your business. Even more serious is the mistake that poor drop shipping suppliers sometimes make of sending the wrong products. This can cause severe headaches for both you and the customer. Any reputable drop shipping company has a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy in the handling of your customer’s property.

Near Wholesale Prices

Until you are able to sell in enough bulk to justify the purchase of very large lots of products, you will likely not be able to find the wholesale prices that retail stores enjoy. This does not mean that you will not be able to compete with retail stores in any given market. On the contrary, your overhead will be drastically lower on every product that you sell. In this way, you will be more than able to compete with even the largest retail stores (online and offline) while still turning a profit.

You should expect to receive such prices from your drop shipping supplier on most products. However, prices may fluctuate. It will ultimately be up to you to research a product thoroughly before putting it up for sale. If the price given by your drop shipping supplier does not seem to match the research that you have been doing (Ex. It does not seem to sell well enough to justify its price), you may need to sell a different product or brand. Being flexible enough to make these choices can grant you a lot of breathing room when designing and implementing your drop shipping website.

Extra Research Tools

You should always expect to receive the crucial extra research tools typically provided by good drop shipping suppliers. One of the finest examples of good extra research tools are the ones provided by the drop shipping supplier World Wide Brands. The cost of signing up is fully justified by their large amount of extra research tools that you need to compete on the market. You will find more than you need to research each product that you sell with this drop shipping supplier.

In general, you should expect to receive research tools that allow for price tracking, product specifications, sales history and buyer information. Some suppliers also go the extra mile and give demographic reports of certain products to assist you in specializing your sales venue to meet the common buyer of a given product. Drop shipping suppliers that offer such extra research tools are very valuable.

1. World Wide Brands – World Wide Brands is, without a doubt, the finest drop shipping company in the industry. Although some people are often turned off by the membership fee ($299.00), it turns out that this fee is a very low cost to pay for the options that you receive. In fact, with the extra tools that you receive from World Wide Brands, you have all the tools that a major business would have at their disposal at a mere fraction of the cost. In addition, the membership comes with a solid money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the services that they provide. We are confident that this money back guarantee will not be necessary.

2. Doba – Doba comes in at second place on this list only because their membership fee can get a bit high at $49.95 a month. However, if you are looking to sell your products on eBay, you will find that the price justifies the excellent eBay integration tools offered by Doba. Their pricing is quite good and their product selection is large enough to satisfy almost any drop shipper. One of the finest points of Doba is their excellent customer service provided by both a 24/7 telephone support line and an email support line.

3. Shopster – Coming in at third is the strong drop shipping company, Shopster. Although their membership price is quite high ($349.95 per year), they offer a 7 day free trial for you to see if the product is worth the price. With one of the highest product selections available and a solid reputation for being very reliable with accurate and fast shipping, you will likely be pleased with their services. Shopster is a very good company to use for website development as the prices are usually set specifically to compete with online marketplaces like Amazon.com.

3. Salehoo – We could not have a top 5 drop ship list without including the small yet very competitive company called Salehoo. Despite its rather lacking inventory, Salehoo offers a low membership fee of only $67 (lifetime membership) and a personal touch that caters to each member of the drop shipping community. If you are just getting into drop shipping, Salehoo can be the best company for you. Their training programs that are presented in a professional and very educated manner provide the user with all the resources and knowledge that they will need to be successful in drop shipping.

3. Dropshipping Wholesalers – Rounding out our top 5 drop ship list is the company Dropshipping Wholesalers. While you will not get the resources that you would from companies like World Wide Brands and Doba, the price is reflective of this. The membership cost is a very reasonable $47.00 and comes with a money back guarantee. Dropshipping Wholesalers is often considered to be the best company for beginning dropshippers as it keeps everything very simple. However, the customer support is lacking with only an email support line and the company offers a relatively low product selection. Many people have reported finding excellent deals within the product selection, however.

In order to properly take advantage of drop ship services, you must follow some simple rules to make sure that you are getting the most for your time and money. The process is not taxing but is actually simple and often fun when performed correctly. The main problem is that many people are misinformed. With the proper strategies, drop ship services will drastically help your business in more than one way. Follow these simple steps to insure that you are fully taking advantage of drop ship services:

Product Selection

Before even considering a move into the drop shipping industry, you must decide what you would like to sell. Pick products with which you are already familiar and are in high demand. For instance, if you enjoy watching movies, you may be well suited to sell DVDs. When you have become successful with your original product, you may decide to move into a wider selection of products or go in a different direction entirely. Most drop ship services are geared towards a specific market. To take advantage of their services, your product will be a main factor as to your drop ship service choice.

Website Development

If you do not already have a commercial website, many drop ship services offer tools that can assist you in the creation of one. By taking advantage of these services, you can further develop your potential to sell a large volume of goods and increase your profit potential. Although it may be tempting to use online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon.com to sell your goods, it is very difficult to compete with the already well established market. Because of this, your website (with the assistance of your drop ship service) will be one of the most important aspects of your business.

Understanding the Process

After establishing your website, taking advantage of drop ship services is quite simple. You take orders on your website and pass the order information on to the drop shipper. After they receive payment, you get your profit and they handle the rest. They will ship the item to the address that you give them and handle any shipping issues that arise. In essence, after you have sold the item, your job is done. You will likely prefer to gear your website towards the selling of volume rather than single items.

Pricing

Until you have fully tested your product’s selling potential and are very familiar with drop ship services, you will likely not be able to buy items in the bulk necessary for true wholesale prices. However, you will receive prices that are often much lower than retail. By then pricing your items a few dollars less than retail prices, you can often be satisfied that your products will sell before retail products do. Keeping your prices low enough to compete with retail and yet high enough to make a decent profit is a key way to take advantage of drop ship services.

Testing the Waters

One of the first considerations on the development of trust with your drop ship source is to get a feel of how they work and how their business functions with a very small order. This can even include ordering a single product for yourself. For example, if you wish to sell DVDs and see a DVD in the product listing that you would like, order it and keep an objective eye on the delivery process.

If everything goes as you would like it to go for your customers (fast delivery, no problems with the product, etc.) you can try putting the product up for sale and see how the company handles slightly larger orders. It would be unwise to place a very large order with your drop ship source before you know that they will be able to deliver as promised. As your business expands with higher profits, you will begin to get larger orders and a natural progression of trust will take place.

Contact Customer Service

Even if there is no immediate problem, try contacting customer service to see how your drop ship source handles calls and concerns. You may try asking questions about the products or particular service aspects to get a feel for how well trained the company’s representatives are and how they address even the simplest of questions and concerns. If they are able to handle such concerns quickly and courteously, it is likely that they will handle bigger concerns such as shipping delays and product problems in the same manner.

Over time, you can even begin a log of such conversations to get a feel for how the entire company handles service issues. Over a period of time, these calls can add up to a much more trusting relationship with your drop ship source. When your order sizes begin to increase, your drop ship source may even be more familiar with you as long as you remain friendly and courteous while on the phone. Knowing some names ahead of time can make customer service go much more smoothly and build trust with your drop ship source.

Give It Some Time

Trusting relationships often develop over a long period of time. By building your relationship with your drop ship source slowly and cautiously, you can build a very trusting relationship in a reasonable amount of time. One of the key components to successful business operation is the ability to trust your provider and set up a system for them becoming familiar with you and trust in your instincts. Never sacrifice such a long relationship of trust for lower prices or larger product selection. Doing so can ruin a well earned and very valuable establishment of trust with your drop ship source.

What then, are your options? Well, we recommend that you take advantage of some of the fantastic free trial offers available on websites such as Doba. You may also take advantage of the money back guarantee offered by World Wide Brands. If you simply try these websites, we are confident that you will be fully satisfied with your initial monetary investment. If you really do not want to spend any money on start up costs, you could also try the Chinese electronics drop shipper called China Vasion. While China Vasion is a good drop shipping company, their non-brand name electronics currently saturate the drop shipping market.

What to Look for in a Free Drop Shipping Company

New Drop Shipping Companies are almost constantly emerging on the market. Some of these companies carry start up fees while others are free. If you know what to look for in a free drop shipping company, you may be on the right track to being successful with your drop shipping service.

Fast Shipping

If a dropshipper is free, it is likely that they have rather slow shipping. Overseas companies (like ChinaVasion) simply cannot ship their goods as quickly as other companies (Doba or World Wide Brands) because of their distance from most sellers and their international trading rules. Make sure that your drop shipping company can offer fast service for your customers.

Research Tools

If you do not know your product, you are probably not going to be successful with your drop shipping exploits. Free drop shipping companies do not usually supply their clients with research tools to monitor market statistics and demographical information. For instance, if you modeled your drop shipping website for youth when your main demographic is senior citizens, your website would not be well suited to make much money. With good drop shipping websites, you have the tools to prevent this from happening.

Customer Service

If something goes wrong during ordering or shipping, nothing compares to the confidence instilled by high quality customer service. While this is guaranteed with most paid drop shipping companies, free dropshippers often fall short in the customer service category. Try to find free drop shippers that offer 24 hour/7 day a week telephone support as well as a live chat feature on their website.

Product Selection

If you are looking to break into the video game drop shipping market, using a dropshipper that only offers games for one console would be unwise. Look for free drop shipping companies that not only specialize in one specific area, but do it well. Dropshippers should keep their merchandise up to date and offer a wide variety of any given product.

For example, if you are a fan of basketball; maybe you will want to sell basketball related products. This would be much more profitable and successful than say trying to sell basketball, baseball, football, electronics and toy products. You will have a lot more credibility if you become an authority in just one specific category of drop ship products.

Discover your Passion

You have probably heard this one before. Your passion is everything in business. It is a lot easier to be successful if you have a strong passion for what you are doing. Why not do the same with dropshipping? Find something you have a passion for and use that to your advantage. If you truly have a passion for video games then start a dropship business revolving around video games. In addition to the products you are selling you could run a website that provides video game reviews and articles. This would also be a good way to establish traffic to your website.

If you are going to be selling drop ship products you will need to have this passion. The main reason is because this stuff takes time and a lot of effort. If you enjoy what you are doing then you are much more likely to stick with it and be around long enough to start seeing some revenue come in. Your work more than likely will not pay off until quite some time down the road. It is unfortunate that so many people work hard at this and then give up before they have a chance to see any results from their work. If you have that passion you will stick around. The money will not matter.

Research Competition

Of course, there are thousands of websites all over the Internet that sell products and run ecommerce sites. A lot of these sites are selling drop ship products or wholesale products. There are even more people on eBay selling these very same products. In fact, if you look on eBay for any type of product you could get through dropshipping, you will see that there are several people selling the same exact product. There is a lot of competition out there.

It is a smart decision to research your competition to figure out what to sell. The passion comes first and this comes second. There is going to be some competition no matter what market you get into. Especially if it is lucrative. In this case, you will just need to find some way to be better than they are. This should not be hard if you follow our tips over here at DropShipStrategy.com.

Once you start to get some experience and learn how to handle all of this information you are getting you will be much more efficient. Things will start to click and you will have ideas for selling all sorts of different dropship products. Just remember to enjoy what you are doing. The rest will fall into place after that.

People that come to your website for specific products must be able to find those products they are looking for. If you have not set your website up the right way with a good search function – then you can forget trying to get a customer base. Why should they shop at your site versus someone else’s dropship site? That is why you have to go above and beyond to make sure your website is done the right way.

Do what Makes Sense – Simple

There is no big secret about this topic. Just keep it simple and do what makes sense. Make sure that your website has good navigation. That just means that it must be very easy for people to find what they are looking for. They should be able to get from one page to another with little to no effort at all. As mentioned above, you should also have a search function so people can search your products and pages.

If you are only offering a small amount of products, it is a good idea to put your best products on the home page of your drop ship site. That way you are putting yourself in the position to sell those products. The home page will be the most visited page on your website. Why not give your products the highest amount of exposure as possible?

There is nothing complicated about this. Just be sure that you are not shorting yourself here. If you do not take the time to make sure the simple things are in place – then you are going to fail. Drop shipping is not easy. If you want to succeed – then do things right.

Pick a Very Specific Niche or Market

Never assume that products that sell well for some people will sell equally well for you. This is almost never the case. When you first begin drop shipping, you are a new player to the game. If you choose a familiar market such as jewelry or electronics, you may find yourself competing with well established providers with a larger customer base. You can counteract this market aspect by picking a specific product with which you are familiar and can provide a market where little or no market is available.

Of great importance is the selection of a product that you enjoy. Search your interests for something that you think will sell well without a great deal of competition. Much of your research can be avoided if you are already very familiar with the product before beginning to sell it for a profit. By choosing a product that you enjoy (or might enjoy) in a market that does not offer a great deal of the product, you can maximize your potential for earning larger profits.

Research Your Drop Ship Product Well

Of utmost importance in learning to drop ship the right way is the willingness to do a great deal of research about the product that you wish to sell. If you have chosen your drop ship source well (we suggest Doba or World Wide Brands) these research tools will already be available. If you chose a free drop ship source, you may have to do the foot work on your own. With such a vast resource as the internet, such research is usually quite easy.

Do not stop with research about how the product works. You must also research marketability and demo graphics. There is usually a high percentage of specific types of people that tend to buy certain products. When you market that product, you will want to gear your advertising towards that demographic more than others. If you do this, you will be targeting the very consumers with which you expect to make the most money.

Build a Website Around that Drop Ship Product

Do not even consider the method of selling on eBay or Amazon.com as being the right way to drop ship. There is just too much competition on these venues to be very successful. Many people that drop ship on eBay make less than a single dollar on each product and have to rely on large sales volumes to turn a profit. With that being the case, you should build a website geared toward the sale of your product and advertise that website on other venues to build a consumer base.

Of most importance to the production of your website is content. Provide information about each product, not just a place to buy that product. With more valuable content, your website will hit higher on search engines and promote more website visits. Even if people only come to your website for information at first, they will likely remember your website when they wish to buy a product in the future, provided that they enjoyed your content.