Drop-shipping a great way of making money online

Posted by mike michael on November 15th, 2017

Using the Internet to sell products and services to ever increasing number of net users is a good way to start your own business. If you are not taking advantage of this great opportunity you are just missing the boat! Consider this: e-commerce, contrary to popular believe, is thriving and increasing at a double digit growth rate.

Drop-shipping is an interesting concept, you might think that this is not your cup of tea; and you still prefer to work with some tangible products. In ideal scenario, probably, you want to sell a product of your choice but don’t want to carry your own stock and don’t want to handle the shipping. Is there a way of doing this? Yes,there is! It’s called Drop-shipping .

What is drop-shipping?

When a manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor or importer, after receiving an order from their retailers, individually pack and deliver the product to the customer of the retailer with retailers address as shipper, this selling technique is called drop-shipping.

Select a product to sell

Once you decided to go with drop-shipping you need to find products to sell and find drop-shipping suppliers for those products. According to the same report from Jupiter following are the most favorite categories for online shoppers: Books; by far the most popular category, after that comes clothing and shoes, music, toys, video tapes and DVDs, gift certificates, consumer electronics, accessories, videogames, bed and related items, and bath items.  You should also consider that this year, total Internet sales of consumer electronics are expected to rise 32 percent to .5 billion, making it the fastest growing group among all retail sales categories online.

You might think that the easiest way of finding a drop-shipper is just to buy one of the numerous lists on the Internet for sale. I will recommend you to use them for number of reasons. Often, these lists are outdated or carry wrong information. Even if you find the companies through the lists, since many people use these lists, you get into fierce competition for market share not even starting to sell.

Use the following approach instead:

Online search

The first step is, naturally, to use the search engines. Using various combinations of the keywords of your product with words: manufacturer, wholesaler, drop-shipper, dealer, see if you can find the original source of the product.

If several online retailers are already selling this product, do some detective works! Check out the sites thoroughly. May be, you can find a clue, which will help you track down the supplier.

If it is an imported product go to the sites like aliexpress dropshipping websites. Locate the manufacturer and get in touch with them to find who you should contact in your country to retail sell their products. If the product is manufactured in North America, the best source to find them is Thomas register.

Trade exhibitions

You should definitely attend the trade shows related to your category of products. This is an easy way to find a number of suppliers, who might be willing to work with you. 

Trade magazines

Trade journals and publications are also a good resource for finding suppliers of your products. Although, you might have to go through a sizable quantity of them before you stumble on the right supplier.

Conclusion

Drop-shipping has some inherent drawbacks too. The biggest of them is you have to totally rely on the drop-shipper to fulfill your order and get the product to your customer on time. The others are,  you do not have any control over the price or availability of the product. However, a good drop-shipper cares for his reputation since his drop shipping business for sale depends on retailers like you. Thats why you have to be very careful in choosing the right drop-shipper.