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You may or may not have heard of Drop Shipping. What is a Drop Shipper?
Today, I will be explaining what drop shipping is and my experience with it. The good. The bad. The ugly. In short, drop shipping is one of the fastest ways to make easy, risk-free income.
Yes, you can make money from this-but you need to be aware of the bad and ugly.
One of the main problems…the quality of drop shippers. In this article, I will teach you how to find drop shippers because I made the mistake of finding a bad one, and also had the pleasure of finding a great one!
What is drop shipping, and what is a drop shipper?
Drop shipping is when a company stocks the items, and sends them directly to your customers.
Usually when you have an online store, you need to purchase stock or items. You then need to package it, create a mailing label, and then send individual items to your customers. Simply meaning, there is a TON of work involved to make a few dollars PLUS you need to buy inventory in advance. Personally, I could not afford to buy a big amount of inventory in advance.
Drop shipping lets you skip this step. When a customer buys an item from you, you contact the drop shipping company (otherwise known as a drop shipper) and purchase the item from them. (Actually, there are systems that automatically fulfill the order for you now!) They drop shipper or the supplier will then send this item directly to your customer. Many of them will include your custom branding or receipt with the purchase.
Talk about being able to convince my husband that drop shipping was the way to go! It completely removed the risk and investment of buying inventory in advance.
So, How do you make money from this?
- Find a NICHE product or series of products without too much competition-and something that you are interested in to sell
- Research what the going rate is on large competitors. Think Amazon and EBay
- Get your creative juices flowing and think of a name for your store.
- Launch an online store, post the products, and write a compelling description. (Most drop shippers will provide you with high quality photos already!)
- Choose your pricing strategy and mark-up the prices to make a profit (usually by 10-50%).
- Keep your audience engaged on Social Media Platforms and email remarketing.
This is the GOOD! It was so easy to post products, especially since the drop shippers provided me with quality pictures already. I just had to bring in the traffic.
Where Should You Sell Your Products?
A popular place to open an online store is eBay. or Amazon. Take a look at the fee schedule and how much it would be to store items in the warehouse as well.
You can also make your own online store and there are multiple platforms to use.
My first go was with Shopify and my second was with SaleHoo
I choose these platforms because I wanted to avoid the high fees that came with EBay and Amazon-for now. Both are great platforms and check out my blog posts about Shopify and SaleHoo on how I review them.
How Do You Find Quality Drop Shippers?
This is where the UGLY came in. My first drop shipping website-named after my cute kiddos-was all about capturing those fun moments when your babies are still babies. It was an absolutely fabulous and beautiful site. I wish I took pictures. Why did I close it? I choose too many BAD drop shippers from China. The items weren’t as described, the shipping took over a month on some, and the smell was weird. There are a lot of drop shippers in China that can’t be trusted. They will take your money and not send you items, or send you illegitimate items that are illegal and claim they are “brand name” products. One of my larger purchases, a $150 order-I ended up refunding completely because the order did not arrive in time.
Lesson Learned.
I did find some FANTASTIC suppliers that branded my product for free, inserted by custom made receipt and thank you note, and the product was delivered in 7 days. They are still to this day one of my favorite and trusted suppliers.
So yes, Drop Shipping is a great way to launch a business today. I had my site up and running in 3 days and a sale on my 5th day. To make it work, you need to find quality drop shippers.
The easiest way to find drop shippers that you can trust is through SaleHoo.
SaleHoo is an online directory that has over 8,000+ drop shippers, wholesalers and liquidators. SaleHoo verifies all suppliers before listing them in the directory-so you know you can trust them.
Using a directory like SaleHoo is good because you can ensure you will be dealing with verified suppliers you can trust.
The Good: Easy, Profitable, Fun, Low Risk
The Bad: Competition can be Fierce. Niche down.
The Ugly: Bad Suppliers. Use a trusted source.
There are probably a lot of directories out there-and I did not research them all. Once I found one that worked for me, I stuck with them. I like SaleHOO but do your research and choose what works best for you.
