Drop Shipping- Any help appreciated

[brett927]

Hello,

I'm pretty new to the whole online store thing, but have recently become very interested in starting one. I've looked at it from many angles and figured that, for me, drop shipping may be the best alternative. I've been looking through the vast numbers of drop shipping companies that charge a "membership fee" to give you their drop-shipping resources. One in particular is http://www.dobo.com. They seem to be the most lagitamite, but you never know when it comes to online business. I was wondering if anyone here has had an relations with this company good, or bad. They offered me a membership for a fee of $225 for 15 months. This membership includes a placement with source wholesalers, ebay listing tools, search engine placement tools and a discount to an affiliate web host called turnkey. The web host would cost $150 with a monthly fee of $16.98. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Elegant]

One question and don't take this the wrong way; why would anyone pay another company to drop ship their products to be sold? I can see charging $5.00 for extra effort it takes to drop ship but $225? What's the product? Service? More importantly, what is it that you want to do? I'd be careful with anyone who wants to charge a huge membership fee just to do a drop ship.

I run a online store, http://www.elegantunderwear.com, and I have distributors who will drop ship (should I need it) for $5.00 but I didn't have sign up for any membership. It’s their products; they want retail businesses to sell their products. The bare minimum that you would need to buy anything would be a business license.

As far as web hosting goes, you can get it cheaper anywhere (http://www.g4hosting.com). And there are plenty of free shopping carts out there i.e. zencart and oscommerce.

My red flag goes up on this one.

[brett927]

I actually just finished reading an article on Entrepreneur.com stating the same thing. Why pay people to drop ship products when you can do it yourself for little or no fee? The only thing that caught my attention is that they included the Ebay listing and major search engine que's. I'm by no means a professional web designer either and they offered a turnkey web host to do the work for me, but I was reading about how that can be a scam as well. I guess where I would have the most problems is finding a company that would be willing to drop ship my product and come up with a deecent website. I took a look at your site Elegant, looks great. Do you have your own inventory, or do you drop ship as well? Would I just contact a company about a product that I'm interested in and ask them if they would offer drop shipping? Would the majority of companies offer it?

Thanks again for the input.

[dropshipman]

Don't ever pay someone to sell their products....Think about it, you're going to make them money by selling their products so why in the world are they going to charge you to do this??
-The only relevant fees will be a "dropship fee", something like 1-5 bucks usually, which means they ship out your product to your customer and slap your companie's name on the box.

-Put your 200 bucks to a better use, subscribe to the drop ship source with Worldwide Brands Inc., find a supplier there for a product you want to sell, setup a drop ship account, Done. That's what I did and it works.

[brett927]

Thanks for the helpful info.

[The Old Sarge]

Brett,

We use WorldWideBrands. Lots of drop shippers listed and never a problem with any of them. You choose which ones you want. You can search their listings by product, brand name or drop shipper name.

Take a look at them, if you haven't already.

WorldWideBrands

I don't think you'll regret the money you spend.

[brett927]

Thanks Sarge. This all looks great. But, now steming back to my other question. Once I have a product in mind and a good target audience, how do I effectively develope a deecent looking website without spending a ton? I realize, like any buisiness opportunity, there's a financial obligation of some sort and a risk, but any recommendations as to what hosts/developers to use would be a good start.

[The Old Sarge]

I bought a "web builder" program that included hosting. I won't recommend it to you because I.m in the middle of switching to another right now. The original product is antiquated and the customer support leaves a lot to be desired.

Some of the others I've looked at seem pretty good, but, again, I will not recommend any. I don't feel I know enough about the topic to give that kind of advise or recommendation. Just do a Google search for "e-commerce web builder", or "e-commerce web site" ... anything similar. You'll get more results than you'll have time to review.

There are some basics to keep in mind though. You'll need a payment gateway of some kind, so I'd look for a builder that includes one, or at least makes provisions for one. PayPal is fairly common but a 'regular' gateway that lets you accept credit cards directly on your site is better, IMO.

To go with the payment gateway, you'll need a merchant account. Some builders/hosts have options built in and some leave it to you to find one and set it up. Also, you'll want a good shopping cart. Again there are numerous options. Personally, I'd go with a builder that had a cart built in rather than a separate cart. Just makes things simpler, especially if you're just learning.

Then there's the easy way ... lol

Hire a web designer to do it right the first time. If you get a good designer, you'll get a very good, effective site. Ask a lot of questions and try to deal with people that will answer all your questions instead of puttng you off or repeating their sales pitch. The only down side to this route, as far as I'm concerned, is you still won't know how to build and run your own site like you will if you build it yourself.

[The Old Sarge]

I forgot to add ...

One of my biggest mistakes was not researching the competition before I signed up with drop shippers. Turned out I was trying to sell in saturated markets. After about 9 months, I switched to other products. Do your product homework FIRST. Search all the major search engines for the products you are thinking of selling. Find out how many sites already sell it and what their prices are.

Then there's keywords and search engine optimization. You know anything about those?

[brett927]

That would be my next question. How do you utilize search engine optomization tools?

I was also briefly browsing around and found a "web development" site that looks deecent(http://www.ebizwebpages.com). They offer a webstore developer, acceptance of credit card payments/paypal, etc and all hosting and updating needs. Anyone have any experience with this company in specific? If not, theres so many out there, which are the best?

Thanks again for the thorough input Sarge.

[The Old Sarge]

Glad to help, Brett. And I hope it WAS help.

The search engine optimization can wait until you get your site started. But when you get ready, you'll need a good tool like WordTracker to help you. Let me know when you're ready.

[brett927]

Do you think around $50/month for that development/hosting package is a deecent deal at ebizwebpages.com? I've been looking around, but It's really hard for me to tell. The $50 is for the bare minimum. If I want to accept credit card payments through them It's a little bit more. Can I just use something like paypal to accept various types of payments? I think where I would get into some trouble would be syncronizing everything to actually function properly.

[Elegant]

Brett,

Because of the nature of our products that we sell and how it is packaged, we carry a small (about 200 items) inventory. However when a customer buys an items whether it be one or more we purchase any where from $50.00 to $200.00 just so that we will have that inventory. The companies that we deal with some do drop ship and others don’t. In any case, that wasn’t our game plan. Because there are many online companies that do what we do (I would imagine the same goes for you too) we wanted to be different meaning, why would anyone buy from us? You would have to ask the same question for yourself.

Do you know what Starbucks sells? They sell entertainment value. You can get coffee anywhere but Starbucks has bundled coffee with other entertainment values. So at Elegant Underwear, we set out to sell lingerie with a romance value. Think of it as a romance in a box; not only to you receive the item purchased online but we also add sample perfume, sample hand lotion, a silk scented rose, little bit of chocolate candy and depending on the season something of the season i.e. a heart shape lollipop for Valentines. You get the idea. We wanted to be different from the others; you have to be other wise you are just one of the other guys trying to sale the same product everyone else is.

You also mention a web site and that’s a very good point. Many people start their own online business believing to make extra cash on the side only to find out that it takes a lot of your time, demands your attention. They get motivated in building a site using tools you have mention or using yahoo stores but what happens is that they soon find out that the mass of people they were hoping for don’t come and isn’t worth their time anymore leaving the online store stagnant. It’s like reading the same month magazine every month at that point. Have a business plan. A lot of people don’t advertise as well; it’s one thing to have a web site and talk about it in forums and what not but that is about 1/8th that should be going into your advertising budget. Remember, there’s you plus another thousand others doing the same thing. Do the ad words, place an ad in the local newspaper and if possible talk about your industry where ever you can, especially on your web site. That’s content that gets indexed with the search engines plus you make the appearance that your web site is active. Have a newsletter people can sign up for and have monthly specials.

The bottom line is this: if you’re going to do an online store, remember this, “Do or do not, there is no try”, Yoda.

[benson712]

I agree with everything everyone said about finding drop-shippers. Additionally, consider the fact that when you buy a list there are a lot of others out there who have that exact list. You'll most likely be battling it out with a huge number of online stores. I'd be interested to hear what type of products you'd like to sell. Once you select what products you want to sell all it takes is a little research on google to determine who manufactures the product. You'd be amazed at how many of these manufacturers offer drop-shipping programs already. The one caveat to this is that you need to make sure you go through the process of creating a "real" business in the eyes of the law. Most manufacturers won't sell to you if you don't have at the very least a state sellers permit (or equivalent). Please keep me updated on what direction you decide to go.

[kashem]

I have subscribed to wordwidebrands.com, have found a lot of companies that will drop ship. the companies listed there are either manufacturer or wholesale distributors. They do not require any membership but wordwidebrands.com require one time fee