Dropship Wholesale Product Sourcing

Wholesale Lists, Dropship Reviews, Reliable wholesale Dropshipping for Your Home or EBay Business

Easy Wholesale Dropship Business | Ecommerce Product Sourcing

Is ecommerce product sourcing really an easy route to a wholesale dropship business? I would say ‘no” to the easy part unless you are both webdesigner and programmer. if you are planning on setting up the enterprise yourself, you may be in for an interesting “ride” as you deal with with the steep learning curve. If you are an ultra do-it-yourself kind or guy or gal, then you’ll enjoy the challanges of designing, coding, and integrating a shopping cart with your site. There are a number of good, free, open source shopping carts, and you can always use Joomla along with the VirtueMart shopping cart component. Joomla is a well regared CMS (content management system), and VirtueMart is a very good shopping cart adjunct. BUT, you will still need to “tweak” the architectural, design and shopping cart to suit your purposes.

Ecommerce, in my opinion, is a great way to set up a business. The costs are relatively low, and depending on the scale of start up you have in mind, may be almost negligeable. However, the technical aspect can be somewhat of a barrier if you don’t have the money to outsource all of the technical tasks. PayPal and Google Checkout offer fairly simple low cost or no cost payment processor options, and PayPal even has a shoppping cart that you can plug right into your site, so there are some work-a-rounds that would allow you get up and running with relatively little mind f@*k. Pardon my language. Using PayPal, you can set up a WordPress blog and sell a few items with out too much trouble or need for technical know-how.

I mentioned Joomla, above. Great, free open source content management system, and the VirtueMart shopping cart is overall a very good free shopping cart. It is possible to make this work right out of the box, as it were, but, there is a drawback to relying on only the free templates available. The pitfall is that trying to run a store just from free resources often leaves you with an ugly site that is almost, but not quite, integrated with the shopping cart. This is true with other free shopping carts–in my opinion. The carts themselves, like OS, for example, are great, but the free templates available suck. To tweak the design and also add functionality, such as integrating a blog, you end up hiring a designer and programmer, unless you happen to also be a designer and programmer. There is currently a free shopping cart called Instinct that is supposed to work with WordPress. I haven’t tested this so I don’t know how realistic this is as an out-of-the-box solution.

My point, here, is not to discourage you, but to let you know that Internet marketers who promote easy ecommerce solutions to quick riches really aren’t giving you the whole story. You may have heard of a a fabulously expensive $800 a month membership centered on ecommerce started by Andy Jenkin and Brad Fallon. Very few people who are completely new to Internet marketing and have never made any money on the Internet succeed in establishing profitable ecommerce businesses in that membership. Of the few that do, some do so by either buying an already existing business or by outsourcing all of the main tasks that go into setting up a functioning ecommerce site. One person who succeeded followed these rough steps:

1. Hired designer/programmer (2000.00)
2. Hired someone for directory submissions (700.00)
3. Hired Angela for product descriptions (800.00)
4. Designed graphically the store myself (0.00)
5. Signed up with OneSource aka WorldWideBrands.com (250.00)
6. Started calling Drop Shippers, filling out their forms and getting accounts lined up. (don’t email, call these people…it works better and faster)
7. I finished my design, handed it to the team to implement. While this was going on, Angela was doing descriptions, I was getting my merchant account setup (emerchantdiscount.com), working on finding more drop shippers and starting to build my database for my store.
8. Spent 2 solid days (sat and sun all day long) building my database using an excel spreadsheet. Imputed product ID’s, conciously named my products properly, named the pages properly, downloaded images, etc.
9. Built a small Google Adword campaign (spending 30 dollars per day)
11. The team are now done with site implementation. I immediately start writing content for my home page, re-arranging products, adding my logos and icons, plugging in my Aweber.com newsletter, working on the shipping rates and tax rates for my store, doing all those little emails that customers get when they buy something…all those fine details.
12. Descriptions ready and loaded now.
13. Google Adwords launched and running.
14. Site is now live…not perfect, but loaded and ready for people to buy.

Financially, this broke down roughly as follows:
800.00 Monthly for Stomper
2000.00 for Yahoo Store Implementaion (1 time)
100.00 Yahoo Setup Fee (1 time)
100.00 Monthly for Yahoo Store
700.00 Submissions (1 time)
800.00 Descriptions (1 time)
100.00 Monthly Hackersafe
425.00 Yearly for BBB Online Logo
1000.00 Monthly Adwords Campaign
150.00 Yearly for RingCentral (my 800#)
12.00 Monthly Merchant Fee

This is how one person went about setting up a store of sufficient magnitude that at the time he published the above on the membership forum, he was making, I think, about $14,000 a month. I consider that a success, going from 0 to $14,000/month. Please note the detailed planning and that he worked his butt off. Also note the heavy use of outsourcing key tasks.

So, you still want to set up an ecommerce business using dropshipping to supply inventory to your customers. What are the kinds of things you need to think about? To help answer this, I’ve borrowed some information from Inventory Source. You need to think about customer service, sales analysis, merchandising, payment processing, and site design/layout.

Site Design and Layout:

Fully customizable design
Add new templates any time
Down for maintenance options
Unlimited main / sub categories
Browse by price, mfg, category
Integrated store search
Customizable product display
Thumbnails and large image views
Multi image views
Add banners, ads, graphics, flash, etc.
Customizable checkout process
Unlimited page creation

Merchandise:

Related products and cross selling
One click featured products
Coupon codes, gift certificates
Inventory control
Unlimited attributes w/ optional surcharges
Special customer discounts
Wholesale / Retail feature
Up selling abilities
On screen shopping list
Automated gift registry/wish list
SEO potential for all site pages
Edit and manage product reviews
Shop by price, quick search, advanced search
New products and coming soon displays

Payment Processing:

Accept real-time credit cards
Offline credit card processing
Add CCV options for additional security
Works with Paypal and Paypal IPN
Accept payment in any currency
Checks, phone orders, and P.O.
Compatible with any major Merchant Account Provider

Customer Service:

All orders stored in your database
Live order tracking
Automated confirmation emails
Repeat customer recognition
Allow shopping with or without account
Discounts and loyalty programs
Express checkout
Newsletter management
FAQ management tools
Affiliate programs
Password restricted customer/dealer entry

Sales Analysis:

Monthly Sales and Tax Summaries
Gross income
Product Sales
Taxable/Exempt Sales
Most viewed products
Best seller reports
Order status monitoring
Detailed site traffic reports (Urchin)

And I see I forget to mention shipping options.

This gives you an idea of the kinds of things we have to take into consideration when setting up an ecommerce business. How you approach these any one of these points depends on the kind and size of operation you want to set up. This is not a hard and fast list. Again, I have borrowed the above outline from Inventory Source to help give you an idea of the scope ecommerce enterprise takes on.

This post began with the idea of ecommerce product sourcing for a wholesale dropship driven business. I know many of you are interested specifically in eBay product sourcing. Wholesale product sourcing is only half the battle. EBay simplifies many of the aspects ecommerce, but the thing about eBay is that almost everything sold is already at wholesale or below wholesale price. EBay power seller product sourcing often relies on buying large quantities of liquidated or closed out stock.

Sites like Mega Goods, Dropship Design, and Doba attempt to solve some of the problems mentioned above by giving subscribers a site preloaded with goods ready for dropship. The price to you is supposed to be the wholesale price. I don’t know if that is always the case, but such offers are tempting because of the obstacles involved in setting up your own fully functioning ecommerce site. There is a general consensus that these sorts of sites are generally not profitable for eBay but can be profitable when run as non-eBay ecommerce businesses.

Well, how do you find sources for your products? If you make the products yourself or run your own small manufacture, that won’t be a problem. You may very well find your products locally. In the example above, the person paid $250 for a One Source membership and used their dropshipper contacts. A good online wholesale dropshipping directories , such as One Source, or Salehoo can be a valuable asset in terms of research, ideas, and in putting products within immediate reach. I am not a member of One Source, so I have no direct experience with that resource. I understand that it is well regarded, and I have never encountered anything truly negative.

As for Salehoo, I have been a member for several years and personally believe it to be a reliable, legitimate resource. Salehoo has provided me with contacts to major consumer electronics wholesalers as well as excellent liquidation contacts. I probably could have found this information by other means, but that is not the point. Paying the one-time membership fee (not expensive, by the way) saved me hours and hours of research time, and the forum and other resources helped me with the learning curve involved in understanding wholesale and dropship product sourcing. You may find the video tour helpful.

However, remember, product sourcing is only one part of the picture. Without taking the overall, big picture into consideration, your list of resources will go unused. In the end, the important thing may simply be to take action. Any action.

 

Sign Up For a Free Newsletter

or

Take A Free Video Tour!

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.