Starting out with Drop Shipping

As I have just mentioned earlier for any newbie or any person wishing to get started making money online, drop shipping is the best way to go. Mainly because of the very little upfront capital that is required and the fast response you have to generating income.

Once you have found your supplier and you are ready to start, usually the next step of a drop shipper is to sell the items on ebay.

In relation to what you need to sell when starting out as a drop shipper there are three different thoughts around this.

• The first option is to research the market and determine what is selling, find a high demand item and then locate a drop shipper that sells the item.
• The second option is to sell something that you are interested in. If you are interested in what you are selling you’re more likely to do what ever it takes.
• The last option is to sell what ever is going to make you moneyJ, this is something that we are all interested in.

No matter which option you chose, when you start looking for a drop shipper, you should look for a company that drop ships exclusively or a drop shipper that has a private access area which requires you to join before gaining access to their wholesale prices.

The main reason for this is if anyone has access to the wholesale prices then the drop shipper is going to be saturated with competition that you don’t want.

These basic things that you will need to get started:

• Place to sell goods
  This will either be your own website or an online market place such as ebay. If that is the case you will need an ebay account (no problem it’s free to join).

  If you’re going to sell on ebay it is very wise to open an ebay store, it’s a great way to display all of the products that you have to offer and you can drive people to your store as you would any other webpage.

• Transaction processing
  Obviously you want to get paid right, when starting out I would suggest signing up for either a PayPal or Google checkout account.

  Remember that if you are usin ebay you are NOT allowed to use Google checkout as your payment processor. This is because ebay owns PayPal and ebay makes more money if you use PayPal to process your ebay transactions.

  But if you are not selling on ebay (maybe your own website) I would suggest using Google checkout.

  The reason for this is until the end of 2007 Google will NOT charge you a processing fee for any transaction that you process with Google checkout.

  At the beginning of 2008 Google checkout will start charging you but the amount they charge will still be lower than the amount PayPal charges.
  
  

• Drop Shipper
  This I guess goes without saying. You will find more information on finding a drop ship supplier in a later chapter (“Finding Drop Ship Suppliers”)

It is important to start out with a product to sell that is easily sold.

You want to know how many competitors you have and what techniques they’re using. Selling products on the internet is quite easy, especially with auction sites such as eBay. Anyone can go and list an item.

If there is any difficult part to this business model it is getting the product delivered – so make sure that you test out your drop shipper before using them commercially. Make sure that your drop shipper has shipping time frames and cost effective shipping fees etc.

Something else that people may find a little tricky when getting started is building their own drop shipping website. If this is something that you have never done before then it can be overwhelming in the beginning.

All you need to remember as with anything, you are learning something new and you will master it eventually.

To this day I use Joomla! for all of my websites.

Joomla! is the software that drives my website. I don’t know how to do all the fancy programming to make a site look pretty (even though I have a degree and diploma in IT, it’s just doesn’t interest me) so I use Joomla to put the site together.

You can read more about Joomla in a later chapter (JOOMLA!)

Remember to never forget that you are a retailer and you should not just sell products but also add value to your company / online business. Offer product reviews, have industry articles that relate to your products etc. A customer will respect you if it seems that you have a deep understanding of the products that you are selling.

Drop shipping is not the latest thing to hit the Internet it has been around for some time but that does not mean that it is old and doesn’t work.

Drop shipping is still around because it works, some of the largest catalogue based companies and web sites use drop shipping.
Auctions sites and smaller websites use it.

Drop shipping is simply just an arrangement between you and your supplier in which you sell the products and the supplier ships them to your customers.

It’s not rocket science so don’t make it rocket science.

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