Launching a business online can be exciting and profitable. It’s a great way to supplement an existing income stream or even to become one’s sole occupation. Many individuals and small businesses have met with tremendous success, some making literally millions of dollars a year, even after starting at ground zero, with no knowledge of the Internet beyond the very basics, if that. There are no guarantees, but it can be done. It does require patience and a willingness to go through the steps to get it right, though. That’s what we’re going to teach you here.
Why Three Services? In this book we explain how to use three different “channels” to build your business online: ■ Selling products through eBay auctions ■ Setting up an online store using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions ■ Promoting your business through Google, other search engines, and various other onlinemarketing mechanisms. Why three channels? There are a number of reasons: ■ Few businesses are simple enough to survive with a single method for finding business. If you sell hot dogs to people who eat hot dogs, you may need only to place your hot-dog stand on a busy street. But if you sell hot dogs to businesses that sell hot dogs to people, you would use many different ways to reach those businesses. ■ What works well for one business may not work so well for another. Using multiple channels to sell and to reach people increases the likelihood that you find the best one.
Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. Click here for terms of use.
4 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
■ Multiple channels provide multiple opportunities. If you can find people to buy your products more than one way, why leave money on the table by only using one method? ■ You’ll find some of the things we suggest in this book can be implemented very quickly, in some cases in just a few hours. Having a range of different options helps you get your toes wet and work your way in slowly. For instance, an already established business could begin selling online with eBay over a weekend, gradually build the online business, then investigate other sales channels later. While it’s true that some businesses have done very well by finding something simple that works and doing it over and over again for decades, most businesses are not so fortunate. Thanks to competitive pressures—other people want your customers too; remember—most businesses have to do many things in order to survive and thrive. What works today may not work tomorrow. Some method you try for finding more business may not work, or may not work well as something you haven’t yet tried. Business is an evolutionary process, with the notion of natural selection replaced by the degree of initiative of the business owners and managers. A business gradually evolves as the people running the business try new things, discard things that don’t work or that no longer work, and adopt techniques that show promise. The three-channel method outlined in this book provides a great way to get started with an online business, showing you a number of essential techniques for surviving—and thriving—online. In particular, companies succeeding online often use a number of strategies to do so. These are the sort of things you may one day find yourself doing: ■ Selling through online auctions ■ Selling through discount channels, such as Overstock.com ■ Selling through merchant sites such as Amazon.com ■ Selling through a web store ■ . . . or, in some cases, several web stores, for different audiences or perhaps different pricing strategies ■ Buying Pay Per Click ads to bring buyers from the search engines to your store ■ Using Search Engine Optimization to bring buyers from the search engines without paying a click fee ■ If you own an offline business, using various techniques to integrate online and offline operations, pushing business from the offline business to the online, and vice versa ■ Using an affiliate program, paying other web sites commissions for purchases made by buyers arriving at your store through affiliate sites ■ Publishing an e-mail newsletter to keep in touch with customers and promote your products to their friends ■ Marketing through PR campaigns targeting e-mail newsletter editors ■ Promoting your products through discussion groups ■ And many other things . . .
One thing you can say about doing business online is that however successful you become, there’s always more to learn!
What Makes a Good Online Product? Just about any product can be sold online. But let’s be quite clear; some products sell much better than others. Let’s think about some product characteristics that both help and hurt products when selling online: ■ Price:weight ratio The price:weight ratio needs to be high; that is the price, in comparison to the weight, needs to be high. Books have a very high price:weight ratio— a book might be worth, say, $30/lb. Sugar might be around 35 cents/lb. The price:weight ratio issue is why it’s hard to sell sugar, cement, and charcoal online. ■ Availability Less available is good. Available everywhere is bad. That’s why it’s hard to sell candy bars online. ■ Information products Products that are essentially information sell well online. Books, reports, reference materials . . . even music is an information product, really. Why do they do well online? Because online technology provides a very efficient way to deliver information. It’s fast and it’s cheap. It’s no wonder that books were the first major product category online and remain one of the primary categories. ■ Complicated products requiring research The Internet is the perfect research tool, of course. Products that require careful selection—products with many different features— often do well online. ■ Wide selection of specialty products An example is one of the earliest small-biz successes, HotHotHot.com, an online success for over a decade. Sure, you can find hot sauce in any grocery store. But can you find Jamaican Hell Fire, Rigor Mortis Hot Sauce, 99%, or 3:00 AM? (The company provides 100 different brands.) Have you even heard of these? Another example is RedWagons.com. Certainly you can find two or three different Radio Flyer wagons in most toy stores, but where else can you find every Radio Flyer product made—steel wagons, plastic wagons, trikes, scooters, retro rockets, roadsters, and everything else? ■ Deals There’s a class of goods that crosses all classes, and even covers products that you might think of as Not Good Internet Products. If you can sell a particular product at a very low price, you may have a good Internet product. Hey, if you can get the price of sugar down low enough, you might be able to sell that online. ■ “Cool” products that sell themselves through word of mouth There are some products that are just so cool, people tell their friends. One company that gets fantastic word of mouth is ThinkGeek.com, which sells tons of really cool stuff (Figure 1-1). Another example of a great word-of-mouth site is Despair.com. This company sells products that people put on their office walls and laugh about with their friends.
No need to touch, smell, or even see clearly. Products that really require a close view generally don’t sell well online. That’s why it’s hard to sell furniture online and difficult to sell unique works of art or perfume. And that’s why well-known brands can sell online . . . because people know what they’re getting. In other words, although it’s hard to sell perfume that your potential buyers have never smelled, it’s not hard to sell perfume from Christian Dior.
Okay, so there’s no such thing as perfect online product. But considering what would be perfect might spark ideas of what products are close to perfect. Here, then, is the perfect online product: ■ It’s valuable, with high margins. You’re not making a dollar or two per sale; you’re making dozens, perhaps hundreds of dollars. ■ It’s in demand. It’s a product people want and are willing to pay for. ■ It’s not widely available. Buying online may be the only way to find the product, or the particular variety of the product. ■ It’s a “research” product. People are looking online for this product right now. (Most products are not research products. At this very moment, out of hundreds of millions of Internet users, probably only one or two are trying to find out how to buy sugar online.) ■ It’s light and non-fragile, so it’s cheap and easy to ship. ■ There’s little or no competition online. ■ People love the product so much they’re going to tell their friends about you. ■ There’s no smell or texture, or anything else that makes the product one that “just has to be seen.” ■ You are intimately connected to the product in some way. The product is related to your hobby or passion. ■ Oh, and it’s legal! While a number of illegal substances match the perfect-product criteria, we’re assuming the risk outweighs the benefits.
8 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
Understanding the Price Sensitivity of the Online Buyer Online buyers are far more price sensitive than offline buyers. That is, the price of the product is much more important for the online buyer than for someone walking into an offline store. When someone buys a product and has to select a particular merchant, they are “sensitive” to various factors, such as these: ■ The price of the product from that merchant ■ The convenience of purchasing from the merchant ■ The confidence they have in the merchant (whether the merchant “backs” the sale, for instance, if anything goes wrong) ■ The additional costs, such as sales tax and delivery Price is only one aspect in the decision to buy. But on the Internet, the weight given to price is much greater. This is a perfectly natural, and much predicted, state of affairs. Consider the buyer walking into a brick-and-mortar store who finds a product he’s interested in: ■ Many buyers don’t care about pricing much at all. They are more interested in convenience, selection, location, and sales environment. ■ Many buyers want the product now and don’t care too much about price, as long as it’s “in the ballpark.” If the buyer finds the product, there’s a good chance the sale is made. ■ Even if buyers are shopping for price, there’s a limit to how much driving around they’re willing to do. Again, if the price is “in the ballpark,” price may be trumped by convenience. ■ Buyers don’t think too much about how much confidence they have in the merchant; if the business can afford a storefront and take credit cards, they’ve already reached a certain level. We know all this is true, because offline prices are often higher than online prices. And haven’t we all been in stores and thought, “How do they sell at that ridiculous price?” The online sales environment is very different, though: ■ Buyers can jump from store to store very quickly. It’s very easy to find a low-priced product extremely quickly. ■ There are many sites that will even do the price comparison for you. There are the shopping directories (see Chapter 25) and the merchant sites (Chapter 28), where buyers, more and more, are beginning their shopping. ■ Many buyers are used to, and now expect, a low price. Price is a much more important factor for them than for most offline shoppers . . . they are much more price sensitive. In fact getting a low price is why many online buyers are willing to delay gratification (to wait for delivery).
CHAPTER 1: How Your Business Fits Online 9
■ Many buyers now do a little research to settle on the exact product they want, then use a shopping-directory comparison tool to search for the product. Then they’ll ask for the system to show the products sorted lowest-price first and work their way through the merchants one by one. They often won’t even go past the first few low-price merchants before buying. Understanding these concepts naturally leads to a couple of conclusions: ■ If you have a really good price, you’re in a good competitive position. ■ If you don’t have a good price, many of the marketing techniques won’t be open to you; you’ll find it very difficult to sell through eBay, shopping directories, and merchant sites, for instance.
Does this mean price is always important, that you can’t sell a product unless you sell at a low price? No, not necessarily. It means you’ll have trouble with sales channels that compare your product with others based on price, such as eBay, the shopping directories, and merchant sites. But it’s possible to position your business—on your own web site—in ways that are not directly related to price. The lowest price does not always get the sale. ■ The big merchants have a real brand advantage. Many buyers buy everything at Amazon, under the (not unreasonable) assumption that it’s a pretty good price, if not necessarily the best. ■ Selection holds value. Web sites that have a wide selection have an advantage; if people discover a hard-to-find product on your site, they may stop looking. ■ Focus is important. Sites that focus tightly on a particular type of product—and have a wide selection of a very small range of products—have an advantage, too, for the same reason. It makes the unfindable findable. ■ A classy site trumps a trashy site. Trashy sites make buyers feel uneasy. Classy-looking sites make them feel more comfortable. Even if your product, in your trashy-looking site, is listed in one of the shopping directories above a product from a really classy-looking site, it probably won’t matter how cheaply you sell; the classy site is getting some (much?) of the business. ■ Recommendations count for a lot. If a buyer recommends your site to someone because they’re so happy with buying from you, you’ll get sales regardless of price. ■ Simplicity is good. Making it easy to buy helps turn visitors into buyers. AllAboardToys .com, for instance, sells products you could buy on Amazon.com if you wished, but they make it much easier. ■ Brand differentiation matters. Look for ways to make your business stand apart. ShaneCo.com, for instance, a national jewelry chain, doesn’t compete on price directly; it competes on value and unique designs. They’ve positioned themselves as the price leader for high-quality jewelry, so they don’t have to compete head to head.
eBay in particular is a very price-sensitive forum. Your products will be listed alongside other products, the same or similar, so buyers can quickly see the price at which products sell.
10 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
To Ship or Not to Ship Here’s an interesting strategy, one that has worked well for many companies yet also represents some risk: Take orders, but don’t ship. No, we’re not talking about scamming buyers; we’re talking about acting as an order taker, not a shipper. This can, in some cases, make perfect sense. You operate the web site, the e-commerce store, the auctions, the shopping-directory listing, and so on. You carry out the marketing campaigns to bring in the sales, and you process the sales. But you don’t ship the products; rather, you send the order to a manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor, or even retailer, who manages the shipment. (This is known as drop shipping; you take the order, your partner “drop ships” it.) This type of business has some huge advantages: ■ Lower initial investment You don’t have to buy your initial inventory. ■ Less hassle Packing, shipping, and managing returns are nuisances you can do without. ■ Tighter focus You get to focus on Internet marketing and sales, not managing inventory, packing, shipping, and returns.
Of course there are different ways to play this game. Another scenario is to put everything from sales transaction to shipping to customer service in the hands of the supplier. All you do is manage the store and the marketing and let the supplier do everything else, including running the transaction through their own credit-card merchant account, almost totally absolving you of all responsibility.
Conversely, there are dangers and disadvantages: ■ If the supplier doesn’t ship it, you get blamed! ■ You get a lower cut of the sales price and profit. ■ You have less control of the quality of the products shipped to your customers.
Watch out for the scams! There are plenty of companies that will be happy to sign you up, to act for you as a drop shipper or wholesaler. Most of these are bad deals, selling junk. Be very careful and only get into business with reputable companies. In fact, you’re probably not looking for a company that touts itself as a drop shipper. You’re looking for a company that already ships products, that is willing to also ship for you.
How would you find an arrangement like this? Keep your eyes open, research local companies, spend a lot of time looking in stores, reading mail-order catalogs, and so on. Then, when you think you’ve found a good opportunity, you’ll have to make personal contact.
WorldWideBrands.com is a well-respected directory of drop-ship wholesalers. For $69.95 you’ll get a lifetime membership to the directory, which contains information on thousands of actual wholesalers that have agreed to drop ship for small businesses.
Why Three Services? In this book we explain how to use three different “channels” to build your business online: ■ Selling products through eBay auctions ■ Setting up an online store using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions ■ Promoting your business through Google, other search engines, and various other onlinemarketing mechanisms. Why three channels? There are a number of reasons: ■ Few businesses are simple enough to survive with a single method for finding business. If you sell hot dogs to people who eat hot dogs, you may need only to place your hot-dog stand on a busy street. But if you sell hot dogs to businesses that sell hot dogs to people, you would use many different ways to reach those businesses. ■ What works well for one business may not work so well for another. Using multiple channels to sell and to reach people increases the likelihood that you find the best one.
Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. Click here for terms of use.
4 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
■ Multiple channels provide multiple opportunities. If you can find people to buy your products more than one way, why leave money on the table by only using one method? ■ You’ll find some of the things we suggest in this book can be implemented very quickly, in some cases in just a few hours. Having a range of different options helps you get your toes wet and work your way in slowly. For instance, an already established business could begin selling online with eBay over a weekend, gradually build the online business, then investigate other sales channels later. While it’s true that some businesses have done very well by finding something simple that works and doing it over and over again for decades, most businesses are not so fortunate. Thanks to competitive pressures—other people want your customers too; remember—most businesses have to do many things in order to survive and thrive. What works today may not work tomorrow. Some method you try for finding more business may not work, or may not work well as something you haven’t yet tried. Business is an evolutionary process, with the notion of natural selection replaced by the degree of initiative of the business owners and managers. A business gradually evolves as the people running the business try new things, discard things that don’t work or that no longer work, and adopt techniques that show promise. The three-channel method outlined in this book provides a great way to get started with an online business, showing you a number of essential techniques for surviving—and thriving—online. In particular, companies succeeding online often use a number of strategies to do so. These are the sort of things you may one day find yourself doing: ■ Selling through online auctions ■ Selling through discount channels, such as Overstock.com ■ Selling through merchant sites such as Amazon.com ■ Selling through a web store ■ . . . or, in some cases, several web stores, for different audiences or perhaps different pricing strategies ■ Buying Pay Per Click ads to bring buyers from the search engines to your store ■ Using Search Engine Optimization to bring buyers from the search engines without paying a click fee ■ If you own an offline business, using various techniques to integrate online and offline operations, pushing business from the offline business to the online, and vice versa ■ Using an affiliate program, paying other web sites commissions for purchases made by buyers arriving at your store through affiliate sites ■ Publishing an e-mail newsletter to keep in touch with customers and promote your products to their friends ■ Marketing through PR campaigns targeting e-mail newsletter editors ■ Promoting your products through discussion groups ■ And many other things . . .
One thing you can say about doing business online is that however successful you become, there’s always more to learn!
What Makes a Good Online Product? Just about any product can be sold online. But let’s be quite clear; some products sell much better than others. Let’s think about some product characteristics that both help and hurt products when selling online: ■ Price:weight ratio The price:weight ratio needs to be high; that is the price, in comparison to the weight, needs to be high. Books have a very high price:weight ratio— a book might be worth, say, $30/lb. Sugar might be around 35 cents/lb. The price:weight ratio issue is why it’s hard to sell sugar, cement, and charcoal online. ■ Availability Less available is good. Available everywhere is bad. That’s why it’s hard to sell candy bars online. ■ Information products Products that are essentially information sell well online. Books, reports, reference materials . . . even music is an information product, really. Why do they do well online? Because online technology provides a very efficient way to deliver information. It’s fast and it’s cheap. It’s no wonder that books were the first major product category online and remain one of the primary categories. ■ Complicated products requiring research The Internet is the perfect research tool, of course. Products that require careful selection—products with many different features— often do well online. ■ Wide selection of specialty products An example is one of the earliest small-biz successes, HotHotHot.com, an online success for over a decade. Sure, you can find hot sauce in any grocery store. But can you find Jamaican Hell Fire, Rigor Mortis Hot Sauce, 99%, or 3:00 AM? (The company provides 100 different brands.) Have you even heard of these? Another example is RedWagons.com. Certainly you can find two or three different Radio Flyer wagons in most toy stores, but where else can you find every Radio Flyer product made—steel wagons, plastic wagons, trikes, scooters, retro rockets, roadsters, and everything else? ■ Deals There’s a class of goods that crosses all classes, and even covers products that you might think of as Not Good Internet Products. If you can sell a particular product at a very low price, you may have a good Internet product. Hey, if you can get the price of sugar down low enough, you might be able to sell that online. ■ “Cool” products that sell themselves through word of mouth There are some products that are just so cool, people tell their friends. One company that gets fantastic word of mouth is ThinkGeek.com, which sells tons of really cool stuff (Figure 1-1). Another example of a great word-of-mouth site is Despair.com. This company sells products that people put on their office walls and laugh about with their friends.
No need to touch, smell, or even see clearly. Products that really require a close view generally don’t sell well online. That’s why it’s hard to sell furniture online and difficult to sell unique works of art or perfume. And that’s why well-known brands can sell online . . . because people know what they’re getting. In other words, although it’s hard to sell perfume that your potential buyers have never smelled, it’s not hard to sell perfume from Christian Dior.
Okay, so there’s no such thing as perfect online product. But considering what would be perfect might spark ideas of what products are close to perfect. Here, then, is the perfect online product: ■ It’s valuable, with high margins. You’re not making a dollar or two per sale; you’re making dozens, perhaps hundreds of dollars. ■ It’s in demand. It’s a product people want and are willing to pay for. ■ It’s not widely available. Buying online may be the only way to find the product, or the particular variety of the product. ■ It’s a “research” product. People are looking online for this product right now. (Most products are not research products. At this very moment, out of hundreds of millions of Internet users, probably only one or two are trying to find out how to buy sugar online.) ■ It’s light and non-fragile, so it’s cheap and easy to ship. ■ There’s little or no competition online. ■ People love the product so much they’re going to tell their friends about you. ■ There’s no smell or texture, or anything else that makes the product one that “just has to be seen.” ■ You are intimately connected to the product in some way. The product is related to your hobby or passion. ■ Oh, and it’s legal! While a number of illegal substances match the perfect-product criteria, we’re assuming the risk outweighs the benefits.
8 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
Understanding the Price Sensitivity of the Online Buyer Online buyers are far more price sensitive than offline buyers. That is, the price of the product is much more important for the online buyer than for someone walking into an offline store. When someone buys a product and has to select a particular merchant, they are “sensitive” to various factors, such as these: ■ The price of the product from that merchant ■ The convenience of purchasing from the merchant ■ The confidence they have in the merchant (whether the merchant “backs” the sale, for instance, if anything goes wrong) ■ The additional costs, such as sales tax and delivery Price is only one aspect in the decision to buy. But on the Internet, the weight given to price is much greater. This is a perfectly natural, and much predicted, state of affairs. Consider the buyer walking into a brick-and-mortar store who finds a product he’s interested in: ■ Many buyers don’t care about pricing much at all. They are more interested in convenience, selection, location, and sales environment. ■ Many buyers want the product now and don’t care too much about price, as long as it’s “in the ballpark.” If the buyer finds the product, there’s a good chance the sale is made. ■ Even if buyers are shopping for price, there’s a limit to how much driving around they’re willing to do. Again, if the price is “in the ballpark,” price may be trumped by convenience. ■ Buyers don’t think too much about how much confidence they have in the merchant; if the business can afford a storefront and take credit cards, they’ve already reached a certain level. We know all this is true, because offline prices are often higher than online prices. And haven’t we all been in stores and thought, “How do they sell at that ridiculous price?” The online sales environment is very different, though: ■ Buyers can jump from store to store very quickly. It’s very easy to find a low-priced product extremely quickly. ■ There are many sites that will even do the price comparison for you. There are the shopping directories (see Chapter 25) and the merchant sites (Chapter 28), where buyers, more and more, are beginning their shopping. ■ Many buyers are used to, and now expect, a low price. Price is a much more important factor for them than for most offline shoppers . . . they are much more price sensitive. In fact getting a low price is why many online buyers are willing to delay gratification (to wait for delivery).
CHAPTER 1: How Your Business Fits Online 9
■ Many buyers now do a little research to settle on the exact product they want, then use a shopping-directory comparison tool to search for the product. Then they’ll ask for the system to show the products sorted lowest-price first and work their way through the merchants one by one. They often won’t even go past the first few low-price merchants before buying. Understanding these concepts naturally leads to a couple of conclusions: ■ If you have a really good price, you’re in a good competitive position. ■ If you don’t have a good price, many of the marketing techniques won’t be open to you; you’ll find it very difficult to sell through eBay, shopping directories, and merchant sites, for instance.
Does this mean price is always important, that you can’t sell a product unless you sell at a low price? No, not necessarily. It means you’ll have trouble with sales channels that compare your product with others based on price, such as eBay, the shopping directories, and merchant sites. But it’s possible to position your business—on your own web site—in ways that are not directly related to price. The lowest price does not always get the sale. ■ The big merchants have a real brand advantage. Many buyers buy everything at Amazon, under the (not unreasonable) assumption that it’s a pretty good price, if not necessarily the best. ■ Selection holds value. Web sites that have a wide selection have an advantage; if people discover a hard-to-find product on your site, they may stop looking. ■ Focus is important. Sites that focus tightly on a particular type of product—and have a wide selection of a very small range of products—have an advantage, too, for the same reason. It makes the unfindable findable. ■ A classy site trumps a trashy site. Trashy sites make buyers feel uneasy. Classy-looking sites make them feel more comfortable. Even if your product, in your trashy-looking site, is listed in one of the shopping directories above a product from a really classy-looking site, it probably won’t matter how cheaply you sell; the classy site is getting some (much?) of the business. ■ Recommendations count for a lot. If a buyer recommends your site to someone because they’re so happy with buying from you, you’ll get sales regardless of price. ■ Simplicity is good. Making it easy to buy helps turn visitors into buyers. AllAboardToys .com, for instance, sells products you could buy on Amazon.com if you wished, but they make it much easier. ■ Brand differentiation matters. Look for ways to make your business stand apart. ShaneCo.com, for instance, a national jewelry chain, doesn’t compete on price directly; it competes on value and unique designs. They’ve positioned themselves as the price leader for high-quality jewelry, so they don’t have to compete head to head.
eBay in particular is a very price-sensitive forum. Your products will be listed alongside other products, the same or similar, so buyers can quickly see the price at which products sell.
10 How to Make Money Online with eBay, Yahoo!, and Google
To Ship or Not to Ship Here’s an interesting strategy, one that has worked well for many companies yet also represents some risk: Take orders, but don’t ship. No, we’re not talking about scamming buyers; we’re talking about acting as an order taker, not a shipper. This can, in some cases, make perfect sense. You operate the web site, the e-commerce store, the auctions, the shopping-directory listing, and so on. You carry out the marketing campaigns to bring in the sales, and you process the sales. But you don’t ship the products; rather, you send the order to a manufacturer, wholesaler, distributor, or even retailer, who manages the shipment. (This is known as drop shipping; you take the order, your partner “drop ships” it.) This type of business has some huge advantages: ■ Lower initial investment You don’t have to buy your initial inventory. ■ Less hassle Packing, shipping, and managing returns are nuisances you can do without. ■ Tighter focus You get to focus on Internet marketing and sales, not managing inventory, packing, shipping, and returns.
Of course there are different ways to play this game. Another scenario is to put everything from sales transaction to shipping to customer service in the hands of the supplier. All you do is manage the store and the marketing and let the supplier do everything else, including running the transaction through their own credit-card merchant account, almost totally absolving you of all responsibility.
Conversely, there are dangers and disadvantages: ■ If the supplier doesn’t ship it, you get blamed! ■ You get a lower cut of the sales price and profit. ■ You have less control of the quality of the products shipped to your customers.
Watch out for the scams! There are plenty of companies that will be happy to sign you up, to act for you as a drop shipper or wholesaler. Most of these are bad deals, selling junk. Be very careful and only get into business with reputable companies. In fact, you’re probably not looking for a company that touts itself as a drop shipper. You’re looking for a company that already ships products, that is willing to also ship for you.
How would you find an arrangement like this? Keep your eyes open, research local companies, spend a lot of time looking in stores, reading mail-order catalogs, and so on. Then, when you think you’ve found a good opportunity, you’ll have to make personal contact.
WorldWideBrands.com is a well-respected directory of drop-ship wholesalers. For $69.95 you’ll get a lifetime membership to the directory, which contains information on thousands of actual wholesalers that have agreed to drop ship for small businesses.
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