Archive for January, 2010

Choosing a Dropship Niche

January 29th, 2010

In order to find a good dropship niche and keywords to go with your dropship niche, I encourage you to brainstorm ideas. Don’t discount any idea; the perfect dropship niche may come to mind at any moment. Don’t toss any ideas away unless you’ve given them some very good thought and proven that they will not work.

Are you passionate about your dropship niche ideas, if not, get passionate about them. It is so much easier to sell a product that you are passionate about. It also makes it easier to market that product if you already know about it. For example, when writing articles for article marketing, it really does help to have a background knowledge of the subject matter. Passion is important and even though you don’t have to be passionate about what you’re selling, it helps considerably when it comes to marketing the product and customer service. If a customer has a question about a product, you will be much better equipped to answer if you already know quite a bit about the product and how it works.

Make sure that your chosen dropship niche is not over-saturated. You can do this by opening up the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Type your product into the search box and then click on “get keyword ideas”. When the results pop up change the match type to exact and then find the keyword you selected. Now look under global searches per month; does the keyword or keyword phrase have 1,000 searches or higher? If yes, go on to check out the competition. To do that, open up a new Internet browser and then type in the selected product or keywords exactly how you typed them in the keyword tool. By doing this, you can find out approximately how much competition your product has. Look up in the right hand corner of your browser and see how many results there are for that keyword phrase. Make sure that the results are under five million. If you find that any of these guidelines are not fulfilled, for your own sake, find another keyword to try. You can still try to rank for the keyword with more than five million, but please realize that it’s going to be much more difficult and most likely take a lot more time.

When you type in your keyword or keyword phrase you want to find out what the page ranks are of the top four results on the page. If the page ranks are three or lower, you have found yourself an ideal keyword or keyword phrase. Look at the domain names of the sites. If the sites are well-known and you know they must get a lot of traffic you may want to try changing your keyword or keyword phrase a little bit.

Finding the perfect dropship niche for you can be very difficult and sometimes you learn that you need to settle for something second or third best. Perhaps you know nothing about the product in question but you know it will bring you a great profit. That’s great! The down side, however; is that marketing may be a little more difficult for you, having no foreknowledge of the product you are trying to sell.

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On Page Optimization

January 27th, 2010

There are a few tricks to learn when optimizing pages but, for the most part, it’s not terribly difficult once you pick a strategy and stick with it. There are a few different strategies and, to be honest, I don’t believe anyone but Google really “knows” which strategy for page optimization is going to produce the best results. My advice, do your research, and pick a strategy that you believe will work best for your company. If it doesn’t work, you can try another one.


When optimizing for a keyword or keyword phrase within an article, industry experts suggest optimizing the word anywhere from three to five percent. Which means that for every one hundred words in your article that keyword or phrase appears three to five times. However, no matter the importance of repeating your keywords or keyword phrases, I suggest writing useful content not simply content to rank your website.


I cannot stress the importance of a well-optimized title enough. When you search for any keyword or keyword phrase, you will find that the highest ranking results will have all or part of the keyword or keyword phrase in the title. If your keyword is not in your title, your ability to rank just went down automatically. I cannot stress enough the importance of creating a well-optimized title.


Some people will tell you that meta data doesn’t do anything for website optimization. I say, why not take the opportunity to optimize for your keywords or keyword phrases. Some people say that using optimization in keywords is overrated and that the search engines do not pay any attention to them anymore. Well, I would like to say that I think they do matter and I have noticed a difference between the two ideas as I have tried them both out for a while.


Long story short, get your keywords and keyword phrases out there; it’s very important. You can still write content that doesn’t include your keyword phrases but it will be less likely to be ranking the way you would like it to rank.

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eBay Crash Course: Feedback Effects

January 20th, 2010

Feedback has an effect on reputation, sure, but what does that mean to us? Why should it matter what my reputation is; I can get by regardless… can’t I?

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is also no. Feedback is going to effect us on eBay in a variety of very real ways. Let’s first talk about the positive effects of Feedback.

High Feedback helps us in the following ways:

  • First, you need at least 10 Feedback to have access to many of the more advanced listing options.
  • You need at least 100 Feedback to become an eBay Powerseller.
  • Consumer confidence; high feedback means high sales. People can trust you, and they’re not going to be afraid that you’re an unknown seller, and will shop with confidence.

In addition to the Feedback requirements, a Powerseller needs to have near-perfect DSR, which means you need to score perfectly whenever a buyer of yours rates how well you did as a seller. The positive feedback will help confer the multitude of powerseller benefits, and is a key part of accomplishing your long-term eBay goals. You should always strive to reach powerseller status if you are working on eBay, and feedback is an integral piece of that game plan.

Bad Feedback can hurt us just as much as good Feedback can helps us. Bad Feedback:

  • Can cause us to lose our Powerseller status. You need near-perfect DSR if you want to be a Powerseller, and once you start slip and getting back Feedback, you can lose it all.
  • If you gain more Negative Feedback than Positive Feedback, you will actually be blocked from seeing a lot of listings!
  • Buyers are not going to be interested in buying from us if we have a proven bad track record. They can see our Feedback history, and if it isn’t pretty, they’re not going to stick around and try to deal with us!

We are going to live and die based on Feedback on eBay. If we have positive Feedback, we will be rewarded. If we have negative Feedback, we will be punished. It is as simple as that. We should strive towards perfection as much as possible with eBay, as it will be to our benefit. Stay tuned next week, and we’ll continue our crash course on eBay!

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Ebay Crash Course: Feedback Introduction

January 19th, 2010

Dropshipping and eBay is a powerful combination, but many people do not know many of the basics involved with working on eBay. Feedback is a crazy esoteric term, and everything seems poised to overwhelm and undermine us even as we begin. However, with a little perspective, we can find eBay is actually pretty manageable, once you learn the ropes.

First and foremost, when you think of eBay, the savvy customers out there think feedback. We had talked about feedback before, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on Feedback, and its significance to us as new eBay users.

eBay, as we know, is a behemoth on the internet these days. There are literally tens of thousands of transactions going on hourly, and eBay quickly came to realize that it was fast growing infeasible to try and track all this information on a case by case basis, if not outright impossible. In this position, you typically have one of two options available to you: let chaos reign, or try to keep some semblance of order. eBay opted for the latter.

The concept of Feedback is simple: you have a “pass/fail” metric by which you rank a transaction, and the buyer and the seller involved both get to have their say. By keeping things strictly as Positive or Negative, there is no guessing. There is the eBay DSR rankings that allow us to get more in-depth, but as far as the transaction itself goes, you either did your job, or you didn’t.

It was a great way to keep the buyers and sellers on eBay in line; you were at the mercy of whomever it was you were directly working with as far as Feedback was concerned. Your reputation itself was at stake with each and every transaction, so it was very important to uphold your end of the bargain, and ship promptly and as outlined, or pay promptly as promised. It helped impose some order onto an otherwise unwieldy environment, and it took off well.

Reputation is well and good, but what practical effect does that have on us as eBay sellers? Find out in our next article!

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I Fought the Law (But the Law Won)

January 13th, 2010

A lot of new business owners are sometimes confused by the necessity of setting up a proper business entity, or going through the effort of getting a Federal EIN number, or state tax identification number. Many think that this is an unnecessary step, especially considering the time involved to get this information. To understand the importance of this documentation, one must understand the way that dropshipping and product sourcing work.

When we wish to begin our business, the common assumption is that we go straight to the manufacturer and move forward directly from there. If we’re going to be the next Footlocker, we should go right to Nike, let them know we want some shoes, and then we’re good to go, right?

Wrong. A manufacturer typically does not want to have anything to do with any company that is not capable of purchasing from them in massive quantities. The reason for this is they are selling the product at a mark up over manufacturing cost, which is typically very far beneath its eventual retail cost. To make it worth their effort, they need to sell in large quantities… sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands of units at once! Most up and coming stores, be it brick and mortar or online, simply cannot do that. What are they to do?

The solution that was reached is that another company will come forward and purchase the inventory from the manufacturer, and resell it to us in smaller quantities. This company, the distributor, typically has capital, but is not interested in marketing or advertising. They are more than happy to resell the item in a smaller quantity, allowing us a foothold in the industry. It is through these distributors that the concept of dropshipping came into being.

However, how does this all relate to our initial question of the necessity of these identification numbers? The answer is simple; there is a barrier of entry necessary for these distributors to ensure that they are dealing with actual members of the trade. Most manufacturers do not want their product hitting the market at just above-cost. They don’t want individuals purchasing their items at next to nothing, as many manufacturers have lucrative arrangements with departments stores and the like to sell their product. If everyone was going to be able to sell for a fraction of the store cost online, why would anyone ever go to the store?

This is a very bad scenario for the manufacturer, regardless of how nice it might be for us as consumers, and to combat this many manufacturers require any distributor that they work with to verify that anyone whom they resell their product to is a licensed member of the trade… hence the necessity for us as prospective resellers to have this documentation.

With this hard restriction on most suppliers, it is very important that we do go through the tasks of establishing our identification numbers, federal or state, so that when we do get to the point where we have a supplier we want to work with, we’re not stuck in a rut, entirely unable to move forward because our supplier is requiring legal documentation that we just don’t have. We may try to fight this step, but in the end, if we want to move forward with our business, we’re going to have to get legal, or get out.

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ID Ideas | GoGo Dropship

January 12th, 2010



When you’re an up and coming business owner, you are going to be asked about two different forms of identification: the Employer Identification Number (EIN), and the Tax Identification Number (Tax ID #). Both of these forms are for identification purposes, and used to establish that you are a member of the trade, which qualifies you to work with dropship and wholesale suppliers.


Many people do not know the primary differences between these two forms of identification, and it is often a source of confusion. With that in mind, we’re going to walk through the primary differences between the two to help clarify things and alleviate some of the confusion.


The Employer Identification Number is a Federal number, which is used to identify your business, primarily for tax purposes. It shows that you are a valid, registered business with the United States federal government, but it does not necessarily show that you are qualified to be exempt from sales tax, or anything like that. You can typically obtain an EIN number from your state government website, and it is usually available for free, or for a very nominal fee. This identification form is sometimes accepted by a supplier when establishing an account with them, but many will request additional information as well.


That additional information is the State Tax Identification Number. This is a number assigned by the state government, rather than the federal government, and its primary purpose is to prove that you are a member of the trade, and therefore do not need to be charged sales tax when working with a supplier. As the legality or necessity of sales tax is very important to a supplier, this is the the most commonly requested form of identification when creating an account with a supplier. A Tax ID number typically comes with a higher fee to establish than an EIN number, and the fee can vary from state to state. When establishing a new business, this is the most important piece of documentation to obtain, as it is almost universally required by suppliers in order to work with them.


The suppliers require this information for legal and tax purposes; if you are not a member of the trade, they can actually lose their contract with a manufacturer to carry their products, and if they don’t charge you sales tax, although they should be, that will also cause problems for the supplier. It is for this reason it is of paramount importance to get things set up legally as you move in to starting your business, or else risk hitting a wall very early on.


It takes a little time, and it takes a little money, but in the long run, it is vitally important that you set your business up correctly, right from the get go, or risk running into legal troubles down the road, which will in turn cost more time, and more money that you don’t want, or need, to spend.

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Money, Money, Money | GoGo Dropship

January 5th, 2010

Going back to our hypothetical scenario, we are a new business owner who has got his website up and running, only to find that everyone out there is able to sell their same products for far less. We aren’t making sales, and things are looking dire. We’re stuck in a bad situation… but how could we have avoided it?

The answer is simple, and one that you may be quite familiar with: research! Research is our best friend in business, and in this regard it is no different. Before we build a site, we want to see how our potential suppliers stack up compared to everyone else online. If our supplier’s wholesale price is higher than what people are selling for at retail, then we’ve got a problem.

Some of you might be wondering how a wholesale price could ever stack up poorly against retail price. We’d talked previously about this phenomenon, and this is definitely one instance where we’re seeing first-hand the effect this concept has with us and our business.

Without being willing to carry inventory, our only recourse is to research the effectiveness of our supplier prior to creating a website where we will utilize them. This way if we see that our supplier will not be effective price-wise, we can turn around and look for an alternate supplier, or even an alternate niche, before we’ve passed the point of no return and created a site.

There are a few website tools that we can utilize to do this. First and foremost we have the Google Product Search, a tool powered, aptly enough, by Google that will allow us to see what people are pricing our specific item on online, utilizing the power of the Google search engine to give us a very good picture into all the available products out there. Conveniently accompanied by images, and with the ability to sort by price, Froogle is one of the easier ways to see what our competitors are pricing their same items at, to see if there’s room to be competitive.

A second resource I like to utilize is PriceGrabber. This website functions quite the same way as Froogle, but it gives us a different system for pulling their results, which in turn gives us an even more complete view of what our competitors are doing.

This is all well and good, you may be thinking, but how do we make sense of all this information? We can see the prices, big whoop. How does this help us? Are we supposed to try and see if we can be the lowest price? Do we just want to see the highest price and price our items accordingly?

Our goal in doing this research using these sites is to see where the price extremes are, both high and low, and find a median fair price. We don’t want to try to be the lowest; someone can always get a better discount than us, and someone is always willing to undercut us, even at their own peril. We can briefly flirt with being the lowest price out there, but it simply isn’t something feasible to try to sustain.

At the same time, we do want to make sure we’re not the highest. If we’re the highest, than it is quite probable that people will utilize many of the same tools that we can to see that there are cheaper alternatives out there, which they will most likely go with. For that reason, our goal is to find a fair price that lies between those extremes, and price ourselves there.

However, this is not so simple a thing as seeing where our supplier’s price is, and just gauging things that way. We want to make money after all, so we need to make sure that we are basing these numbers off of our supplier’s price plus our profit margin. Typically a new business owner should try and shoot for a 30% profit margin, which roughly translates into a $15-$20 per item profit.

This may seem like a lot of extra leg work, but if we can find out whether or not our supplier is effective before creating our site around them, we can be much more confident moving forward with the knowledge that we can be priced effectively, and expect many more sales as a result.

For more information, please visit GoGo Dropship.

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Dollars and Sense | GoGo Dropship

January 5th, 2010

One of the biggest steps in finalizing your dropship website is finally mapping out the potential earnings. Its a step that is intimidating to some, but it is vital that we go through this process as a prelude to the actual creation of our site, rather than after we’ve gone through all the sweat and elbow grease to get our website up and running.

The reason for this is simple; if we do not see if our supplier or niche is going to be competitive before creating the site, we put ourselves in a very bad position if we’re now finding this out after the fact. For the sake of example, let’s say that we’ve found a great supplier that’s going to provide us with all our remote control car needs. They have a ton of available products, and they’re bursting at the seams with variety. Sounds like a slam dunk so far.

We figure that the variety speaks for itself, and the price is probably right, so we move forward, spend a few weeks making a great website to complement the supplier and the products… weeks go by, and we still haven’t seen hide nor hair of a sale. The products are great, the website is solid. Why aren’t we getting a sale?

Needing to know what we’re doing wrong, we decide to take a look at one of our competitor’s websites. Their site is pretty good; ours might be better… but their retail price is our wholesale price! This could be a fluke, we say, and we look at another site. Uh oh, their retail price is a little higher, but still lower than ours by a fair bit.

One time is luck, two times may be coincidence… so we take a look at a third site. Lo and behold, this one has followed suite; its lower than all the rest! All of these are sites we found just looking up our product. Chances are very good that our customers who are looking around can see these as well.

Now we’re stuck with a site all complete, but a supplier that just doesn’t seem to compete. We either have to market really aggressively, or cut into our profit per item; either way we look at it, the only way to make things work at this point is to take some losses, and hope for the best.

But how do we avoid this situation? There are a few techniques that we can utilize to avoid landing ourselves in such a pickle, which we will discuss in our next article!

For more information, please visit GoGo Dropship.

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Scratching the Dropshipping Niche Itch

January 4th, 2010

As you begin your business, one of the hardest questions that will come up is “What do I try to sell?” We’ve talked previously on what not to sell, but the harder question still often lies in what exactly you should try and sell. Unlike the majority of the steps towards building a web-based business, this is not a simple linear progression of steps; deciding on a niche for dropshipping can sometimes be described more like an art than a science!

However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot approach it with a somewhat scientific mindset. There are a few things that we can add into a mental checklist to assist us in determining at a glance whether or not it will be worth pursuing a niche idea; I like to call it The Who and The Why of dropshipping niche research.

The Who

First things first, we have to think of who, logically, is going to want to purchase this item. For instance, we might think that that electric singing dinosaur lamp is a great buy, but are there going to logically be a lot of people who will agree? We want to think of potential customer base, and we have to think of if they are really going to be active online. For instance, the extreme, fashion-oriented people out there won’t be caught dead buying things online; for that reason, is it really logical to try and source high end fashion as an Internet site? Thinking of who is going to buy from us will greatly help in weeding out potentially bothersome dropshipping niches right from the get go.

The Why

When we are pretty sure of the customers having a real chance of buying from us, we have to determine what it is that will make them buy a product online, rather than in a store. Heck, we want to know why they’d buy the item in the first place! This brings us again into the very practical side of our dropshipping niche research; what void are we filling? Why would someone be buying our product? Is the product we want to sell something that is a popular gift item? Flatware is a popular wedding item, but also something that people may want for themselves, too. It’s something that they can constantly use, there’s almost always an application for the product. It’s not flashy like a gadget, or trendy like a toy, but it’s something that one can reliably expect to be used, abused, and needed. Item ideas like this really help in narrowing down our dropshipping niche, especially in these times of cutting back. There are near-essentials that almost any customer is interested in, and more often than not they’re an untapped market, as many people prefer to “go big, or go home”, and foolishly discount the lower, but consistent, sale items.

Even with these ideas in mind, sometimes the best way to get things done is just by diving into a dropship supplier and making a checklist. It is not a silly notion to simply take inventory of a supplier’s inventory, and look at the products that you like, and seeing what the demand is. Niche research is not an exact science, and sometimes blind luck has just as much success as deliberate research. The key is not to get discouraged if it takes some time; everything after finding a dropshipping niche is a methodical application and progression of steps. It’s only when we’re starting that we’re having to guess and hope on a wing and a prayer!

For more information about dropshipping, please visit www.gogodropship.com.

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