I would recommend experimenting with a few items. You can sell almost anything on eBay, but do some research before you decide what to sell. Find out how much it will cost you to buy and ship the item. You’ll also want to know if there is an audience that is buying the product and who else is selling that item on eBay. Who is your competition? Can you compete on the benefit of price, quality, speed, or product expertise?

Look for more information by looking at  eBay Pulse and keeping your eyes on current events and trends. I write this blog three times a week for GoGo Dropship. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog article on the Japanese response to the Tsunami and what businesses can learn from their example. It was not an out of the ordinary blog post. But because it was timely and the keywords used within the post got picked up by search engines,  it was on the second page of search results for a few days. I was surprised and very pleased. Keeping current, brought more eyes to my blog post, and a similar thing can happen to you on eBay if you are selling the right thing at the right time.

Keeping up with trends will also give you a competitive edge while selling online. “Early Adopters” or people that influence their friends to buy are a highly sought after group by advertisers because they know that if this group likes a product, their friends will buy it. If you come across a great product before it goes main stream and  then sell it, you’ll make a nice profit.  But if you get on the bandwagon too late, you may end up loosing money due to extra inventory. But you’ll have to experiment to know when these times are.

This concern may lead you to sell products that tend to sell almost any time during the year. Things like electronics, books, or toys.

How do I list on eBay?

If you are curious about the actual eBay listing process, take a look at this helpful eBay video.

Ebay has other great videos on everything from shipping to taking pictures here.

As long as you’re willing to invest the time it takes to list, take pictures of your product, and ship it or drop ship it, then you’re ready to sell.

What should I do with my unsold items?

Remember to be patient. When you don’t have a feedback score it may take some time for people to trust buying from you. I like this list of tips on what to do if your items don’t sell. Don’t worry, in most cases if your items don’t sell, you can re-list them for free. If you can’t re-list them for some reason, consider selling them on many of the free classified websites or donate them.

What if I lose money?

It’s important to start small and get the hang of listing on eBay before you invest a lot in your business. I’m starting with used items, that if I can’t get a lot for won’t hurt me too bad. I will practice listing, selling, and shipping these items before I start investing more money into my business. Besides, when you first begin without feedback you may have to compensate for your lack of feedback by offering killer deals.

Any new business involves some faith, work, and experimenting. Do your research, find out what works for you, and don’t give up. EBay won’t be a complete gamble if you keep these things in mind. Of course, like everything else in life, most good things come with practice, so don’t be afraid to make a few mistakes along the way!

This rat was huge! It’s massive size fooled me. But as it climbed into the storm drain I shivered. Yuck! The differences between a kitten and a rat are innumerable. But the dark, the size, and it coming out from under a car like cats do, had contributed to my misjudgment.

Sometimes a lot like my “kitten” that was really a rat, deals cross our paths that look pretty common-place or maybe even appealing. As entrepreneurs we may even approach an opportunity with interest only to find out that the opportunity is a rat. It looked good, but up close was really something else, maybe even something sketchy.

This is a reminder to approach drop shipping with caution, there are a lot of rats out there.

So how do you find a legitimate company?

1. Be observant. Paying attention to details and your feelings will help you spot the rats.

Last night I was applying for jobs and spotted what seemed like a great job opportunity that paid well. It seemed too good to be true, but I really wanted it to be real. I began the application process, but using caution provided my junk e-mail address on the form. I filled out more of the form and they asked for my social security number.

That seemed like awfully personal information to be giving out on a form on a web page the looked ancient and possibly fake. Some of the information they wanted seemed to personal for a job application, so I left the site. I got an e-mail 5 minutes later that encouraged me to apply and listed an e-mail address that led me nowhere. That settled it for me. They were trying to scam me. I’m glad I trusted my gut and quit filling out the application.

Just as the dragging tail observation  made me reconsider what I saw in the street, the request for such personal information upfront caused me to question the trustworthiness of the site. Pay attention to how you feel about services and if something seems off, do some more investigation before proceeding.

2.Be willing to take a closer look. Are the costs associated  with the product or service fair? “What does their user agreement say? Thankfully most companies have user agreements you can review. Do yourself the service of scanning through it to see if anything sounds fishy. Think about the risks involved. Does it have strong enough benefit to counter balance the risk involved? What kind of profit margin exists for the product or how much will you make after you take out all the selling, shipping, and handling expenses? Does it seem fair?

There are several businesses built around drop shipping these days. There are services that act as a middleman and do almost all of the work for you, but then dip deeply into your profits to pay for their services.  Then there are complete scams that take your money and never provide a service. But there are also honest drop ship directories. These directories provide you with legitimate supplier information at a low cost. Beware of the directories that promise you information for “free.”

Look at the services a company really offers and then make your decision. You may want a middleman, but don’t pay for one if what you really want is a drop ship directory.

Most sellers agree that the change was a result of the popularity of Amazon’s shipping policy which often included free shipping. As an avid  eBay buyer I  always add the shipping prices to the  total in my head anyway, so it seemed like a natural change to me.

But the best news about the change is that it represents an advantage  to drop shippers. Because the manufacturer drop ships the products that sellers post on eBay, the final value fee will not be as high for these sellers. Drop shippers handle shipping charges and even though they may charge a small fee, it will generally be less than the shipping, handling, and now final value fees that would be included if a seller tried to ship the products on their own–not to mention all of the shipping hassles that they save themselves from experiencing.

So if you already drop ship, you can now enjoy free listing fees,  50 free buy it now options, and a 9% final value charge that–thank s to drop shipping– will not include shipping fees.  If you don’t drop ship, these changes may be a good reason to start!

To learn how to receive our drop ship directory please visit www.gogodropship.com

To receive free new business tips follow us on on twitter @gogodropship or read our weekly blog.

America's National Pastime, Baseball

Stopping at 3rd base scores no more points than striking out! Why not let gogo dropship be your 3rd base coach and help you bring your sales home? Having your own online business is a great way to have significant extra income working from home.  Here at gogo we have a highly motivated team of professionals that want to help you get your online business out of the dug out and up to the plate.

Do you think that selling online is too difficult? Think again. We have specially designed drop ship packages for you to choose from that all allow you to work at you own pace.   With our memberships you will have access to a long list of wholesale suppliers and drop shippers ready to ship products nationally and internationally. Making money from home couldn’t be easier. We are here to help when you are just getting starting and when you are ready to swing for the fences.

More and more products are being sold online every year. E commerce has become a multibillion dollar industry and it is more simple now than ever to get your piece of that money. Drop shipping with GoGo Dropship will take the hassle out of selling online and making money will become simple. So what are you waiting for? Give us a call a talk to one of our representatives today to learn more.

Storing Merchandise

What is drop shipping? Can it be leveraged into a successful business?

As a senior at BYU-Idaho, I first heard about drop shipping when a successful online business owner came to speak to us. She got her start selling homemade baby blankets on eBay and then over time expanded her inventory by adding furniture. When she branched out into furniture she was nervous that she didn’t have the space to store the cribs and chairs.  With a little negotiation her supplier agreed to be a drop shipper solely for her. When someone drop ships it means that the supplier or manufacturer ships the product directly to the customer.

This drop ship deal was due to the good relationship she had built with her supplier. (since the supplier didn’t drop ship with everyone) The  drop shipper saw that she worked hard and thus was willing to put in a little extra work by agreeing to drop ship. Really it was a good relationship that made the deal possible.

Most businesses will tell you that a good business is centered around a good product. But, because suppliers largely control if you sell a product or not, it is so important to develop a good relationships with them. The truth is that for most manufacturers, drop shipping only a few items can be a hassle. Most manufacturers would prefer to sell to organizations that buy a product in bulk. But many will know drop ship thanks to relationship built with a good directory or seller.

Suppliers also control when a product gets to your customers. This alone is reason enough to stay on good terms.  After all,  quick shipping generally translates into customer feedback. And any eBay seller will tell you the value of good feedback on eBay.

But besides saving you the hassle of shipping a product to a customer, it can also help you put profits back into your pocket more quickly. You see once the customer pays, you have your entire profit right up front. You don’t have to worry about the fees associated with shipping and handling.

While it’s true you can work with drop shippers without a directory, it can be extremely difficult to connect yourself to a legitimate drop ship distributor on your own. There are a lot of scams  out there but drop ship directories take the guess work out of finding trusted suppliers. They form relationships with these suppliers so that you’ll be connected to a friendly, dependable drop ship supplier. The supplier of the woman I told you about was a trusted supplier that helped the woman expand her business from a small eBay account, to an online store, and then into a successful brick and mortar store. While  this woman knows her hard work got her the trust of the supplier, she acknowledges that her dream business could never have boomed without an honest supplier that produces quality products and ships quickly to her customers.

Do you want more tips on how to jump start your online business?

Please follow us on twitter @gogodropship or read more of our blog articles.

Selling online contributes to the challenge because selling online sellers have greater competition and competition naturally  drives prices down. Some sellers operate on such a slim profit margin, you may wonder how they ever make a profit.  However, with some research and strategy you can sell products that will put money back into your pocket.

What kind of a profit margin you receive depends entirely on what you sell. Things like electronics are harder to gain a profit on because of the costs required to make them. Competition to sell these products, is also a huge factor.

High ticket items may appeal to you, but it’s important to look at the demand for the product. It may seem great to receive a $100 profit from a sale, but if an item sits on the shelf for months before you sell it, it may actually be losing its value. You may be losing money in theory, if you could be selling ten $10 items every week, but instead focus your time and efforts on one high ticket item that takes forever to sell.

The best items to sell are items in a niche market. The less competition you have the better. The risk of low competition is that you’re not sure if the demand for your product is as high, since no one is currently marketing the product.

Take a look at this article for more ideas of how to sell online successfully. http://www.entrepreneur.com/sales/article206390.html

For all you history buffs, drop shipping developed in the days of the Sear’s catalog and has been around for more than 50 years. Back then, customers looked up products and then ordered them through a Sear’s representative (a.k.a middle man) or from a brick and mortar store (a.k.a middle man). But let’s be honest, that sounds as long ago as when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.  Since then, the Internet was born and with it came a wave of drop shippers and opportunities for web based businesses and entrepreneurs to make money online from the comfort of their home.  So what are the advantages of using a drop shipper?

There are many advantages behind working directly with a drop shipper rather than working through a middle man who tends to mark up the product to pad his/her wallet. Here are some of the advantages:  get true wholesale pricing, limit start up risks by not being forced to buy the product before you sell it, avoid overhead costs such as packaging materials and space to warehouse the products (being that the drop shipper carries that burden), save yourself time from having to go to the post office each time a product needs to be mailed off, build/establish a business relationship directly with the supplier and remain more in control,

Northeast Coffee Company
Nantucket Brand
Swimsuits for All
Fat Brain Toy Co.
P&S Fishing Tackle, Inc.
Tire Wholesalers
Bait N’ Hook
American Recreation Equipment, Inc.
Karate Depot
Handbag Crew
Bargain Wholesaler
Dog Supplies
RMF Scrubs LLC
Allegro Medical Supplies Inc.
All Authentic Sports Memorabilia
Wholesale Gifts Direct
Sport Supply Group
Puppia International Inc.
ATAFA
Alternative Healthcare
Vitamix Laboratories

For more information about dropshipping or to sign up for a package or a free trial (no credit card required), please visit GoGo Dropship.

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.

Why Drop ship?

Drop shipping is a great idea for the small businessman who just wants to make a buck on the side. However, unless you have an incredible niche, I wouldn’t suggest quiting your day job to become a drop shipping tycoon. I would suggest drop shipping for anyone who would like to earn a little more spending money.

Drop shipping is also a great idea for the individual who doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of storing inventory on hand at their home or paying to have it stored in a warehouse. With drop shipping, you don’t have to store anything; the supplier will simply send the product to your customer. You could even request blind drop shipping if they do it. Blind drop shipping is when they send out the product but they put your information down as the return address.

There is very low liability with drop shipping. Really, the main thing you need to worry about is following up using good customer service. For example, let’s say you have a contract with a supplier who drop ships banana chairs. This drop shipper sends the banana chair but the customer doesn’t ever receive it. It’s your responsibility, as a reputable company, to make sure that the customer gets their product. Follow up with them. Following up will hopefully increase customer retention.

Why Use a Drop Ship Directory?

Many believe that finding a drop shipper is a piece of cake. Well, they probably haven’t ever had to find a drop shipper. Sometimes it’s a nice idea to recruit some help when starting up your drop shipping business. Having someone find a drop shipper for you can actually speed up the amount of time it takes to get your business running by quite a bit. In fact, some of them even offer instruction on how to continue with your business and what steps to take to have a chance at being successful.

All in all, if you’re looking for a way to get a little extra money, and you like the idea of earning it from the comfort of your own home while you do other things, then drop shipping is right for you.