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.

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.

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.

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.

Christmas and Black Friday are the poster children of this phenomenon, but they are not the only holiday offenders out there. Even ignoring the big ones, like Halloween, or Easter, we’ll still need to become very aware of what times are of significance to our specific demographic. If we’re selling paintball guns, is there a paintball super event that we need to be aware of? Is there a season when demand for our products is going to be off the charts? These may seem like very simple questions to ask, but many forget about them until it’s too late.

The significance to these questions is because they will have a very real and very potent effect on our suppliers’ ability to meet our orders. If we know that there is going to be a massive movement in our industry during a certain time of year, we want to plan ahead well in advance. Let our customers know there may be delays in processing their orders, make sure our suppliers’ inventory levels are high. The last thing we want to do is have a major event roll in, and have us caught entirely unawares.

Holidays or special events are always an excuse for a buyer to be a little spend-happy, and that’s a great force for us to work with to our advantage. However, we need to keep on top of our suppliers, and make sure they have the inventory and the ability to keep pace with the demand, because in the holiday frenzy, if anything goes wrong, its going to become a giant headache for everyone involved, but by keeping the lines of communication open, and the remaining inventory watched diligently, we can avoid a lot of the normal holiday frustration, and make it a happy one instead!

For more information, please visit GoGo Dropship.

However, if we are set on using that supplier and trying to secure that product, there are a few things that we can do to try and protect ourselves. The first main contender we have with effectively working with a Chinese supplier is getting past the logistic issue of shipping. There is the very real problem that we have to get a product halfway around the world. Our customers are going to be very impatient, and many will balk at having to pay more to wait longer. Our best recourse is to try and communicate with the supplier as to what their average shipping time and shipping costs are. They will typically be upfront about it, and it will serve a dual purpose in allowing us to see whether or not we can even speak with the supplier easily or not.

The second resource we can utilize in the great “authenticity wars” is a website called http://whatsitworthtoyou.com. This website is intended to allow us to research products and find out whether or not they are going to be legitimate or not. This is not a free resource, but for a price they will be able to help determine the authenticity of a product, which will allow you to know whether or not you can confidently and ethically sell the item on your site. Without handling the item itself, they cannot definitively and empirically make a statement on its authenticity, but we can very quickly and efficiently determine using this service if our source is legitimate. However, with a form from this site to verify that the site or product is, indeed, something that is not entirely questionable, it will allow us to list on eBay and our own site with much more confidence. It is not a bullet-proof vest to protect from any problem at all, but it is a great way to list without fear that your item is a clear counterfeit.

Our biggest concerns with Chinese suppliers will always be present; we can never be 100% sure that an item is not a counterfeit, that the shipping cost and time will not grow unreasonable, or that we’ll even be able to reach the supplier if there is a problem, but if we are very careful, it is not an impossible hope to be able to utilize Chinese suppliers. However, to quote an old food adage, “When in doubt, throw it out”: if we have good reason to think that our supplier is not legit, we are almost always going to be safer abandoning the product idea, and moving somewhere else.

To learn more about dropshipping and how it works, please visit GoGo Dropship.

One of the most important things that we have to realize about life on the internet is that if you don’t diligently keep track of things, you’ll never be able to know how well you’re truly doing, and what you can do to improve your dropship website.

On a typical day, we are going to get people coming to our site.  Maybe we put out ads, and they responded and came thusly. 
Perhaps they just looked up a keyword in Google, and lo and behold our little dropship site appeared.  Many people think that so long as people are coming to our site, it doesn’t quite matter where; that would be wrong!

It is very important for us to know where our traffic is coming from, as well as what they are doing when they get here.  Are the ones come from ads staying to shop, or do they just arrive and leave in a matter of moments?  On the contrary, do the ones who arrive from the search engines typically stay longer, and go forward with purchases?  This is extremely important information, because it should be our goal to make our dropship site as efficient as possible, and we cannot do that if we do not know what our visitors are actually doing!

One of the most powerful tools to utilize in this regard is called Google Analytics.  It is a program designed to track all of that information; where are our visitors coming from?  How long are they staying?  Are they leaving and then coming back?  What pages do they go to before leaving?

All of this information is worth its weight in gold!  If, for instance, everyone is leaving when they get to our product pages, perhaps our dropship site is a bit on the expensive side.  It would be worth it, then to see if we can change things up a little bit to become more competitive.  Are they making it to the homepage, and then leaving?  Perhaps we can put more enticing offers for the visitor to stay and look around, be it with a sale, or changing the images that we have.

As you can imagine, there are tons of little instances just like those that we need to be aware of, because as the old adage says, “He who is resistant to change is destined to perish,” and never has this been more true than with our dropship site!

Finding a product niche to drop ship can be the most difficult stone to place but it must be firmly placed before proceeding on in the dropshipping industry. Keywords revolving around your product niche should also be found. I would suggest using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. The best keywords will have over one thousand searches per month and under five million search engine results.

Now it’s time to find a supplier for your niche product. If you need help doing this, you may contact GoGo Dropship who has a Product Research Team designed to find a supplier for you. Please visit GoGoDropship.com for more information.

Once you have a product niche, create a company name and a website revolving around your product and target market. You want your website to include images that your target can relate to. Your website should follow basic design principles and have some kind of call for action.

You should also have a dropshipping strategy which may revolve around the following questions. At what point will I expand my product niche? What complimentary products do I intend to sell with my niche product, etc

Just remember to get each stepping stone firmly in place and don’t get too ahead of yourself. Take it easy and don’t skip any steps and you’ll be able to bridge the gap.

There are a lot of scams circulating their way around the business world right now. So much in fact that it’s becoming nearly impossible to find any one company that is trustworthy and ethical all at the same time (apparently there’s now a difference between the two). Someone once told me that in order to be in business, a person must be shady in some way or another; I submit that they are wrong! I know there are still companies out there that strive to give their customers the best and most fulfilling experience possible. I know this, because I work for one of them.

GoGo Dropship is dedicated to finding the strengths in each employee so they may be of more service to our customers. The people I work with are regular people like you and me. They struggle with various aspects of life and have financial worries just like you; it is this common adversity of life that helps us understand what you’re going through. At GoGoDropship, we’re not just anyone, we’re your neighbors, we’re your family, we’re your friends. We know how tough life can be, we can’t do everything for you but we can teach you and make starting a business a little easier for you.

In order to prevent such failure, always contact the dropship companies you intend to work with before assuming that they dropship the particular product you want to sell. When you contact wholesale dropship companies, make sure that you also ask about any fees associated with drop shipping with that supplier before you get in too deep.

Some of the fees associated with dropship companies are price mark-up, same price, and monthly fee. A price mark-up occurs when the wholesaler marks up the product after getting it from the manufacturer. A second way to charge a fee is by selling the product for the price they were able to get it from the wholesaler but then charging a fee for each time a product is drop shipped. A third way is to be charged a monthly fee and then you can sell the product as often as you wish that month at the price of the wholesaler, without any extra fee associated with it. The dropship companies you’re working with may use all or none of these fees. If they use all of them, the chances of making a profit off the products are very low.

I cannot stress enough, the importance of contacting the dropship companies in advance. You would never want to post something on eBay, for example, and make a sale only to find out that the dropship companies you are dealing with plan to charge you extra fees. For more information please visit GoGo Dropship.