If you are looking for products to sell online, you may want to consider looking at Drop Ship Companies that will work with online entrapreneurs.

How Does Drop Shipping Work?

Drop Ship Companies sell you products on demand and will ship them for you to your customer, using your company information. From the customers standpoint, the product is purchased and shipped by you.

The drop shipper will provide you with his catalogue of merchandise and your cost. Your cost will usually be a bit higher than wholesale because they build in the cost of warehousing and handling the fulfillment. Some drop ship companies add a 'drop ship' fee to their order.

You will select your products and then put the products on your ecommerce store. When the customer orders, you will send in an order to the drop shipper and will pay them at that time (usually by credit card unless you have terms set up with them). The drop ship company then fulfills the order and sends you the order tracking information, which you can pass on to your customer. Once the order is shipped you process the charge to your customer.

What are the advantages of using drop ship companies?

By using companies that drop ship you can offer a larger variety of products without having to buy a variety of inventory. You can actually have a large product offering spending zero dollars on inventory.

This also can be used to do market tests. Once you find a product that sells well, you can buy bulk order for reduced cost for that and fulfill the orders yourself for that particular product.

Drop Shipping lowers your risk. You are not investing in products that may not sell. Using a drop ship company allows you to start up a home based business without the cost and risk of buying inventory.

What are the disadvantages of using drop ship companies?

In most cases you'll have higher product costs, since the drop shipper is having to warehouse the products and hire staff to fulfill your orders.

You do not control the inventory, so may have backorder or out of stock issues to deal with.

When should I consider using Drop Ship Companies?

Using Drop Ship companies for an online ecommerce store can be very profitable if you can get enough traffic to your site. Marketing niche products using 'long taill keywords' would be an excellent way to market your product(s).

Using Drop Ship companies for ebay or Amazon, may not be profitable, as both are price competitive and have additional fees, which will cut into your profits. Do the math to evaluate your chances of success.

Use for testing how well a product converts. You can test products using drop shipping to see which sell the best. Once you find a product that sells well, you can bulk order the product to maximize your profits.

Where do I find Drop Ship Companies?

There are many companies that will drop ship, but you may not have a lot of luck finding them through the search engines, as they typically don't want to be found by consumers.

You will find many middlemen through the search engines and you will want to avoid them, as they build additional costs into the products for their profit.

We recommend using WorldWide Brands Onesource. They have a full time staff that is their sole job of finding Wholesale and Drop Ship companies that will work with small online businesses. If you cannot afford their one time membership fee, at least review their web site, there is lots of great free information to assist you in avoiding scams and guiding you in the right direction.

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