Dropshipping On Ebay, Does It Work?

    



    

eBay offers any business owner a new global market to sell his products or services on. You are no longer constrained by geographical positioning. Your small local businesses, when taken online, can become one of the biggest players in the industry. While eBay is a great potential resource, one of the best tools for maximizing your efficiency, and profit, is dropshipping and eBay is the perfect place to start.
Dropshipping basically works like this: a merchant offers a certain good on the market. He has large quantities of that product and needs dealers to advertise the merchandise and bring in buyers. You can become a dealer for a certain product, study the product's specifications, price and quality, take a look at demand and competition and offer it on eBay. Doing business on eBay, especially if you're using dropshipping as a method, requires some careful planning. The more you know about this constantly changing environment, the better are your chances of achieving the success you are looking for.
OK, but where does the profit come from? Well, the dropshipper usually bills you, the trader; only about half of the retail price you sell their products for. If you sell something to a buyer and get $100, about 50% of that will go to the dropshipper, who then has to package the product, label it with your name and return address and mail it to the buyer. This is an excellent way to make some profit.
Of course, you will have some additional costs and won't get to keep half the retail price. eBay charges are one of the fees that you will have to pay. You also have to send your labels to the dropshipper, so that they can attach them to the product. You will also have to pay for your own advertising. This can be done by attracting people to visit your listings on eBay from outside the actual web site. You can get buyers from forums, discussion boards or through your own website. These are all costs you will support on your own, as it is your responsibility to attract paying clients.
As an answer to the title ? YES, dropshipping on eBay can work for you! However, as with any business, you need to invest time, energy and money in order to put it on the right track. You have to find those products that sell well and area easy to find by customers. You also need to know how to employ advertising secrets in order to grab attention and bring more buyers your way. Dropshipping on eBay is just a tool, an amazing one, true, but without proper management it can turn into a bad idea. On the other hand, if you keep connected to the dynamics of eBay and the dropshipping process you may see your profits increases steadily.
Steve Dawson is the editor of the online Freelance Network magazine which focuses on eBay, Dropshipping and Homeworking. Forums and a comprehensive wholesale and dropshipping directory are many of the features available. Find out more at http://www.freelance-network.net


    



    

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Drop Shipping Is Your Perfect Home Based Business Solution

    



    

Drop Shipping Is Your Perfect Home Based Business Solution
Drop shipping is one of the greatest businesses to operate from home. With drop shipping you sell another company's products, use their warehouse and shipping facilities, and they provide you with the sales tools you need like product descriptions and images and more - free of charge!
Drop shipping is great for small businesses because you can start with literally nothing & gradually increase to higher levels of success. Drop shipping allows you to leverage other, much larger company's resources!
Any business owner who needs the an inexpensive & efficient means to market items online should look into drop shipping. Drop shipping allows you to sell almost any type of product you want with no warehouse & no inventory.
No inventory = low risk! You only purchase an item from the dropshipper after you've already made the sale! You never get stuck with a garage full of products that won't sell.
Drop shippers packages all of the products for you, they place your name on the return address of the package & then they ship it to your customer. You'll look like you're a multi-million dollar outfit to the customer!
In order to do business with a real wholesaler, some of them (not all) may require proof that you're in business & not just some consumer looking for great prices. So, you may need to file for a Resale Tax ID for your State. It's easy to do I filed my application online in just 10 minutes & even received a temporary certificate that I immediately printed out. I was literally in business within 10 minutes!
If you're SERIOUS about running a business you MUST have one! No ifs, ands, or buts. And, it's so easy to get one, there's no excuse not to.
If a wholesaler doesn't request a Resale Tax ID from you, they're a very small company or they're not real wholesalers, just middle-men.
When you find wholesale companies that drop ship many different types of products, everything from toys to electronics, and they don't request your Resale Tax ID, be aware that probably aren't a real wholesale company. Most legitimate wholesalers focus on a specific product type, like electronics or toys alone.
These middle-men companies just forward your order to the real wholesale company. You won't be able to compete on a level playing field with your competition if you do business with these guys. Chances are your competitors have Resale Tax IDs.
So be aware that you're dealing with a middle-man wholesaler who will have the real dropshipper dropship your products for you. Do yourself a favor & avoid dealing with the middlemen and get a Resale Tax ID. You'll save yourself a lot of money by be able to compete with the big-guns.
After your account is set up with the real wholesaler, you'll get a printed catalog and possibly a CD-Rom with product descriptions and images that you can use.
Middle-men usually don't provide these "bonuses". You just upload the image & description to your web site, decide on the price & wait for the orders to come rolling in!
Drop shipping will allow any person to run a successful & competitive business from home regardless of a lack of start-up funds.
Mike Nalbone is the creator of "The Wholesale Detective" http://www.nalbone.org/detective/ which is a complete resource for people seeking to utilize drop shipping to start or expand their own business.


    



    

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Drop Shipping Increases Profits

    



    

You would like to increase your income by selling other peoples` products but you just don`t have the money to stock inventory.
On the other hand, perhaps you have lots of your ownproduct and would like to increase your sales, but youdon`t have a lot of money for advertising.
The solution to both problems may lie in drop shipping.
1. Sell Products You Don`t Own
You would like to sell a variety of products but you don`t have very much money. Don`t worry! Your customers willsupply you with the necessary capital. You don`t have to stock inventory. You can drop ship orders.
For example, you receive a credit card order for a product retailing for one hundred dollars plus five dollars shipping. You now turn around and fax (or e-mail or phone) your order to your dropship supplier. You pay the fifty dollar wholesale product cost plus five dollars shipping using your own credit card.
Your dropship supplier now ships the order to your customer. With no investment in inventory, your gross profit equals fifty dollars.
2. Sell Products You Do Own
Would you like more sales of your own products? Consider drop shipping your products for other dealers.
As an example, you may have a product that sells for one hundred dollars plus shipping. Every time you sell that product yourself, you will have a sale of one hundred dollars. However, how many one hundred dollar sales can you make personally?
Now consider the situation where you offer your dealersa wholesale price of fifty dollars. You could have hundreds or thousands of persons selling for you.
It is true that each product sale now only brings you only fifty dollars in sales. However, these are sales that you wouldn`t otherwise have. What would it cost you to obtain these sales through traditional advertising channels? Would your advertising even bring you the desired results?
Keep in mind that with this drop shipping arrangement, you pay only for results. When a dealer retails your product for one hundred dollars, he is really receiving a fifty dollar profit for selling your product; you could view it as a sales commission. You receive only fifty dollars per product sale but sell way more than without drop shipping.You ship directly to the customer for your dealer.
So, whether you sell other peoples` products or your own,drop shipping can increase your sales, preserve capital, and maximize business profits.
RESOURCE BOX:
J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc.,has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twenty-five years.
For valuable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/
For additional information about drop shipping, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/dropship.html

    



    

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Drop-ship Or U-ship: That Is The Question

    



    


For small Internet retailers, drop-shipping is one of the best innovations since sliced bread. How else can a start-up offer a wide variety of products and convince customers that they have a fully-stocked warehouse-while investing virtually nothing in inventory or warehousing? Before you jump right onto the drop-shipping bandwagon, however, there are some pitfalls to avoid.
While a quality drop-shipper is truly a dream come true for the Internet retailer, there are plenty of painful pitfalls to avoid. Things can get embarrassing and costly in a hurry when a drop-shipper:
? sends products out late
? forgets to process your orders
? sends out poorly packaged products
? double-bills your credit card for orders on a regular basis
? provides cheaply made products and/or shoddy workmanship.
A Matter of Credibility
In addition to the above drawbacks, many customers are not very impressed when they find out you retail drop-shipped products. This is especially the case with the rustic log furniture I sell on the web. Many phone customers ask if we make the products ourselves, or are "merely" drop-shipping.
They are relieved and impressed when they find that we manufacturer, finish or pack most of the log furniture we sell at our warehouse. We sell to a lot of people with expensive vacation homes, and quality is of utmost importance. It's always easier to testify to the quality of furniture when you have seen it yourself, and we are able to offer a more unique line by going to Amish suppliers whose products aren't sold elsewhere on the Internet.
Advantages of Drop-Shipping
With this said, there are still some sizeable advantages to drop-shipping. As the volume of our orders grows, it becomes more and more difficult to package all of that furniture. Fortunately for us, our largest supplier is only two miles away and we have a pretty good deal going: we finish all the log furniture they want finished, and they drop-ship the unfinished furniture. So they make it, we finish it.
That means if somebody orders unfinished furniture, it can go directly from the factory. This might have made me nervous about quality control at one point, but I have developed a high degree of confidence in our log furniture manufacturer. In the five years I have been associated with them, they have never let me down. They fill orders with a high degree of quality and accuracy, which makes our job easy.
Choosing a Drop-Ship Partner
Unfortunately, not all drop-shipping companies are as reliable as the one I have found. This is why it pays to do your homework before choosing a drop-shipping company. If you align yourself with fly-by-night operations, your business will most likely suffer as a result. If you are wildly successful, which you no doubt hope to be, a small start-up may not be able to manufacturer or ship product fast enough to meet your needs. A drop-shipper that is unstable as a business may be happy to take your cash but fail to fill orders on a timely basis.
Any business who drop-ships your orders will affect your reputation as a company one way or another. As a result, it's important to make sure any drop-shipping companies you partner with meet the high level of customer service and quality control standards you set for your business.
Copyright 2005 Log Cabin Rustics
Cari Haus is webmaster for http://www.logcabinrustics.com, an online retailer of quality log furniture.

    



    

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Do You Sell Tires By Mail? Maybe You Should Ebay

    



    

I just received an interesting email from eBay and it got me thinking... Do you sell tires by mail? Maybe you should 'eBay' (yes it's now a verb as well as a noun)
I know, if you're in the retail business ? you have a shop, staff, overhead and all that a physical location requires. But what would you say if I mentioned that [at the time of writing this] eBay had concluded over 8,275 auctions for tires and tire related products in the last 90 days. That's about 91 transactions per day. And that number doesn't include other completed auto part auctions which totalled 1,581,529 ? that's 17,573 auto-part auctions per day.
A Retail Sales Dream
Now I'm not suggesting that eBay is the sales answer to your retail dreams, and some of those auctions never resulted in a sale ? but a lot did. Those are online adverts that cost pennies to post and resulted in a great deal of traffic and visibility for your product.
Here's a little known fact ? I'm a registered eBay Trading Assistant. What this means is that amongst all the other things I do, I am 'qualified' to show people how to best sell things on eBay.
An Online Garage Sale
Now this all started a few years back, I had some junk to get rid of, and just for fun I decided to see what this eBay thing was. Well, let's say that a garage sale is never likely to happen again in my household, and I cleared out all the things I never figured I could. I was hooked.
And here's the neat part. Being The Practical Marketeer?, I wondered how I could use this to my advantage ? and here's what I learned.
If you have a website then you should sell on eBay ? and not for the reasons you'd normally think. The main reason is search engine rankings.
Purple Widgets
While I was active on eBay, my adverts and auctions were consistently being indexed by the Google? Search Engine ? I was always showing up in the top 10 searches for the items I was selling. If I was selling purple widgets, and someone went onto the Internet and typed 'purple widgets' thanks to eBay I'd show up ? usually in position 3 for some reason.
Web Traffic For As Little As $0.30
Now pause for a moment?think about this. For as little as $0.30 (the base price of an eBay advert) you can post an advert on eBay and within a few seconds, hundreds, maybe thousands of people will see your advert.
eBay lets you link back to a page on your own website for more information ? trying to cut eBay out of the deal by offering your products on the referred page is not allowed. They frown on that practise and the eBay police ? yes, there are people who police eBay ? will shut down your account.
But if you play by the rules and post adverts for products and services you'd normally sell in your store ? and you offer them online for either the same price or less, you'll get exposure. And lot's of it if you do it right.
A Virtual Retail Store For Pennies!
You might think what's the point of someone 700 miles away seeing my advert ? they'll never become a client. You're probably right about them not driving over to pick up their purchase ? however 'eBayers' are used to paying for shipping and handling, so you would mail out your products.
So for pennies you get a virtual retail store, you'll get good search engine rankings, you'll get web traffic, and you can even expand your business operations by adding a mail order department (that'll impress the bank manager!)
So, as the title of this article so aptly asked... Do You Sell Tires By Mail? Maybe You Should eBay...
AUTHOR BIO: James Burchill is a freelance marketing consultant and author. He's also the editor and associate publisher for two of the automotive aftermarket industry's leading print publications and he's the publisher of http://www.CorrectLink.com - a new Internet publication for the automotive aftermarket in Canada.
In between all that, James helps people 'Sell more stuff, and make more money!' and publishes a series of informational and Internet products about advertising and marketing. His main website is http://www.JamesBurchill.com
    



    

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