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TwitterEcommerce is really made possible for most store owners due to dropshipping. By using a wholesale dropshipper, you do not need to pay for and stock inventory for your store. There’s also no need to worry about packing and shipping items, because the dropshippers do all of the work for you.
You simply take the orders from your site, send them on to your dropshipper who then sends the package to your customer. You get to sell the wholesaler’s products without ever having to touch a thing, and the best part is you keep all the profits. Simply brilliant, right? Well, not always.
The whole process depends upon how good or bad your dropshipper is. Many store owners struggle with how to find good dropshippers for their ecommerce stores. So how do you find good, legitimate dropshippers?
Check Out Your Competitors:
One of the best places to find a good dropshipper is to check out your competitors websites.
If you continue to see the same Brand Name over and over again, that’s a good sign that it’s a legitimate dropshipper with a good reputation and one you should consider adding to your own store.
Once you have determined which wholesalers your competitors are using, you can plug that company’s name into a search or go to the Yellow Pages and do a search. Once you get to the wholesaler’s website, you can shoot them an email as we discussed in our post on How To Approach Dropshippers.
Use A Dropship Service:
There are some very legitimate dropship services available, but there are also lots of scams whereas the service poses as a legitimate dropshipper when in actuality they are only a middle man who has marked up the wholesaler’s prices and passed that mark-up on to you.
Here are 3 dropship services that come with good recommendation from other ecommerce store owners and business owners:
Worldwide brands is essentially a service that you buy a list of dropshippers from. Their list includes over 8000 wholesale dropshippers. Many ecommerce stores and Ebay sellers highly recommend Worldwide brands and they do have a good reputation in the industry.
You need touUnderstand that Worldwide Brands is NOT a supplier, dropshipper or wholesaler. They provide you the service of finding and verifying reputable suppliers for you, plus educating you on properly buying and selling these products. Since most of their suppliers are true wholesalers, you may need to obtain a sellers permit to buy products from these companies (this is a good thing!…it proves these companies are legitimate and NOT middleman).
You pay $299 for full access to the Worldwide Brands list. They do qualify all of their product sourcing for you, but $299 is a little steep for most people who are just starting out in e-commerce. The biggest problem we see with using this type of service is that many times these list services are full of dead links, wholesalers that will only sell to you in bulk, or wholesalers with lots of junk products.
There’s also the possibility that you pay for the list only to find out that there are no wholesalers in the niche you are opening your store. Bummer!!
Doba works a little differently than Worldwide Brands. Rather than you establishing the account and the repore with the dropshippers, Doba does that for you. They provide you with all of the wholesaler’s product images and descriptions that you then add to your ecommerce business solution websites.
You please all of your orders directly through Doba, who in turn places the orders with the wholesalers.
Doba works on a monthly membership basis of $59.95 per month. If you cancel your membership, then you’ve lost your access to all of the products you’ve placed on your website. That means you’ll have to maintain your membership with Doba for as long as your store is online.
Personally, we don’t feel that Doba is a great solution for ecommerce stores that want to build their own individuality and have complete control over their own stores. However, they do have a free 7 day trial so you can check them out. We took advantage of the 7 day trial ourselves, but determined they just didn’t have the right products for our niche eccomerce stores so that pretty much ended that.
If you can’t find your own wholesalers, and don’t want to pay $299 to Worldwide Brands for their list of dropshippers, then Doba may be your answer. Just understand that if you cancel your membership you also lose your store’s products.
Product Sourcing:
Make no mistake-Product Sourcing is the same thing as Doba. The difference is that Product Sourcing does not have a monthly membership fee (although they’ll later try to sell you on one). The trade-off of no fee is that they also offer fewer products than Doba.
The benefit of this is that you can continue to offer their products on your ecommerce websites without having to worry about canceling your membership and losing your products. The drawback is, they really have very few products to offer. As was the case with Doba, we found almost no products that really fit with our niche ecommerce stores.
Additionally, don’t give your real phone number to Product Sourcing. Keep all communications with them by email. Once they have your phone number, they’ll continually call you attempting to get you to upgrade. Our assumption is that once you upgrade you’re really going back to Doba. I’ve even read where people have said Product Sourcing contacting them about upgrading for much higher fees than Doba charges.
That’s not to say they’re not legitimate as far as what they do, because we think they are. You’re just very limited in your product choices and for any products we did find on their site we knew we could find a better deal directly through the manufacturers and the wholesalers. For those just starting out who don’t want to search for their own dropshippers, Product Sourcing my be the right alternative.
Niche Blueprint 2.0:
Niche Blueprint 2 is a total ecommerce business solution. When you purchase Niche Blueprint, not only do you get you store shopping cart and a choice of several pleasing and easy to use store templates, but you also get Dropship Blueprint.
Dropship Blueprint is a proprietary tool of Niche Blueprint 2 and is very similar to Worldwide Brands (which costs $299).
Dropship Blueprint includes a list of thousands of dropshippers with all of the contact information and the products they over. There are millions of products in this guide and it is being updated daily. With your Niche Blueprint purchase of $397 you get all of the Dropship Blueprint updates for free.
Obviously, the best free route to go for finding good legitimate dropshippers is #1-check out your competitors and see who they’re using. However, if you’re still looking for your shopping cart, your templates and lots of free video training along with a huge list of dropshippers in almost any niche you can imagine, then Niche Blueprint 2 may be something you want to take a look at.
Please share your dropshipping experiences or other dropshipping alternatives that you have found below. It will help others who are just starting in ecommerce or selling products online.
