Ecommerce Business Solutions

So you’ve decided to open up an online ecommerce store to cash in on the surge of online retail sales.  You’ve researched your niche and decided on the type of store you want to open.  You’ve found your shopping cart, your store templates and are now ready to find your suppliers and your products for your complete ecommerce business solution.

What you’re most likely looking for is dropshippers.  With dropshipping you don’t have to carry an inventory of products or ship to your customers.  The dropshippers take care of all of this for you.

We’ve learned a thing or two about how to find dropshippers since we started our first ecommerce store.  Here are our best suggestions on how to find the best dropshippers for your ecommerce store.

Approaching Suppliers:

Before you begin approaching dropship suppliers for your store, you should register a trade name and get a reseller license for your state.  There is usually a nominal cost associated with both of these.  Go to your states Secretary of State website to find out what you need to do to get both of these accomplished.  You will look much more professional to suppliers when you are able to provide them with this information.  As a matter of fact, many dropshippers will not do business with you until you have your state’s resale tax license…so just get it done!

When you have found a supplier for your store, you can either email them or call them.  We normally try the email method first, but there are those who will tell you to make a phone call first.  Experience has taught us that most dropship sales departments prefer to work with email, but if you don’t get a response from your emails then pick up the phone and call them directly.  It’s really a personal preferance as far as we’re concerned, and depends upon the supplier you are contacting.

Start off by introducing yourself and your store (your niche).  Let the supplier know that you are very interested in adding their products to your store.  Ask them if they “dropship” directly to your customers, and if so ask them to please send you all of the forms necessary to get set up to sell their products via dropshipping.

Additionally you should ask them to send you all of their company contact information including how to place orders, their product price lists, how you obtain images and descriptions, their return policy and if they use their own shipping services or if you have to provide them with your shipping account.

Most legitimate dropshippers will respond within a day or two.  If they don’t answer all of your questions, we suggest you go ahead and complete their forms, submit them, and then continue to follow up for information on your “unanswered questions”.  At this stage you can get a good idea of what type of supplier they are based upon their resp0nsiveness to your emails and their willingness to answer you questions and provide you with lots of detail.

Our _ Most Important Things To Know About Your Dropship Suppliers

#1 : Get a very clear understanding of the suppliers stocking process and stock notification process. Do they restock items frequently or do they have limited quantities of certain items and when they’re gone they’re gone?  On our toy store we have one dropshipper that almost never restocks items once they have sold out.  This has created problems for us because we spent a great deal of time promoting and building backlinks to some of those products (which were very popular), only to have to turn around and completely remove them from our site in a relatively short period of time.

It makes our site look back when customers come to the site only to find out that the item no longer exists.  Additionally we spend a great deal of time responding to emails from customers asking where the item is and will it be restocked?  You do have the option to note these items are “discontinued” on your website, but we typically try to stay away from suppliers who do not restock their more popular items. Know how your supplier stocks his products to save yourself time and headaches in the future.

Also, find out how the supplier updates their dealers on stocking status.  Some suppliers send regular weekly or monthly stock status updates, others will send notification when a particular item is out of stock, and others do nothing at all!  You are left to spend a lot of time checking back to the suppliers website (if they have one) to see what’s “Out Of Stock”, and this can become very time consuming if you carry a lot of that suppliers products.

If your supplier does not notify you of stocking status, make it a point to email them at least once a month to request an updated stock status report.

#2: Make sure your suppliers have a good and clear return policy. You don’t want to be messing around with companies that have poor or nonexistent return policies.  The last thing you need is to have customers returning products to you and expecting refunds from you.

We have been extremely fortunate with our ecommerce stores regarding returns.  All of our suppliers have a substantial return policy (which we have posted on our sites), and most are even more than happy to deal directly with the customers and ship out replacement parts and provide assembly assistance if necessary.

You will have returns…no matter how good your suppliers or your products, so make sure your supplier accepts returns within a reasonable amount of time and either issues refunds (less shipping of course), or ships replacements.

#3: What are the supplier’s shipping policies? Can you use their shipping services or do you need to set up your own UPS or Fed Ex shipping accounts?  When do they ship?  All suppliers have different policies.  Some suppliers will ship the day after they receive your order.  Others take 2-3 days to ship after they have received your order, and there are those who only have certain days of the week that they ship or don’t ship.

It’s important that you know and understand how your suppliers ship so you can notify your customers when they can expect their item to be shipped.  We make it a policy to do our own follow-up emails with our customers, in addition to the auto-generated emails from our shopping cart.  We like to assure them once again that we are processing their order and let them know when they can expect the item to be shipped.

There’s nothing worse than a customer who’s expecting their “birthday gift” or whatever in less than a week, and then finding out that the supplier doesn’t ship until several days after they receive the order.  Know your supplier’s shipping policies and relay that information to your customer.  Post it on your websites too.

#4: Make sure your supplier gives your sharp images and good product descriptions. It can take a great deal of time to add your products to your ecommerce store, and the last thing in the world you need is to spend a great deal of time trying to make crappy images look good.  The images on your website are a reflection of your store and you want to have good clear images that represent your products well.

It’s also important that the supplier provides you with detailed product descriptions.  Most of the time you’ll be rewriting the descriptions to get in your own keywords and make your site stand out as unique from other sites that offer the same products, but there are details such as size, inclusions, exclusions, etc. that you need to get from the supplier to add to your own descriptions.

Customers want to know as much as the product as possible, and it’s up to your supplier to give that information to you without you having to scour the internet for hours trying to locate the information on your own.

#5: Does the supplier have a MAP pricing policy? MAP stands for “minimum advertised price”, and if your supplier has a MAP pricing policy it means you cannot charge less than the MAP.  You can charge more if you’d like…but not less or you are likely to lose your contract with that supplier.

MAP policies have their pros and cons.  If you have a very popular ecommerce store with lots of traffic and good customer repore, then your customers won’t find a lower price for those items anywhere else so they’re most likely to buy from you.  On the other hand, you don’t have the flexibility to competitively price those products on your site.

Normally we have a good mix of MAP suppliers along with suppliers that allow us to price ourselves on our ecommerce store and it seems to work well that way.

#6: Does the supplier charge membership fees? Most suppliers do not charge membership fees.  There are fees associated with certain well known drop-ship list suppliers such as Product Sourcing, Doba and Worldwide Brands, but in those instances you’re paying them for their list of dropshippers or their associations with the dropshippers that you are using.

Beware of a direct drop-shipper that wants to charge you a membership fee to have the privilege of selling their products.  There are a lot of scammers out there in the dropship business.

Ecommerce and dropshipping can be a very profitable business, but you need to understand your products and your suppliers before you get into the game.  We recommend you sign up for the free dropship ebook.  Yea…it’s up there, right at the top of this page in the right column.  The one with the big red arrow!  Nothing to buy…no upsells or downsells, just a good content filled book for ecommerce store owners.

It has a lot more useful information for anyone considering using a dropshipper, including all the benefits and pitfalls, and how to find dropship suppliers for your niche ecommerce website.

Niche Blueprint 2.0 is a complete ecommerce business solution that includes a shopping cart, a multitude of professional templates, lots of training videos and Dropship Blueprint which is a free lifetime membership to thousands of dropshippers and over 1.6 million products for almost any niche.

Two of the training videos and 4 of the training manuals go in depth into how to get set up with dropshippers, what to look for, how to deal with dropship suppliers and an entire process flow for ecommerce dropshipping.

(If none of the above applies to you and an ecommerce store is still just a dream, waiting to become a reality, then check out all that Niche Blueprint 2.0 has to offer including niche research tools, your shopping cart, multitude of store templates and a huge supplier list…all included in a one time price.)

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