Looking for Legit Dropshipping Sources...

[cartoonfan1983]

I looked at Tim's link in the book to Dropship Direct, but I cannot / will not justify paying $300 just to get a list of names. How do I know that they will have what I'm looking for anyways?

My first muse went completely bust straight out of the gate...

Now it's on to muse #2!

My idea is to create a personal development store online that sells only the BEST products in personal development (books, dvd's, etc.). It will sell products for all aspects of the person (physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional) and it will only sell products that I think are worth selling (i.e. highest quality... as we know a lot of personal development products are complete and utter junk). By selling these products with a "You've got our word on it" guarantee", I can hopefully gain sales (which I can then target with direct mail in the future).

I do not know if many know about this, so I'll just let you in on this... Prostores.com (owned by eBay) has an online store for CHEAP. It's $29.95 a month (first month free) and links with Paypal, google checkout, and has it's own payment processing as well. The fee per transaction is only 0.5%, which in my opinion is very low.

SO, to recap.... any way to find specific products for dropshipping? Or am I SOL?

[Marcie]

I don't remember where I got this .pdf, but I know it was free so should be OK to post here. Not sure if this info. is credible but thought I'd pass it along!

http://del.icio.us/jakesutton/dropshipping

[cartoonfan1983]

Thanks Marcie.... checking it out...

[jazzdrive3]

Search clickbank.com for quality products. That way you can just be an affiliate for what you sell. Of course, this means you'll probably have to buy the product to make sure it is up to your standard.

Good complement for anything else you want to do.

[Drewkerr]

Having a site where you can review these products and rate them can be very successful once you build some credability or make it look like you have credability.

If you get a lot of traffic to your site consider selling ad space for certain products on your site.

Best of luck on round 2!

Drew

[ironsides]

Try this

http://www.worldwidebrands.com/wwb/main_products.asp

They have a small intro video, shows how they operate.

[ironsides]

Oh yea this one looked pretty cool too...

http://www.doba.com/

[kindwomanxx]

Doba is actually a middleman. They take a cut of each sale by marking up
the "wholesale" price you pay. I did their free trial, and didn't like the
quality of their products. I did buy the subscription for worldwidebrands. They offer a list of wholesalers that they have checked out themselves. These companies have agreed to work with small business/ home business owners as part of being listed in the catalog. You will need to set up your own business relationship with each wholesaler, but there will be no intermediate markup like there is with doba.

Joann

[ironsides]

I signed up with doba yesterday. Not liking what I am seeing either.... So far.

[coollikeme]

is harder than you think. There are a lot of ways to go about it. Most dropshipping services will try to charge you around 100 to 300 dollars , and you might not find what you want. Also no one is going to tell you where the dropshippers are, because you become there competition. Even if you pay the fee for a dropshipping service, you will have a lot of other people doing the same thing so you need to do a lot of research. Here are a couple of hints that may help you out. A real dropshipper does not charge you an up front fee. If you get charge an upfront fee they are most likely a 3 party dropshipper. Most real dropshippers will ask you for a tax ID or a resellers license, if you don't have that, they won't even talk to you. So you need to get one a some point. Find a dropshipper in your state, if you find a great product it will be easier, to sell outside your state, and you may not have as many issues with people selling the same type of item. Hopefully this helps.

[SilverSurfer]

I went through a lot of research with Doba.com and they offer nothing. I did a comparison of items between them and ebay and items were selling between 10-25% LESS than their price on ebay. In other words people could be listing doba products and losing money on every sale. I noticed that every item I checked on Doba was available on ebay already at a buy it now price that equalled doba's price plus some percentage. In other words people were there first and people were buying the products cheaper elsewhere.

I think one thing that's very important on forums like this is to ONLY post information that we know about, not just an assortment of links. If anyone made money off doba products I'd like to know. If you didn't do research on it then please let us know that too.

I did some fleabaying (purchasing and shipping straight to the buyer) last fall and made no more than $1000 profit on I forget my total sales- close to $10k. $1000 profit gets me nowhere. It turns out some of the people I was talking to online tried to convince me I that $10k in sales was good. The dollar amount of sales is meaningless, only the profit matters.

SS

[final_id]

Actually, the dollar-amount of the sale (gross sales) or the total profit (net) RELATIVE TO THE EFFORT is what matters. Just to stick to brass tacks. :)

I've done some "fleabaying" (as you put it) too. Sometimes I find it fun -- for example, I got started collecting vintage razors, and then got sick of them, so I turned them around for a small gain. But at about $20 each razor, and a good two or three hours of cleaning them, then emailing and setting up the listing and so forth, you end up paying yourself less than $7 an hour. Not worth the effort. They're out there in antique and junk shops everywhere, and I'm sure I have amassed enough knowledge to accurately assess which ones could be turned around for a full %300 gain over my initial cost to buy. At least it's money in, rather than money out, so if you have an uncontrollable acquisitive streak it makes sense to start developing hobbies which can be "fleabayed" later rather than getting into something that's going to be a complete loss (chocolate collecting?). But the weight of having these things lying around in boxes, and the ridiculously small monetary gain (in hourly terms) available by turning them around, makes it more PITA than it's worth.

The 4HWW thing is really geared to getting you thinking about time and effort as one of the many currencies which we trade in this world. On a strict dollar basis, my EBay razor experience has been nothing but income. But that's the wrong basis to look at.

[SilverSurfer]

Actually, the dollar-amount of the sale (gross sales) or the total profit (net) RELATIVE TO THE EFFORT is what matters. Just to stick to brass tacks. :)...

Yes, you are correct. I did not disclose my effort in my post, but it was substantial. Probably 100 hours- 30+ 3 hour evenings working on ebay sales.

I think we're in total agreement.

I have lost so much inspiration by working on projects that didn't live up to "advertised" expectations that it's not funny at all. I think Tim looks at success very differently and I think it's an interesting interpretation.

I am eager to hear from people who put the 4hww into successful implementation. We all have some ideas, but a lot of them aren't going to lead to where we want to go.