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What to Do (and Not Do) When Dropshipping

John Jimmy over at my YouTube channel left a comment asking if I’d be willing to talk about what not to do when dropshipping, what to look out for, and easy mistakes that shouldn’t be made.

The most crucial piece of advice is not to go for the low-hanging fruit – the first site you find – because the first page of the Google search results for “dropshipping” will be seen by just about everyone looking to get into wholesale, inflating your competition for those items. Look further off the beaten path for dropshipper you might be able to make use of. You don’t want to find a product you like, check eBay for its availability, and see fifty-two separate sellers that sell that same product. More sellers drive down the price, because there are people willing to take the smallest profit, which leads to a lot of work for a little money.

More important than the list of what not to do is the list of things to do. The biggest thing I can suggest is doing proper research. I’ve featured a website called Goofbid (search the YouTube channel to find the video), a free resource for eBay sellers to research on your market. Get onto eBay and search for the things you want to sell and find the suppliers that sell a lot of those things. Put those eBay usernames into the search on Goofbid to find out a number of things about them – their best-selling product, their gross revenue, and several other things.

Be sure to refine your eBay search for the best results, utilizing the “completed listing” option to see the selling price of those items that have sold recently. Refining your search can give you the best idea of how to enter strong in listing top-selling items. Find what people are really looking for, and give it to them.

Once you have some ideas of what you think will sell well, use them as your keywords on Google for those products with the word, “dropshipping” on the end. If it looks like it’s a very glossy website, there’s a good chance that a lot of other people are using it. You’ll turn similar results by searching for your product with the words, “wholesale” or, “supplier”. Get in touch with these people, and see if they’ll ship directly to your customer if you do the paperwork (offering to pay up-front helps your chances of getting a “yes”). The worst thing that can come of asking such a question is that you receive a “no”, because it never hurts to ask. If they agree, you have an exclusive dropshipping arrangement with no other competitors in your market other than people selling wholesale, which levels the playing field for a new business.

A strong piece of advice is to choose wisely. Take your time on this decision, because your supplier has your reputation in their hands. You could really hurt yourself by making the wrong decision on suppliers. Don’t get excited and want to jump in too quickly, because this is a big decision that pays off if you take time to research it. Make sure to ask your supplier about customer returns! Most dropshippers have a process for this, but you need to know how it works so you don’t get trapped into paying for returned goods. It’ll save you time down the road.

Compelling listings are your biggest help through all of this. Your listing is what people see when deciding whether or not to buy from you, so taking the time to expand your listing past a few lines of plain text is definitely a worthwhile use of your time. A bit of spice helps to entice people into buying your product, because a shabby listing says, “I couldn’t be bothered to take the time to make this better”. There are ways to do this for free without paying for costly templates. A few tips on how to do this would be to make sure you format your listing nicely, make it look professional, include good photos of the item that aren’t identical to a competitor’s photos (use stock photos, your own photos, or paid professional photos), and use helpful keywords related to your product in the title of your listing.

Check out the video below for some elaborated information on what to do and what not to do when you’re dropshipping!

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Buying Designer Handbags

Dee on Facebook recently asked me a great question about wholesale designer handbags:

“Dear Andrew, I’m from India and I wish to open a retail store of handbags from Italy. Can you help me? I wish to know how I can source them from wholesalers. Also, what are the wholesale markets there? Plus, good dresses and garments. I wish to cater good quality, high-end stuff. I have no clue. Can you please put light? Regards and love, Dee.

I think you’ve got a good idea here, Dee – Italy’s a great place to start for designer items.

You’re going to need a pretty sizable amount of money in your buying budget. A lot of people think they’ll find remarkable deals by buying wholesale, but that simply doesn’t happen. Unless the stock you’re buying is being liquidated by the container, you’re not going to save that much money by buying wholesale. But, there’s still a profit to be made, so it’s not that it’s not worth it. You’ll need a reasonable amount of items in your store, and if those items are designer handbags and clothing, it might get expensive to stock up.

You’ll probably need to get this money together by yourself, but if you’re an established retailer, you’ll have other options. Specific websites help finance eBay and Amazon sellers by short-term loans so they can order a good amount of stock for their store. If you can prove that you’re able to sell, they’ll most likely help you out, but that’s a different subject for a different video.

Another thing worth mentioning – shipping costs from Italy to India are probably going to be high, which is another reason to look at buying wholesale. Get as much in as possible on one order to save yourself repeat shipping costs. High shipping costs eat into your profit margins, so if there’s a way you can cut down on them, I’d wholeheartedly advise doing so.

Get a recommendation for a supplier. When you’re spending this kind of money to stock your store, you have to be 100% sure you’re getting your goods from a reliable source. I always try to look for personal recommendations. If I find a supplier on my own, I speak to them before I order. I get the contact details of some of their customers, so I can personally talk to them about the supplier. Some of these scammers have extremely professional sites, but they’re not always legitimate. You might get fake merchandise, or you might not get any merchandise at all.

Finally, you’ve got a few options for stocking your store. One man is called Victor Barris, who has a membership site that specializes in the supply of designer handbags from Italian wholesale sellers. You have to be careful when buying wholesale contact information – a lot of them are banned from eBay for selling outdated links or false information. Getting proven, real information for a price pays for itself in the end. There’s a link in the YouTube description box that will take you to a great website for such a thing. Another option is the gold upgrade in the Wholesale Help member’s club. There, you get access to suppliers that I personally use for my own business. Also, check out the Wholesale Forums, which are free. It’s mainly European suppliers, and there’s a buying and selling section there as well. There are routine checks on these suppliers, but still, do the checks and make sure the person you’re dealing with will give you good service.

Check out more information in the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGqUatZZ_JA

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Buying Stock on eBay to Sell on eBay

This is a very powerful technique that can help you build a complete eBay business and the great part is that you can do it all from the comfort of your own home!

If you have a busy life and are tight for spare time you may not get the chance to go out hunting garage sales, thrift stores and other great places to find your eBay stock. If you have a family and a job with long hours it can be tricky to juggle everything and still find time to develop your own online eBay business. That’s where this works so well, with just an hour an evening you can build a profitable eBay business buying and then selling the same stuff back on eBay.

The trick is to find the badly listed eBay stuff with bad pictures or wrong keywords in the title, miss spellings etc or auctions finishing at strange times like 3:00am. All these types of auctions can be found using Goofbid.com you can select your own country and dig out those bad auctions bid on them using the Goofbid eBay sniper and then sell them again with a different eBay account for a tidy profit. It’s actually really easy to do.

The video below takes you through the process and shows some examples.

 

Filed Under: eBay Sellers Tips & Tricks, Wholesale Articles

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Using Social Media in Your Online Selling

Though social media is no longer seen as a medium for large conglomerates, smaller sellers could still take far more advantage of this medium than they are currently doing. Social media is free and doesn’t have to take up too much of your time. Depending on what you want from it you can invest your time accordingly. You can either be aggressive and try to drive more sales through social media or you can be more passive and simply use it as a channel of communications. Or you can mix it up.

As a branding tool 

Who are you? Are you funny? Do you have a lot of empathy? Are you excellent at doing cool graphics or are you an amazing writer? This is the time to show it, and stand out. This is where you can really show your personality and let people fall in love with you(r brand). In your listings and on a possible website, you will obviously also try to offer some personality in terms of design and wording, but consumers aren’t as relaxed and you can’t be as personal. Here, you must be professional.

A great example of this is LH Jewellery. Their Facebook page is very nicely set up and provide customers with information about their listings, but set up in a very nice way, showing pretty images provided with clear links to the different items. What LH Jewellery has also done is to have competitions on their Facebook page, attracting likes and engagement.

While their page is great, you can easily be far more personal. Personality (and hence likes) build loyal customers or if not, it gives you a list of people that you can easily reach via social media. And branding yourself here, will eventually turn into a sales tool.

As a sales tool 

If you decide to use social media as a sales tool you can expect to put quite some work into it. But the outcome can be great. What’s great about promoting yourself in this way is that it’s an easy way to let people know that you have new things in your store and it’s a great way to lead them directly to your site, as demonstrated above. However, the obvious problem being that it can only work if you’re actually socially connected to anyone.

When you’re actively working to connect with buyers, twitter and Pinterest are great platforms. They serve two different purposes, but can easily be used combined. Pinterest is great because it’s a platform that focuses on the visual, i.e. you can post pictures and link to your store. As you have probably noticed the new eBay design is very influenced by the design on Pinterest, which makes it easy to visualize how you want your Pinterest profile to look like. What you should consider though, is who your target customer is. Some products are better suited for Pinterest than others. A jewellery company can easily promote their products on this platform, but with other products it may demand more creativity.

Twitter is great because it gives you the chance to actively get in touch with people. The most important thing with twitter is, however, that you’re not passive. Don’t wait until you have 200 followers before you start tweeting. Yes, it can be depressing to tweet to five people, knowing that four of them are probably your friends, but that’s the only way you attract new people. There are different tools available that can help you. A really good one is Twellow who categorize people on twitter for you, making it so much easier to find the relevant ones for your product.

Of course you will also have the possibility of using Facebook as your sales tool. The use of Facebook has been widely discussed among online sellers over at the wholesale forums as it seems there is no direct recipe to being successful on Facebook. In this situation, benchmarking can be a great idea. Remember, benchmarking isn’t copying other people’s pages. But it’s definitely about trying to figure what works for other and try to implement that into your own strategy.

Just remember, for it to work and not backfire, you must be active and online at least two times a day. When people post something on social media profiles they expect a reply rather quickly.

No matter how you decide to use social media, if at all, it can be a very helpful means of showing who you are as a person and more importantly make sure that your customers don’t forget about you.

 

About The Author
Camilla Gilbro Camilla is the community manager at iwoca, a limited London based company that provides instant working capital to online sellers. Visit their website at www.iwoca.co.uk

(image: pshab)

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Join Me At The Online Seller Meetup!

17th April – The Blue Anchor Pub, Hammersmith London

The online world is an amazing place but from time to time I love to get away from my computer and meet up with like minded online sellers and industry experts.

I will be at the Blue Anchor Pub Hammersmith, London on the banks of the Thames on Wednesday 17th April at 6:30pm for the UK Online Seller Meetup.

There will be guest speakers giving their insights on the latest online trends, the chance to meet useful business contacts, plus there are free drinks and nibbles!

There is no charge to attend and I would love to get the chance to chat face to face with some Wholesale Help members. Hopefully the weather will be on our side and it will be a nice evening to sit outside and chat about eBay, Amazon and all aspects of selling online.

So if you think you can make it along on the 17th leave a comment below and let me know so I can look out for you.

RSVP here to get all the details: http://www.meetup.com/onlineselleruk/

This event is organised and sponsored by iwoca, they are an award-winning finance provider dedicated to online sellers.

iwoca can analyse your online sales history and customer feedback scores to make an assessment of your business to get you funded fast.

If you’re looking to scale up your online business and need capital to make it happen then iwoca are the people to speak to, take a look here for more details: www.iwoca.co.uk

 

 

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