So, I’m finally just going to let the secret out. Every other website I go to looking for this information is charging exorbitant amounts of money or monthly memberships to get access to this kind of information. Here’s how I got started retailing merchandise I got at wholesale prices, on eBay for MSRP, and pocketing the profits. This will be a multi-part series of blog posts on what I did, what mistakes I made, and maybe you’ll be able to jump straight in without all the frustration I had.
Here’s the first thing I sat out to do: find a wholesaler list without paying a dime! As you’ll notice when you do a Google search for internet wholesalers or dropshippers, there are thousands of people ready to take your money to let you join their club where you can get all these “tried and tested” wholesaler or dropshipper websites. Don’t fall for these scams. They are tightly and coherently wound together with the second biggest scam on the internet: e-Books.
I waded through tons of these sites myself, and none of them looked legit. They were all these sites that wanted you to let them setup a turnkey website for you, or setup some other kind of automated cash flow system. All of them had screenshots of their PayPal accounts, showing huge deposits. Or their Clickbank accounts. Or their Authorize.net accounts. But none of them wanted to share how they were doing it, so I’m sharing what I’ve found so far.
World Wide Brands is the only site out there that’s a legitimate, Product Sourcing Company (eBay certified), with a free weekly newsletter to help you compile your list of wholesalers. Usually, these companies they give you each week will also drop ship. What is drop shipping? WWB’s site says “Dropshippers send products one at a time directly to your customer from the warehouse. No inventory investment! Millions of brand name products.” These companies will, either for free or for a small fee, let you sell their merchandise and charge whatever you want, then they ship directly to the customer, often with your name on the package, and you pocket the profits. There is little risk involved from products not selling, because you actually have no investment in inventory costs and won’t lose money.
The biggest issue I have heard of with drop-shippers, besides finding a reliable non-scammy one, is making sure the item is in stock with the wholesaler before you go to sell it. You don’t want to have to disappoint your customer by having to tell them the item is back-ordered when your auction or website said it was in-stock. Especially this time of year, someone might be disappointed for the Holidays.
That’s it for part 1, be sure and head on over to World Wide Brands for their FREE product sourcing newsletter. Next time, I’ll talk a little bit more about how you can get FREE information before you make enough money to start paying for sources, and I’ll have a FREE link to a real Chinese wholesaler that I’ve used to sell Sony PSPs and Nintendo Wii’s on eBay for profit!