Ebay Dropshipping Tips

Posted on February 18th, 2008 in Articles by admin

by Mike Stason

Many people want to have an eBay business. Wouldn’t it be nice to make a full time living from home just selling stuff on eBay? The good news is: It can be done - even if you don’t have products to sell.

Many people want to work from home and selling products on eBay is one of the easiest choices that are logical and easy to realize. However, nobody wants to pile up products in their backyard or livingroom. This is where dropshipping companies come in.

Drop shippers send merchandise to the customers of business owners. If you have an eBay business, you are a business owner. This will allow you to offer a wide variety of stock in your eBay store, without having the need to warehouse all of those products!

The only thing you have to do is setting up your auction in eBay. When the auction ends you just pass on the shipping address to your dropshipper. Or even better: Have the address automatically passed to your dropshipper when the auction ends. This way you would have everything automated.

When the product arrives at your customer’s home, they will have no idea that your company didn’t send it. The drop shipper will package, label, and ship the products that you sell, allowing you more time to set up even more auctions, for greater profits.

There are many dropshipping comapnies available and prices differ substantially. Usually when you are starting out your will have to pay your dropshipping comapny up front. Later you may negotiate better terms and conditions. However, this depends on the volume over a period of time.

Orders usually have to be delivered instantly and the company will either charge you per delivery or upfront - depending on the conditions that you agreed on.

When setting up your auction you will have to make sure that your reserve price is higher than the price you have to pay to the dropshipper.

Observe your competition. Find out what they are charging for similar products. If for some reason they sell the items cheaper than your dropshipper would sell them to you try to find out which dropshipper they are using. To do that just order the item from them and when it is delivered have a look at the label. Usually dropshippers leave traces or their contact details somewhere. This is because they also handle returns.

By starting an eBay business using the drop shipping method, there is essentially no financial risk involved. The product will be sold before you pay the drop shipper for the item. This is one of the few businesses where you can actually turn a profit before you have expenditures!

To learn how a 16 year old high-school dropout made a fortune on eBay in only 4 weeks just using dropshippers let me give you my free killer eBay selling tips

Dropshipping Is It Really That Hard?

Posted on February 17th, 2008 in Articles by admin

by Graham Waite

Dropshipping what is it anyway, now that’s a good question if you live in the US you might well of heard of it but much of the rest of the world hasn’t caught on to the idea yet.

Dropshipping is pretty basic really in essence instead of you buying stock and then selling it and sending it out yourself to your customers. What happens instead is you place completed orders with the supplier and then they send the goods out with your labels on your behalf its simple but very effective.

Drop shipping is a very popular option with sellers because it takes a lot of the grunt work out of selling on eBay.No need for shipping goods or buying stock. However, there are some pretty big negatives to drop shipping it’s not all plain sailing especially true for new and inexperienced ebay sellers.

Lets investigate some positive points of dropshipping first:-

1. You’ll find no need to hold vast stocks of goods or have to pay to store bulk goods. Whilst this might not be that significant if you sell small items it could be if you sell gym equipment or things that take a lot of room.

2.There are no shipping costs getting stock sent to you to sell.However the dropshipping company will charge you or your customer to send out the goods plus a handling fee for saving you all that work.

3. Many sellers find the packaging and taking parcels to the post office tedious and time consuming. When you use a drop shipper they handle that side of your business saving you time and hassle.

4. No need to pay for or store packaging materials: Packaging can be quite costly and also very bulky so not having to worry about this can be really important, even more so if you don’t have much storage space.

However as with most things in life there is always a downside and dropshipping is no exception to the rule.

Lets look at the dropshipping negatives:-

1. It can cost quite a few bucks as you will be paying the supplier for their staff to pack and ship your goods.This can be as high as $5 an item or even more and then shipping still needs to be added on top. On occasions this can mean selling the product and making a profit can be almost impossible. So you must look carefully at your margins and work out if you can still make money using this service.

2. It is inevitable sometimes things won’t work out with deliveries or goods. It is important you understand that any problems will be yours to sort out as your customer will expect to deal with you and not the dropshipping company. So make sure you thoroughly research the company you are using both for their dropshipping service and products.

3. Limited Choice is another negative when it comes to dropshipping you may find a perfect product to sell but are then unable to find a suitable company that offers dropshipping. Many distributors prefer to sell in bulk and don’t want the hassle and extra paperwork involved with dropshipping.

4. Dropshippers may not have stock of products when you need them. If you find a hot in demand item you may find others have also found it and ‘out of stocks’ may lead to unhappy customers. If you have sold products you have to put on back order this can mean you have to apologise to customers and may receive negative feedback if not handled correctly.

Whilst dropshipping can work for some people for others it can be a major headache make sure you do thorough research and you should avoid most of the major problems.

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