Dropshipping and Ebay

p4nth3r7

I recently got sacked for being ill and im taking my work to a tribunial and am not fit for work at the moment so im looking into a business venture.

What i want to know is:

1. does anyone know a reputable free dropshipper?

2. Does anyone here do this already?

I promised my fiance and kids i'll give them everything they ever wanted one day and i wont stop trying til my dying breath, so any help is much appreiciated.

Thanks, Mel

PS: also looking for business partners interested in trying the same idea, maybe we can put our minds together and run a successful online business.

mostlycheerful

Hello,
I’m sorry to hear about your illness. I hope you can get some treatment that helps.

Re dropshipping a few years ago I researched this a bit and found that most of them have sign up fees but that there were a few that were free to sign up with. Then when I looked on ebay to see how many other people were advertising their products I found that it appeared to be mostly saturated and that the margins didn’t look particularly good. Also one in particular of the dropshippers that I looked into in more detail had a no returns policy so it kind of looked like that it would be me that would take a fall on any sales that went wrong. Hmm, ok, so there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Dropshipping is evidently a big market but as with anything in life and business you would likely have to put a certain amount of effort and work into it and you would probably have to try several things until you find a good one. And you’d have to be robust and persistent about your approach if you want to get anywhere with it. I’m sure it could be lucrative for some hard working people but, as with everything, it could also probably be a right headache and nuisance. Still, you only live once and there’s only one way to find out if it would be any good and that’s to give it a whirl and get stuck in and go for it. Good luck if you do. Perhaps let us know how you get on if you do give it a go as this could be useful or inspiring for other people.

If looking into dropshipping then perhaps also consider another similar method of sales known as affiliate marketing. Basically you set up your own website and include links to other sites who do sales and you earn 5% or 10% of the sales that occur when people click through your links to the sales sites. One of the bigger companies doing this is Commission Junction. And with some of them you can earn a percent just from people clicking through to request information and such like. This is the main way that this site makes it’s money. So you need to make an interesting website and drive traffic to it by marketing, promoting and publicising it and also, for instance, having lots of keywords on your home page so that you come up in the top ten on search engines. There are various ways of doing it properly and as with everything there are beginners’ mistakes to learn to avoid doing. For instance there are acceptable ways of including keywords and other blatant unacceptable ways that can simply get you banned from the search engines. So, as with everything, it’s a learning curve and again, as with everything, it requires work, effort and tenacity. But if you crack it then you can earn good money and once it’s set up correctly and well publicised then it kind of largely does it itself. Look, no hands, free money pouring in while you sleep! Well, er, yeah, maybe…Of course if you do manage to get it working then once you’ve got a good one up and running then you can likely expand it and also replicate the success and put up some more sites and make more money. According to various reports I’ve read some people do very well. I got as far as making some sites and signing up the affiliate marketing out of interest and as an exercise but then I was too busy doing other stuff to follow through and actually develop and publicise my sites so I never got to the point of actually generating any income.

Building a website is reasonably straightforward if you have the turn of mind to do it. Basically it’s just saving some pages as .htm or .html and then uploading them to some space. The home page is called index.htm I used free hosts to host my sites as I didn’t want to pay £10 or £20 a month for something that you can get for free. If you also want to sell products yourself then paypal offer payments services and a free shopping cart template to use so again although there are lots of companies offering these for monthly or annual or one off fees you can actually get it for free. And you can get free domain names via .co.nr and if you want a .com and or .co.uk then don’t pay more than about £9 a year for .com and £4 a year for co.uk as there are providers offering as cheap as this and sometimes even cheaper. There are also other companies charging a lot more but you don’t have to pay big money if you look for the bargains. Choosing a domain name is tricky as all the good ones are already taken but with a bit of imagination and then checking on the availability you can eventually come up with something reasonably ok.

Good luck.

p4nth3r7

Thankyou for that very informative post.

Im currently trying to get talks with the manufacturers and/or master distributers like Sony, Bush, Nintendo and video games publishers to try and get it at the source and avoid middlemen and costs. My friend is going to make a proper website for me and i will use it as a catalogue and also throw in some free advertising for the companies that dropship for me just to say thanks. My friend also has his own server company which has 1000's of customers and his site gets a few thousand hits a day so hes going to advertise my site on his too.

Hopefully i can dig myself out of this dark hole, at the end of the day ive got nothing to lose right now.

Ames

There's a dedicated ebay board on here where they might be able to help you more.