Finding Dropshippers: What Do Your Results Mean?
So you’ve been searching for dropshippers, and maybe you’ve found a mountain of prospective suppliers, or maybe you haven’t found any at all. What does that mean? When trying to choose the correct market, the correct products to sell online, how do you interpret your search results?
Well, the trick is to find a market with demand that is not already saturated by big-name companies. This doesn’t mean that you can’t sell successfully in a competitive market. Take electronics, for instance. This is one of the biggest on-line sellers, particularly on eBay. But you have to be very cautious when entering this market, because there’s a ton of competition and it’s not easy to find competitively priced dropshippers. Your specific product is everything. Let’s say you want to sell the iPod Touch on eBay. Bad choice. First off, Apple doesn’t dropship, so whoever you get your iPod Touch from is already a middleman, and will already be charging you an inflated price. Second, get on eBay and see how many iPod Touches are up for sale. About a thousand. That’s because Apple gives one away free with every student-discounted laptop they sell, so every cash-poor student who got one free is trying to dump it on eBay for $20 pocket-money.
photo credit: _sarchi
Maybe you want a market a little less competitive than electronics. So you decide to sell meditation shrouds, or size 6XXXXXX swimwear. You may have stepped into a market with not enough demand. “But I’ll be the only person selling meditation shrouds”, you say, “Anyone who wants to buy one will have to buy it from me.” Yes, that’s true, and maybe you could make some money that way. But I hope you’re planning to sew the shrouds yourself, because manufacturers need a bigger market than you do. You may be fine making $600 a month profit, but they need a larger margin. So while you might actually sell quite a few shrouds, you won’t find anyone to supply them. If you’re searching for dropshippers on the Wholesale Match database, and you’re not finding a single one for your product, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a hint early in the game that you picked a product with too small of a market, so instead of wasting your time trying to built the market, you can look for a product with more demand.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
So what if you find a product with a good demand and not too much supply, and there are four or five quality dropshippers you can use, but none of them want to work with you? Well, this is where you need to get persuasive. You need to convince them why they should supply you with product. Don’t be afraid to call them multiple times, to send emails outlining exactly how you’re going to promote their products, and why you’re the kind of person they should work with. Woo those dropshippers. Show them that you’re persistent, motivated, hardworking. Don’t send one little email, and then move on to some trashy supplier who may or may not have what you want. Finding the dropshippers you need is only the first step: then building a relationship begins.
