Build a Home Based Business from scratch selling products online using Drop Shippers.

Looking for Suppliers

By now, you should have a handy list of product and service ideas to build a neat little business around, and you now need to find out who can supply you the product side of things. There are a few ways we look to do this, but first you need to do some more research.

Open up your browser and research all your competitors. That’s right, you need to see how and what your competitors are selling and also how their web sites operate. Go to www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, and www.msn.com and type in each of the keyword phrases that made your final list, and bookmark all the sites that come up in the first two pages of each engine.

This may seem like a tedious task at first but trust me, it will be invaluable to you now, and later on. Bookmark every site that comes up on both the left and right hand sides of each engine page that is promoting the same products. Some sites will not be selling anything but may seem like directory or lists of other sites. You’re not interested in them. Some will feature more than once, but that’s okay, as long as you get the full list from all three engines and their first two pages, and do this for all your major product keyword phrases.

You are doing this to find a common theme among your competitors as to what products they sell. If you find that a lot of the sites are selling the same products it means there is an easy supplier out there supplying them. This is a good way to get your business started.

I’m not suggesting that by selling what everybody else sells is a good idea, but it will help you to get your business up and running. Once you are up and running, you can then find the harder to find suppliers with the more unique products. It is usually these more unique sellers who prefer to see an established business operating before they set you up with a drop ship account.

Of course, if a lot of your keyword phrases are specific brand names then you’ll have no choice but to sell the same products as your competitors, and you have to expect that if someone types in ‘coleman tents’ into google, then sites selling coleman tents will show up (but you knew that!). It just means you have to do be more creative with your marketing to beat your competitors (but that is for later).

Trying to find the suppliers of products is not easy early on, but here are some suggestions. Type into Google, Yahoo, and MSN your keyword phrase but with the addition of words such as supplier, wholesaler, drop shipper and so on. Of course, this is what most other people do, but like I said earlier, there is nothing wrong with following the crowd for now. I happen to stumble across my first supplier by doing searches, and although a lot of my competitors were selling the same products, signing up was quite easy. Downloading pictures of the products was even easier.

Another suggestion is to purchase what are called drop ship directories. I like these myself because they are designed to create a meeting place for retailers and drop shippers. This means that the suppliers on the list already drop ship! That’s half the battle won. Another reason I like them is because most people are not prepared to part with their money to purchase such a list, and therefore will make do with selling what everyone else is selling. Those that are prepared to pay for a list will get the added benefit of selling more unique products.
 
Here are some of my favourites, and all will update to keep suppliers current.

SaleHoo - This company is increasing all the time, and for the one time price offer one of the greatest ranges of dropshippers, wholesalers, liquidators, manufacturers and more. Just look here you can access the topics of your choice from the links below

Adult DVD's
Apparel
Body Jewelry
Car Audio
Cell Phones
China
Clothes
Clothing
Computer
Consumer Electronics
Cosmetics
DVD
Electronics
Footwear
Fragrance
Handbag
Hip Hop Clothing
iPod
Jeans
Jewellery
Lingerie
Nintendo Revolution
Perfume
PSP
PS3
Purse
Radiocontrol
Scooter
Shoes
Silver Jewelry
Sunglasses
T-Shirt
Urbanwear
Video Camera
Video Games
Watches
XBox360

World Wide Brands – Currently offer 3,000,000+ products from over 4,000 brand names. They are #1 in my opinion, only charge around US$70 and update suppliers daily. They even offer a directory for those wanting to buy wholesale and stock products themselves. If you'd like more info on both what they offer and dropshipping I suggest these two free links

Free 40min Video on Product Sourcing

Free Ebooks

Hienote – Another great directory, and like World Wide Brands, offer a lot of information and help.

Ultimate Emarketing & Dropshippers – Offers plenty of marketing support to go with their researched list

A third suggestion for finding drop shippers is to search for wholesalers and distributors and call them up (or email). One of my best selling product lines came from actually asking a supplier if they drop shipped. I had to ask because they didn’t advertise the fact that they did drop ship, and I really liked their products, so unless I asked, I wouldn’t have had the success with that particular product line.

So there are plenty of ways to find suppliers and the ones that succeed in this business are the ones that go that extra mile. Do some research, pay for a drop ship directory, and ask suppliers personally if they drop ship, especially the ones that don’t advertise it.

A final note on competition – Please don’t be scared off by the level of competition, in fact be aware that most people who get this far will see the competition and turn around. Competition is good, but it’s also important to remember that just because a web site gets a higher search engine placing, charges less than you, and looks like a million dollar corporation, this does not mean they’ll get all the sales and you won’t get any. Some of the more successful web sites out there simply provide a better online experience, an easier to navigate site and better personal service, and this makes a world of difference.

A checklist of so far –

· A long list of interests.
· A longer list of product and service ideas.
· A list of keywords and keyword phrases fitting your criteria.
· One or two suppliers to get you started.
· A list of your competitors.

If you have got to this stage and you don’t feel you have a viable business idea, or suppliers are hard to find, you need to go back several steps, even as far back as step one. Start again at one of the earlier processes until you reach this point with satisfactory results for all of the above.
Tasks:

1. Research your competitors.
2. Find a couple of suppliers.
3. Sign up to a drop ship directory.

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