To Drop Ship or Not: What You Need To Know About Wholesale Dropshipping
As ecommerce grows everyday, people are looking for ways to benefit from the great potential the internet has to offer. For new commers to e-commerce or ebay selling, the hardest step is to find
legit and reliable wholesale products suppliers. Drop shipping is a quick and easy solution that can get you up and running fast, but you have to do it right or you can easily fail. In many cases, ecommerce startups fail misreably for lack of research and planning. My goal in this article is to explain how drop shipping works. I'm also going to explain the pros and cons of dropshipping, What you need to do before even contacting your first supplier, and how you can avoid the most common mistakes that beginners make.
But what is drop shipping anyways?
When you dropship products, you essentially have an arrangement with your wholesale supplier where by they ship your orders directly to your customers. In most cases, they will include your company name on the shipping labels instead of theirs. Some wholesalers provide this service for free while others charge a nominal fee for it. So, what does dropshipping mean for your business? Let me tell you!
Why Drop Ship Products?
There are many advantages of using dropshippers when selling online. Here are a few of them:

You essentially get customers orders before you order them from your suppliers. This means that your initial investment is minimal, and in some cases none.
No inventory to hold. This by itself is one of the big pros of drop shipping. You don't have to pay for storage fees, or invest in expensive merchandise, that might stay around for a while before it is sold.
You can diversify your offerings as much as you want. You are only limited by finding the right dropshippers for the merchandise you want to sell.

Sounds good you say, but is there any disadvantages? Well this is life, and as any other thing in life you should expect some cons.
Why Not Drop Ship?
Obviously, there are also some cons that you have to consider. here is an idea about some of them:

A lot of middle-men and scam suppliers. This is a big problem now, a lot of wholesaler wanna-bes are springing on the internet everyday. You have to watch out when choosing your drop shippers.
Inventory volatility. In some cases, you might get an order for a product that is out of stock. You have to either refund your customer or have them wait longer than usual if the wait is not too long.
Smaller profit margins. This is a major one as it directly affects your bottom-line. Like I mentioned before, many internet dropshippers are middle-men that are basically drop shipping to you! For that reason, they don't have the best profit margins, if any.
Customer service issues and returns. Your customers don't know your suppliers, they know you. When they have any issue or request such as a refund, they will direct it to you. In that case you have to deal with those issue transparently and professionally. This might mean losses for you at times.
You cannot control the quality, shipping times, customer service response of your suppliers. This might hurt your business at times, when you can't do anything about it.

What to DO Before Searching For Wholesalers
Well I didn't want to make things look so gloomy for your future online ventures, but a reality check is needed before taking any serious steps. Now you might ask, should I forget about drop shipping? My answer is NO. If done right, dropshippping could be a very effective strategy at least for jump starting your business. My advise is, if you are just starting out, and you don't have a lot of money up front, consider to drop ship your products. That doesn't mean that you jump at the first drop shipper that comes your way. You need to do your homework and find good quality products and good reliable and most importantly legitimate wholesalers that offer drop shipping services.
Before you jump into finding drop shippers, decide which products you want to sell. Go to ebay.com, shopping.com, and pricregrabber.com, and search for those products. Study your competition and pricing. Look how your competitors are pricing their merchandise. Record a price range for all the products you might consider selling. Also, try to read some product reviews, and merchant ratings if avialable. On ebay look at how the sellers are laying out thier auction pages, and who's selling, and what kind of demand exists. This is an essential step before even looking for wholesalers. When you do this you will also be able to see how
popular differnet products are. On ebay you can tell by the number of bidders. On comparison shopping sites, you can look at their popular products sections, which will give you an idea about what consumers are buying.
In conclusion, study your market and choose your products before you begin selling a single item. If you are on a shoe string budget, then consider drop shipping your products using reliable and legit wholesale suppliers. If you have some capital to invest I would advice buy bulk wholesale. You will get better prices for actually buying the merchandise. On the other hand that also means arranging a storage space...etc. So, decide what you will sell carefully and test different products first, ad then move forward with an expansion startegy.
Good luck with your ecommerce ventures.
Ahmed Nassar is the founder of a wholesale products distributors directory that has great resources for ebay sellers and ecommerce website owners. http://www.wholesaleinone.com lists manufacturers, wholesalers and importers in 38 categories.


One Less Meeting Gets You Home In Time For Dinner
Excerpted from The Truth about Getting Your Point Across…and Nothing But the Truth

A client of mine absolutely loved to have meetings. Regardless of the topic, if there was some reason for at least two people to have any kind of interaction a meeting got called. Not only were there a lot of meetings but there would almost always be superfluous bodies taking up space in the meeting that had no real reason to be there other than to be "informed." Now, if decisions got made and things got done I would have had more tolerance for the meeting mania. But more often than not little got done at these meetings other than to schedule more meetings. It was madness, I say!
As a senior manager, I could have spent every working hour of every day in meetings. Me needing to meet with other managers or my staff. Vendors wanting to meet with me. Meeting with customers. Meeting with other organizations. Meetings to decide what meetings to have or not have. It was meeting after meeting after meeting. I had to actively control my calendar to say no to meetings that didn't make sense, push back on meetings where I didn't need to be there or where we could get work done through other means.
As much as I may grouse about meetings, some of them were necessary, beneficial and effective. Then again, there were those that were a total waste of time and could have been accomplished by some other means. The million dollar question then becomes, "How do you keep the beneficial meetings and eliminate the wastes of time?" In my experience, there are several situations where meetings are generally more appropriate than doing through other means, as follows:
Getting buy-in or consensus on a strategy, direction, or decision – Meet if you've got something that requires people being 100% bought in to the solution. For people to be truly bought in, they need to have an opportunity to influence direction, express concerns, or provide alternatives.
Team building – If you want your team to work better together then they need meeting time to get to know each other, to understand relative strengths and weaknesses, and to want to help each other.
Celebrating a success or milestone – Having an e-party just doesn't work. Let your folks get together for a milkshake and celebrate a successful completion of a project, meeting a critical milestone, or celebrating a holiday.
Delivering bad news where people will likely have questions – No one likes to find out bad news by reading a memo. If you've got bad news that will affect people directly, get them in a room if logistically possible and deliver the message. It gives people an opportunity to interact as well as it being a more humane and sensitive way of delivering bad news.
What are some effective alternatives to people getting in a room together to meet? Try these on for size:
E-mail – Great for dissemination of information and for some decision making that may not be contentious or controversial. Just watch for when a topic does turn contentious or controversial; you're best to take the discussion offline and get a meeting together for the relevant parties to discuss.
Web sites – Also great for dissemination of information or for getting input
Audio/video conferencing – Effective when logistics prevent people from physically meeting or when a person only wants to listen in on a meeting
One-on-one discussions – Effective when a decision or direction can be made by just a couple of people and then others can be informed through e-mail or web sites
We need to interact, we need to exchange information, and we need to work together to get things done. Avoid falling into meeting trap and consciously ask yourself if there are other ways to communicate and get your point across.

Lonnie Pacelli is an author with over 20 years experience with Accenture and Microsoft and is president of Leading on the Edge International. See more at http://www.leadingonedge.com


Risk Reversal
Bringing in new customers is expensive and often difficult. Here is one effective but frequently overlooked way to reduce the difficulty.
Businesses, even the most customer oriented ones, tend to expect the customer to take the risk when doing business with them. The premise is almost: "We have great products, so you can try them if you pay us first," as opposed to; "We have great products and we believe in them so much, that if they don't do exactly what you want we don't want you to pay." The difference in attitude is subtle, but will have a huge impact on your customers' readiness to do business with you.
For a new business or a new relationship, the traditional stance makes the sale much more difficult. Trust is one of the most important ingredients in any sale. People will seldom part with money until trust is there. Trust takes time to build, and sometimes is impossible to build, until several interactions have occurred. Lack of trust causes hesitation and hesitation loses sales.
One way to build trust and credibility quickly is to reverse the risk. As a business, you can make an explicit offer to take the risk when a customer buys your product and thereby increase sales very quickly. Some examples of ways you can do this:
• You can offer an unconditional full money back guarantee, if certain results are not achieved;
• If you can afford it, you can agree not to deposit the customers cheque for 30 days, until the customer has had the opportunity to try your product or service;
• You can offer a better than risk free guarantee. Offer the customer gifts for trying the product or service. If they are dissatisfied in any way, not only will you refund their money but they also get to keep the gifts, simply for trying your offer.
Most of us would refund an unhappy customer's money without hesitation; why not make it an explicit benefit of your offer up front. Build it into your advertising, direct response and sales pitches. Make it obvious, instead of casually mentioning it or only offering when necessary. Doing this will build trust and encourage trial and increase sales.
Will customers take advantage of you? Sure, some will, but the majority won't, and the risk reversal will increase significantly the number of buyers willing to try your service. Think of those that abuse you as a promotional cost, you won't regret it. You'll find the advantages quickly outweigh the disadvantages.
You have to make your guarantee powerful and appealing. The more outrageous the better. I prefer to offer a better than money back guarantee, where the customer gets to keep something of value, simply for trying the product or service, regardless if they keep the product or not.
Customers should pay for your products and services, but you have got to make it easy for them to buy. This is one very effective way of doing it.

Michael Hepworth is the Streetsmart Marketer. You can sign up for his free marketing tip newsletter by visiting http://www.streetsmartmarketer.com/. There you will find this article and hundreds more free marketing articles.