Posts Tagged Shipping
Benefits of Working With Wholesale Supplier’s Sites
Posted by johnb in Drop Shipping, Wholesale, Wholesale Sources on November 13th, 2009
If you’re looking for a great centralized wholesale supplier’s source with convenient drop shipping, you can use the services offered at the new website doba.com. With Doba.com, you don’t have to juggle several different wholesale suppliers to get the products you want; just search among Doba’s centralized network of wholesale suppliers to only have to look in one place for the products you want to buy wholesale! When you want to utilize this business model, make sure that you can profit from the sale of the products you see from these wholesale suppliers; otherwise, it will make the entire enterprise mean nothing. Make sure you know the market well enough to know what sells and what’s hot right now, so you can jump on that bandwagon and sell the products that people want to buy.
Doba and other centralized wholesale supply sources have the advantage of having a drop shipping service that you can use instead of shelling out money on a warehouse and other storage space. You’ll be able to have a wide variety of product from all kinds of different wholesale suppliers for sale. You can even offer all of the products you can potentially buy from Doba if you want.
You don’t have to buy items until you make a sale on it; once you do, place the order in the centralized wholesale source. Even though you’re working with a variety of different wholesale suppliers, you just have to place a single order to get all of these different items from many places at once. Doba will process your order and make their own orders with the wholesale suppliers it works with to get your customers the items they just bought from you.
For those of us in an online retail business, it’s incredibly convenient to use; you only have to consult with a single wholesaler and still get a great variety of items to sell to your customers. Doba is definitely more preferable than Alibaba.com or other such websites, where you can get ahold of different wholesale suppliers, but when it comes time to order something, you still have to talk to all the individual suppliers to get it done.
However, drop shipping isn’t the most convenient way to source wholesale products if you’re buying in bulk; while that’s the way in which to make the most profit, you have to find some way to store it yourself and sell them individually. One potential criticism with sites lika Doba.com is that a lot of retailers don’t want to take the chance that they’ll have to pay more for these items, thus cutting into their profits; however, you can rest assured that the centralized wholesale source lets you keep your great prices. Just pass along the cost of shipping to the customer when they have to pay for it; no matter where they bought something online, they would have to pay for shipping either way, so charge them.
If you want your online retail business to succeed, invest in centralized wholesale suppliers; they’re fast, easy, and convenient, and sites liek Doba.com can help you get a great variety of items for your business all through one service.
What is drop shipping? Part One
Posted by Dan Blacharski in Bulk Drop Shipping, Drop Shipping on June 29th, 2009
Drop shipping has garnered quite a lot of attention over the past few years, presenting an easy way to become an Internet retailer. Is it just another get-rich-quick scheme? Multi-level pyramid deal? Flash in the pan? Not really. Like anything, you do have to put some energy into it. When you first consider the concept of drop shipping, it seems remarkably simple. You don’t have to carry any inventory, and you don’t have to do any shipping. You just put up a web site, send the orders to the drop shipper, and collect the checks.
Well, it’s not really that easy, folks. Successful drop shipping involves successfully doing two things: Making a good product selection, and marketing. On the product selection front, it’s easy to just load up everything the drop shipper has to offer into your virtual catalog, but a more effective method is to create a niche for yourself—specializing in one particular area. Don’t try to be everything to everybody, because the customer will just get lost. Specialize in one area and position yourself as the expert in that area. On the second front, marketing—again, it’s easy to just put up a web site, but will anybody see it? How many web sites are out there today? With no marketing, again, it will get completely lost.
That said, drop shipping can be an effective management technique, especially for handling inventory.
Drop shipping, for the uninitiated, is a form of inventory control whereby the retailer sells his items to the customer, but instead of having a supply of the item on his shelves for immediate delivery, the retailer orders his items directly from the manufacturer or the wholesaler, who then ships them directly to the retailer’s customer. In this way, there is no need for the burden of carrying inventory. The retailer still retains his profit margin as a difference between the wholesaler’s or manufacturer’s price and that of the retailer.
Often, the final customer never knows that the retailer is drop shipping his merchandise because the retailer chooses not to disclose this up front, thereby hiding his inventory control from view. There are several ways to hide the drop shipping from customers. The best way to do this is to have the manufacturer or wholesaler ship the product with the retailer’s name and logo on the packaging slip.
The benefits are obvious: no inventory means less cost can be passed on the retail customer, and the retailer retains positive cash flow throughout the entire process. The potential downside is that it may take longer for the customer order to be fulfilled, since it’s going through a third party, there may be a backorder that the retailer is unaware of, and the retailer’s markup will not be as high as if they were sourcing, warehousing, and shipping the product direct.
In part two of this article, I will explain a few of the positives and negatives of drop shipping in more detail, and how the retailer who drop ships can benefit in the end. To be sure, there are negatives to the drop shipping idea, but they are manageable if you know how to navigate the drop shipping maze.
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