Drop Shipping - Things You Should Know

    Drop shipping is a great way to make money from home using the internet. Drop shipping, in a nut shell, is selling products to consumers online without the risk of spending your own money upfront. When you drop ship, you list products of your choice on your website/ebay/amazon and do not purchase those products until you are paid beforehand by a customer. This eliminates you fronting your money and taking up all of your space in your garage to store your inventory. However, in order to drop ship, you must first create drop shipping accounts with suppliers.  You can do this by directly applying to companies (which requires you to apply for and have an EIN number) or you can use a third party company.

   The site I personally used was Doba. They charged me around $200.00 for a little over a year of service from their company. I am sure you are thinking about how I just said you don't have to spend money up front, but it was well worth it. Doba has thousands of suppliers with millions of products to list on my website and ebay. Instead of working directly with thousands of suppliers, Doba did it for me. For a fee of $200.00.

   The next step is to sell the products online.  You can use eBay or create your own site.  I have done both, and eBay isn't recommended.  There is so much competition it's unreal.  In order to even sell anything on eBay you have to mark the price so low, you make a dollar or two off of each item you sell (of course it also depends on what you're trying to sell).  Then there is also the slight setback of your rankings.  When you're new on eBay, people will tend to buy from someone who has already been on the site for a long period of time and who also has very good ratings.  I have had much better success using a website storefront.  There are numerous web hosting companies that offer eCommerce websites, however, I recommend GoDaddy.com.  Get your own online store -- in minutes! GoDaddy.com Quick Shopping Cart®

   Now before you get too exited and think you're going to make over $1,000 the first month you sign up, calm down. Although it sounds easy enough, there are numerous things which determine how profitable, if profitable at all, this can be. You must first create a site (or you can use eBay mentioned beforehand). Then, you must generate traffic to your site by creating a whole lot of back links, as well as other means of SEO (search engine optimization). Then you have to get your site indexed and crawled by search engines, which isn't as hard as it sounds. Then you must get your ranking up on those search engines, which includes the back linking and a long list of other things mentioned beforehand, in order to even begin to see a little sliver of profit. So, don't expect to make any money for the first few months, unless you already have an established site with a lot of traffic and incorporate drop shipping on it.  I'm not trying to discourage you, but I've been there and done that.  It's always better to expect less and get more, then to expect more and get less.

   So in closing, drop shipping can be very profitable if you know what you're doing and you are determine to do so.  You must have time and money to invest.  It is a great legitimate work from home opportunity however, it may take some time to actually see some profit.  You must also keep your expectations reasonable.  Once up and running though, it can be a very lucrative business.