Drop Shipping Proves Profitable
Written by ady on January 22, 2009 – 7:58 am -The missus had decided to try and make money drop shipping and had a modicum of success with a particular line of products on Ebay but with the costs taking a large chunk of her margin she asked me to set up a website and work my magic to get it ranked ready for the Christmas rush.
Task achieved with top spot in Google UK with 3 weeks to spare, I left her to it. I’d done some research and already decided there wasn’t enough people looking for info about this product in the entire world to make the project worth the effort, never mind in the UK but if it keeps her happy….
What followed was a bit of an eye opener. Instantly she was getting between 4 and 7 sales a day and this peaked at 12 in one day. Someone sent a return back and we found that the wholesale drop shipper hadn’t removed the manufacturers label so a quick search online pinned it down to a factory on the outskirts of Peking, China.
I ordered a ’sample’ of 20 items and paid extra for a quick delivery. It arrived in under a week and we’d (notice how its now ‘we’) instantly doubled our profit margin from 100% to 200%
After Christmas the sales leveled off and I thought that would be it but the site is still moving at least 10 a week. I get the notice of sale from PayPal and forward it to the missus at work. She either orders it from the drop ship supplier or if it’s one of the popular items that we now keep in stock she wraps the items in the evening when she gets in and I walk down to the Post Office with them in the morning.
Drop shipping and Ebay had never previously interested me. It seemed too much like a bricks and mortar business rather than making your living online. Obviously I’d looked at it a few times when I was still gullable to the ‘how I made $21,300 in just 5 minutes on Ebay’ sales pitches but it almost felt like I would be cheating if I went down that path.
I was going to be a success selling nothing more than digital data dressed up in a fictional book cover and I was/am doing very well at it thank you very much.
I had though, started to feel a shift online. If you look at my previous 10 posts in the right column you will see my reviews on certain internet marketing products. Do a search on Google for those products and more than likely you will find this blog hanging around the number 2 spot. Occasionally I even get and hold number 1 spot on a new product.
Am I telling you this to brag? Not at all, in the last few months all those top spots have brought plenty of traffic but very little in the way of money. What happens is when I write those product reviews I try to be as honest as possible. Quite often I will rip the thing to pieces but even then I still add an affiliate link at the bottom so should the reader find the review a deciding factor and want to buy, I may make something for my trouble.
I have never made much from this blog, it’s not why I started it but the odd few sales it made a week were of course welcome. Those few sales are now down to maybe a few a month, sometimes less and it’s not just this blog I have noticed this trend. I have at least 20 blogs selling info products and sales are well down on the lot.
To add confusion though my physical product sales are well up. It’s hard to be mathematical about it because of so many variables but by looking at how much traffic a particular blog of mine was getting last December and dividing by the amount of Amazon sales the site made, I can clearly see that this year it did far better, despite the economic doom and gloom (although profit wasn’t up by much so people were perhaps buying cheaper goods or amazon dropped their prices).
Where is this post going? Well based on my own observations and the unexpected success of my good lady’s dip into the world of the drop shipper, I decided to dig deeper and learn as much as I could before jumping in myself and making a deliberate shift in my online direction.
As it happened, a course started last week and I managed to grab a spot. At $500 it’s not cheap but once you have been online a while you realise just how important it is to get the right training. Folk who try to do it all for free will 99.99% of the time never make it.
Think about it this way, people make a fortune on Wall St. but would you just walk in there and start waving your arms around screaming buy, buy, buy and expect to make the same kind of money without any form of training? Would you open a cobbler shop with no idea how to do book work, order stock, mend shoes? Exactly, so why do people think they can log on and just make money?
Drop shipping is an entirely different ball game to what I have been doing so I asked a few people whose advice I listen to, followed their recommendation and found myself signed up to learn from one of the best in the business (you can see the course I did by clicking here).
I want to land with my feet running. I want to add another 10 or 20 sites to the one my missus thought of and I want them as fast as possible because people are buying online. Every day they log on with their credit card in hand.
You know they are buyers because they are using search terms such as “Black and Decker lawnmower with free delivery” not “how often should I use my lawnmower.”
The person wanting the free info is still online, it’s just that there are thousands and thousands competing for the privilege of having him read their info in the hope he will end the visit with a click on an advert that earns the provider of said info a few cents.
The person catering for the needs of the buyer on the other hand, if he digs down enough into a niche, will find little competition because drop shipping requires much more work. You need suppliers, a shopping cart, a gateway etc.
As my good Lady showed me this Christmas though, drop shipping is definitely worth the effort and it could prove to be a very good Christmas message indeed.
Update: Like any web based business model there are plenty of cowboys operating in the drop shipping industry. Just do your research on any company before joining as they normally charge a joining fee. Luckily their seems to be a good drop shipping community (at least here in the UK) and they soon start slagging off any bad performers such as this Lens I found yesterday about fancydressdropship.com
Tags: drop shipper, Drop Shipping
Posted in Drop Shipping |
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I couldn’t agree with you more. As long as you’re smart about finding a niche and managing your profit margins, there’s some good money to be made from online dropshipping.
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