Many of you will probably remember
days when only way to start a successful home business was to join some sort of multi-level marketing program or sell makeup at parties. In those days, people would have to buy a membership in ‘program’ along with an inventory of sample products that they would then sell to friends and coworkers at ‘parties.’ Most people were not very successful at this and made very little money and usually alienated their friends and family. In 1990’s however, all of that changed for better with advent of Internet and a retail delivery method called wholesale drop shipping.Wholesale drop shipping is when a wholesale distributor or manufacturer agrees to send out single unit products to customers for a retailer. Many will also even include retailers name on invoice so that customer is never even aware that they got it from anyone else but retailer. This, along with Internet has changed whole dynamics of home businesses in America, making it easier and more cost effective to start your own business.
Home business owners are now able to launch a business without purchasing any inventory up front and are able to open a ‘store’ without ever having to find a place to setup shop. Millions of Americans have setup ecommerce sites on internet selling everything from Personal Computers to lawn care equipment all using wholesale drop shipping. As a matter of fact, according to eBay over forty thousand people make their full time living on their auction site alone; many of these are using drop shipping as their main method of product fulfillment.
The only problem for today’s small business owner is how to find wholesalers to drop ship. In general wholesale distributors don’t make it a habit of getting out there and advertising; obviously whole reason they are in wholesale and not retail is to get away from doing all of that work. So it makes it very difficult for someone who has little or no business experience to make contacts with distributors when they aren’t even sure where to start looking.
To help out those small business owners I’d like to offer some advice for finding wholesale distributors: §Look for trade organizations and magazines to help you make contacts. Many trade organizations out their produce some sort of listings of their members, many of whom may drop ship. §Contact manufacturers. People don’t realize that if you call manufacturer they will provide you with a list of their distributors; so if you are looking for a particular product, ask manufacturer. The down side of this route is that they may have hundreds of distributors that you may have to contact before you find one that is willing to drop ship. §Find wholesale chat rooms and message boards. There are many message boards on Internet today that are devoted to a wide range of discussions. You may find boards on wholesale, distribution, supply chain, etc. All of these may lead you in direction of a wholesale distributor.
