Suppliers / Dropshippers

[mcm]

Hi Everyone,

Im new here and hopefully i can also give some advice aswell as receive some!

I am very interested in starting an online ecommerce business and have various ideas but I have no idea how to actually get the products!?

What do you guys use? Dropshippers? Suppliers? How do you find suppliers or dropshippers?

I dont understand where all these online stores actually get their products from.

Please can someone help me out?

many thanks.

[Anton3]

I know someone with high calibre who's been doing drop shipping but apparently it's an area that may be experiencing slowdown. Clever online marketers and traffic buyers/sellers are moving heavily back toward the central money tower on the web - the affiliate networks. There are TWO ways to handle these networks - two kinds of network. Here's an excerpt from an article I'm writing about it (it's already online, but it's a work in progress - i'm building an exhaustive list of all the companies and sites in that sector, so i can help people measure its real annual turnover - if you include the gambling and porn involved, it OWNS the internet, it makes more money than a google of googles, without that porn and gambling, it's still bigger than one google!! that's why so few "realworld" people really know about it. american youth, asian/eastern hackish idiots, and a few clever europeans are the only ones who really know the scale of money being made in that sector - the rest pick up a couple of quid a month and don't have any idea how much money pumps through the performance marketing sector).


Affiliate Networks are good or evil

Okay. Sometimes in life you have to try and boil things down into the simplest thing possible. I'm going to do that now. This is a nugget, a kernel, a bitesize do-it-yourself little book of HOW TO OWN VAST BUSINESS WEALTH (well, if you phrase it JUST right, maybe you can get people past their knee-jerk prejudices about why anyone shares valuable information). Affiliate networks come in two flavours, (that's right muthas, you're in England now, where flavour tastes of the letter "u"), the dark side of the force, and the yodaic. The yodaic networks control amazing ivory towers of wealth and are powered by the bluechip top of the line fat known big brother style corporations who own everything and the kids too. The dark side networks run the porn, gambling, pyramid schemes, scams, rubbish and evil. Suffice it to say, choose the more predictable of the two evils - stay away from the casino-whore-world, I mean... WHY get your hands dirty like that? Is it any way to achieve tranquility?
So how do you know a good (unevil) affiliate network? Well it's not so hard. First, just stay away from anything selling ebooks, pyramid junk, gambling, porn, ringtones, basically stuff from thin air - stuff nobody even ever turns into anything real even if fools pay for it. Focus on selling for real stores/shops/traders/retailers - real people - shops you know... ideal - others too - why not? It's a growing market, the online commercial world, there's so many good payers out there, take their damn money!
If you are unable to do it by yourself, I am compiling a lot of carefully checked lists of good networks, below and will also add some detailed guides about the dark side too, whether that helps you avoid it or, since it is all still within the framework of what is allowed by the laws and modes of activity of the global free market system, whether that helps you cash in on it in a huge way. I am not here to tell you what path to choose out of the yodaic and the vadic.



I think drop shipping is clearly a business which can be influenced in riskier ways than something with no overheads or stock like affiliate selling. As for traffic trade- learning how to build websites which have mass audiences, knowing how to buy and sell bulk traffic from/to legitimate giant well-paying high quality people like google, is a good idea because it is the biggest growth industry in the world (partic if you work out how much chinese clicks cost these days) and learning to buy and sell well in that field is like learning the property market in 1980.

[deniser]

Hello and welcome,

I think you are approaching this backwards.

Selling online is no different to selling in a shop. The important thing is to sell a good product that people want to buy at the right price. You've got to know and understand the product to really sell it well and it helps if you have a passion for that item whether it be clothing, electronics, pet accessories etc.

Once you know what you want to sell, then you can find the best way of sourcing it. I get my products from all over the world and their source is a closely guarded secret!

But without knowing the product no-one can tell you where to start looking.

[ImproveSearchListings]

Hi Anton,

Where have you posted the full article (in progress)?

Thanks,

James

[Anton3]

Hi Anton,

Where have you posted the full article (in progress)?

Thanks,

James

It's just on one of my sites, but it doesn't matter - I posted all the content here. The rest of the page is a list of affiliate networks and all the details i can put down about them.. geography, payment time, year of founding, type of stuff sold (brick and mortar vis a vis other stuff), and so on. It's in really raw useless stages at the moment and it's worthless for anyone to read it yet, but at crm-systems.eu you can browse to the pages where there is a link to it in the stuff about affiliate programming you may find interesting (that's at ukusers4u.com)

None of those pages are for commercial traffic - they're more "white papers" crossed with techie p.r. - and the get close to and overlap with the domains I have for opensource development, above all of A.I., coming this year, well the development is, not the final product, obviously.

I'd like to find out a bit more about drop shipping, but I was willing to set up mailorder business myself, since I'm good at selling any kind of product, so setting up sales pages for my own products is all I have to do to move into a different arena altogether from selling advertising... and I am definitely good enough to build good sales interfaces. I researched it a lot, I was going to do officewear, menswear initially, but then I realised that I have pressing work to do to maximise my ad revenue - there's a LOT of cash in my reach and I have to go and grab as much of it as I can.

Maybe mailorder is a good business to set up yourself... I think drop shipping has numerous risks, I saw some bad stories about it, but then it obviously can be done well, through carefully researched proper drop shippers. However, all business models are supposed to tend towards minimum cost maximum return - and in the end you want a product that you either buy in bulk yourself or produce and then retail sell in bulk... over 7 to 10 years, I've learned to do that with clicks - sometimes called "eyeballs", often known in the marketplace as "traffic" or "users" or "advertising space", or "banners", or "text ads", or just plain "publicity". I'm also good at perl, really good, but you don't get many buyers, and those that do require non-hackish perl, something the fools all "oop", thinking it's the right way to program when it sadly is not. But hey, now I'm just being a total git.

[An Oasis]

Can't beat Perl, of course my mum still thinks that it's something that you wear...:rolleyes:

[Anton3]

But what crazy cruel sick freak decided to put an "s" in the word "lisp"?