This is part 5 and also the last part of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below:

• Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.
  
• Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?
  
• Part 3 : The Basic Steps to get started with drop shipping.

• Part 4 : How to Select A Reputable Drop Shipper

Since the day one I started this series, I already discussed what is drop shipping, its advantages and disadvantages, how to get started and select the right drop shipper as your business partner. If you never read the tips and information that I brought to you in last few series, you can click on the link above and read it.

Before this I also want to start a drop shipping business, however when I came across blogging, I changed my mind and start making money from blogging. So today I would like to show you the reasons why I choose blogging by comparing this 2 money making opportunities together.

2 Ways to make money online : Drop shipping and Blogging

For me, both of them are good ways to start making money online. Each of them has some proven successful stories that how people make a living or even become rich through them. There is no doubt that you can make money from either one of them if you work hard enough and do the right thing.

In last 2 years, I was searching what kind of opportunities that available in the internet which can help me to make money online. I came across drop shipping business. After doing some research and read some successful stories, I found that this is a good business to start. So I decided to join Ebay and wish one day I can start making money from it using the drop shipping business model.

After a few weeks, I was brought to problogger.net. Yes, this is a blog from Darren Rowse, a problogger that make a living from internet through blogging. At that time I really impressed with his story about how he bought a house using the money from blogging. He made this money through 6 months of serious and full time blogging. I really impressed and I start doing some research on blogging. So I compare 2 kind of business carefully and finally made my decision.

Drop Shipping VS Blogging

Today, in this article, let me compare 2 of them for you:

Now you know what are the differences between drop shipping business and blogging.

I choose blogging because:

1. I write and touch the topics that I like. At that time I can’t find any products that I’m really expert in for my drop shipping business. I don’t like shopping and maybe because of this I can’t find any passionate products for drop shipping. However, blogging is different, I just start a blog around the topic that I like to share and I can keep doing what I like to do and make money. The life will be easier….
   
2. Multiple ways of income. In drop shipping, I found that the only way to make money is selling products. However, in blogging, you can leverage on your blog and make money from multiple of income sources. This means that I have multiple choices to plan my money making strategy.
   
3. Blogging is easier. For me, blogging is easier. Although both of them need some technical knowhow and information to succeed, but in my mind, I feel that blogging is much easier. I’m running a computer service business in day time and I know that in business, if you want to sell something to the market, you must understand it very well. Then only you can market your products out and make money. However, since I don’t really like shopping, this is hard for me to identify a market for drop shipping. So I choose blogging rather than drop shipping.

The Choice is on your hands

I wrote this part not because I want to influence you to make money from blogging. All I want is just show you my ideas on blogging. The choice is still on your hands. Of course, if you want to read more about blogging, then please read my 2 famous articles on blogging, How to make money from blogging and achieve financial freedom and How to make a living with part time business.

In future, I will start more series articles around the topic of making money online. At this moment, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or bookmark this site by pressing CTRL + D on your keyboard.

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Make More Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

This is part 4 of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below:

• Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.
  
• Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?
  
• Part 3 : The Basic Steps to get started with drop shipping.

In order to make money in drop shipping business, you have to find and get a good drop shipper as your business partner. This is a crucial step for your drop shipping business.

So in this part 4 of the series, I would like to discuss the tips that will help you to get a good drop shipper for you business.

How to select a Reputable Drop Shipper

Drop shipping is a very hot and popular ways to make money from internet. Maybe because of this, many scams have arisen around the industry. So you have to be careful in this industry to choose the reputable drop shipper for your business.

But don’t worry and don’t let this scare you away. If you really want to make money from drop shipping, then you must take some time and research your drop shipper. To help you out, below are some of the tips that you must consider when selecting your business partner – drop shipper.

1. Middleman or drop shipper? Please ensure this before dealing with any parties. Some of the companies claim that they are drop shippers, but in fact, they might be the middleman and use other drop shipper to delivery the products to you.
   
2. Product list updates. How often a drop shipper updates their product list? This will ensure that you will have different kinds of products to sell from time to time.
   
3. The Wholesale Price. You need to make sure the wholesale price a drop shipper offers is low enough so that you can have more margins and make more money in every sale.
   
4. How they handle delivery. Some drop shippers will add the delivery costs into their wholesale price and some of them just charge you a handling fee for delivery. As a business owner, you must clear with this as it is directly affect your business expenses and profits.
   
5. The Availability guarantee. I hope you don’t want let your customer down with stock not available after them making the decision to buy. If possible, please pay attention on the system how you can check the stock availability.
   
6. Read previous customer testimonials. Nothing is better than review of experienced users. If everyone is giving positive reviews on a drop shipper, then they are obviously doing something right.
   
7. How drop shipper helps you to make money. Most reputable drop shipper will provide tools and information to help you in business. After all, both of you are business partner. If you can make money, they can too.
   
8. Returns and refund Policy. Read the terms and condition of the drop shipper and pay attention on the lines which talk about returns and refund. This is the after sales service and guaranteed that your business giving to customers. Obviously this is very important if you want to build up a good business relationship with your customers.

Above are 8 tips that I can give you to select a good and reputable drop shipper for your business. Of course, you have to spend some time here and don’t rush. This is the most basic and yet important step that you must take to ensure the success of your business in future.

This review on drop shipping business is almost comes to the end. If you feel that drop shipping is suitable for you, then you can take action base on the tips that I shared in the previous parts. But if you want to start another kind of business, then you must read my next article about the comparison between drop shipping and blogging.

Yes, you can make money from both of them. However there are certain reasons I choose blogging over the drop shipping. Do you want to know the reasons? Then you must subscribe to my RSS feeds or bookmark this site by pressing CTRL + D for the next updates.

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Make More Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

This is part 3 of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below: 

• Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.
• Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?

After discussing both advantages and disadvantages of drop shipping business, I think you should have a clear mind that whether this business is suitable for you.

Just like other kind of business, if you want to start a drop shipping business, then you must learn the proper way to start it. You must have a strategy that will maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages and risks. This is what this article about.

Below are some of the tips that I will give you if you want to start a drop shipping business:

The Basic Steps to get started in Drop Shipping Business

1. Find a good drop shipper. Just like what I said in part 2, in most of the time, you will have to depend on drop shipper to handle your after sales service such as shipping and returns. So finding a good drop shipper is a must and definitely is the most important part for this business. This is why I will recommend you spend more time on this research before you start a drop shipping business.  Don’t worry, I will cover more information on this in next part, part 4 of this series.

2. Market Research. When you have a few reputable drop shippers on your list, then you can start researching the market. This is one of the hard parts for business owner. First you must find a niche market that is not too niche until lack of demands. Demands are very important in business. However, at the same time you must look at the competition of a targeted market because high demands always come with high competition. So your job is trying your best to find the win-win situation. Of course, you can start with some products and test the market. You will gain more experience and eventually able to look for a niche market later. In general, you must look for:
   • A niche market with targeted buyers
   • There are plenty of demands and ready buyers in the market
   • Less Competition in the market

   
   

3. Products Selection. Now it is time for you to select a few products to sell based on your selected niche market. Please remember to sell only a few products and make sure it is really target on the niche market’s demands. From my experience in running my own business, this will help you to be more focus in marketing efforts and advertising costs. At this moment, you are the one who handle the business. So it will be easy for you if you select a few products to sell.
   
4. Be Prepared to handle backorders and returns. Yes, you can let your drop shipper to handle this for you. However, I encourage you to put some attention on this and if possible build a system to handle this. Try your best to make the process more convenience for your customers and make sure the whole process can run smoothly. If possible, try to collect your customers’ contact emails and numbers for further follow-up and relationship building.
   
5. Treat this like a real business. Please remember, this is your business. So please be honest with your customers and please DON’T SPAM! I saw a lot of business owner try to bring traffic to their web pages and stores by spamming. I can say that their business will not last longer as they are putting their business image on risks. We are trying to build a long term business, aren’t we? So be careful to decide every steps you take in business.

Above are 5 tips that I can give you to get started in drop shipping business. Some of the steps might take you a long time to get done but don’t worry, take your time. This is not a race. As long as you get every done properly, then you drop shipping business will have a good foundation and it will be easy to success.

In next part, as I promised just now, I will talk about how to select a good drop shipper and some of the questions that you must pay attention. You can subscribe to my RSS feeds or bookmark this site by pressing CTRL + D for next updates.

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Make More Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

This is part 2 of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below: 

Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.

In the previous part of this series, I discussed the basic theory and some advantages to start a drop shipping business. They are many people start their own drop shipping business after reading its attractive benefits. However, like most business, drop shipping also has its own disadvantages which we cannot overlook. 

Today, in this part, I would like to discuss the disadvantages of drop shipping and what kind of thing you must pay attention in this business.

The Disadvantages of Drop Shipping

Below are some of the biggest disadvantages of drop shipping:

1. You complete rely on the wholesaler. One of the advantages of drop shipping is you don’t have to worry about the after sales service such as delivery and etc. However, this also is a disadvantage for you. You have no control over on this and therefore…
   
2. Your credibility is on risk. Please remember, your customer is dealing with you and they have no idea about your wholesaler. So if the drop shipper happens to be slow, or out of stock and take a long time to deliver the products to customers, your complain call and email will be increased and your business credibility is dropped due to this uncertain factors.
   
3. Lack of quality control. Products and service quality is very important for a business to grow. It is directly related to your business’s image and credibility. However, in drop shipping, you have no idea the condition of the products, the after sales service, the delivery and also the returns services. In a nutshell, you have no control on the quality.
   
4. Your Profit margin is affected. Sometime your margin will drop due to the fluctuations in wholesale pricing. So you must pay attention on this.
   
5. It is hard to fully understand a product. Since you never ever seen the products yourself, sometime it is hard for you to answer customer questions about the product. In this case, you have to select a wholesaler that has this kind of system or give you the sample to let you understand the product.
   
6. Competition. Well, your wholesaler might deal with a lot of sellers like you. So all of you is selling the same category of products and the competition is there.

Above are some of the main disadvantages that you must pay attention on. Just like other kind of business, you must think a way to fully maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages efficiently. So in next part, I am going to discuss the proper way to start a drop shipping business that you can make money from. 

This is an article series about drop shipping. This series consist of many information about drop shipping. So far the topics that I covered are : 

Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.

Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?

I hope you can enjoy this series and please feel free to give your opinions on… whatever you think about. I really appreciate it.

What is drop shipping?

You might hear about the words drop shipping before. This is a dream for many internet entrepreneurs to make money from internet or from their own house.

In drop shipping, you are a middleman. Your jobs are market and sell a product over the internet. After someone purchases your product and you receive the payment, you place an order of the product to your drop shipper. Then the drop shipper will ship the products to your customers. They usually charge you the wholesale price of the product plus shipping cost. So you make money from the difference between the selling price and your costs (product wholesale price and shipping cost).

Sound great, right? This is why Ebay business becomes so popular because its business model was developed base on the theory of drop shipping.   Actually there are several advantages of this online business that make it become one of the hot discussed topics.

Advantages of Drop Shipping

Ok, there are a lot of advantages that making drop shipping becomes a so attractive online business that many people want to start. Here is some of the main one that I think you should know and understand:

1. No Inventory to hold. Drop shipping doesn’t like the old traditional small business where you have to hold a certain amount of stocks to run the business. In drop shipping, all you have to care is promotion to attract customers to buy and payment collection. After that your drop shipper will look after the order fulfillment. So you don’t have to hold any inventory as drop shipper will handle it for you.
   
2. No Shipping Hassles. Drop shipper will handle this for you. You should be thankful for this.
   
3. Low Modal Business. To start a traditional small business, you have to dump a certain amount of money in it. But in drop shipping, the story is different. All you have to do is buy a domain name and get a web hosting which is in a very low price. (around $20). Maybe you can hire someone to design a web page for you. This may cost you some money, but it definitely worth it to free up your time for marketing. After that your first online business is ready and you can start promoting your products to the internet world.
   
4. Your risks are low. Since you are not holding any stocks, your risk in this business is quite low. You don’t have to worry about sales. But of course if you want to make money, you must try your best to boost the sales volume. But if you sales are low, especially in starting, you don’t have to worry because you have no burden in this business.
   
5. Work at home business. In a nutshell, drop Shipping allow you to work in your house!

There are many advantages that I can think about. However I will not list them all here instead I just listed down some of the most beneficial advantages above. Now you know how attractive a drop shipping business is. But please wait a minute before you start jumping into this online business. There are several disadvantages of drop shipping that you must care about. I will discuss this in next part which will come out not so soon….