Starting a business, ANY business, takes time, money and a commitment to learning. Those things are all investments you are making in yourself, and in your future. Anything that slows down the progress of those investments is a BAD thing!
One of the most important things you’ll need for your business is information. How to use eBay. Who are the best web hosting companies. How to collect money from your customers’ credit cards. Where to find products to sell. Etc., etc., etc. Nobody is born knowing all this stuff! You have to learn it, which means you have to rely on someone else, somewhere, to teach it to you or to write down the information that you need so you can read it and learn it.
In our opinion, one of the lowest, sleaziest things one human being can do to another is prey upon their hopes and dreams for a better life, in order to cheat that other person out of a few lousy dollars. Yet, this happens all the time on the Internet when it comes to Information.
In our Information Market, which is Product Sourcing, there is an absolute human cesspool of scammers and lazy profiteers who are more than willing to lie to your face, promise you riches beyond your wildest dreams, and then leave you with information that will not only not help your business, but will actually damage your business. Bad information can actually cause your business to fail completely.
Many of the people who do this are outright scam artists who are actively and purposely trying to cheat you. Some of them are simply lazy, and are looking to make a fast buck selling substandard, outdated information, not caring who they hurt in the process.
Some others actually think it’s “ok” to cheat you, because “everybody else does it”.
Then there are a very few of these small operations in Product Sourcing Information (only two or three, actually) who do try to put together halfway decent information, but they don’t have the time and manpower to maintain that information, and it quickly becomes outdated and useless. That cheats you and your business as well, although it’s not malicious, it’s just irresponsible.
How can bad information damage your business?
Mostly in the form of lost time. The money you spend on the information isn’t really the thing to worry about here. Most of the bad information is cheap to begin with. Some of the scammers have realized that cheap information is recognized as bad, though, and will actually jack up their prices and charge you premium money for the same worthless piles of cow flop.
However, still, it’s really not the money. The problem, as we said, is lost time.
Let’s use an example.
Lionel decides he wants to start a Home-based Internet Business. His full-time job doesn’t pay all that much, creditors are always calling, it costs money to raise two kids, and his wife hasn’t been able to find work in a couple of months.
Lionel’s not broke, but he’s not making it all that well either. Beside that, he really doesn’t like his job to begin with. So, he takes a leap of faith, and decides to invest what money he does have, in his ability to start a Home-based Internet Business.
Lionel decides he wants to sell on eBay, because of the low entry cost. It doesn’t cost him much to get started. He starts out by selling a few things out of his attic, and from garage sales around the neighborhood. He quickly realizes, though, that if he’s going to make real money in the long run, he needs to find a steady, reliable source of the products he wants to sell, and pay genuine Wholesale prices for them, so he can make a good profit.
Lionel has heard that Drop Shipping is also a low-entry-cost solution for getting a real wholesaler to ship brand new products directly to his customers for him, so he doesn’t have to buy a bunch of products up-front and ship them from his home. That sounds pretty good!
He’s now a fairly experienced eBayer, so naturally he turns to eBay to search for information on Drop Ship Wholesalers.
He enters a search on Drop Shipping in eBay. What he finds looks exciting to him! Auction upon Auction for all kinds of “Guaranteed Genuine” lists of Drop Shippers and Wholesalers!
Better yet, many of them are only $5! What a great deal!
So, Lionel spends a few bucks on something called the “Ultimate Genuine 2013 Drop Ship and Wholesale Connection Guide”. The name sounds so impressive, that it must be a wonderful source of information! Besides, the Auction promises him Guaranteed, Genuine Sources that will make him thousands of dollars in a matter of days! The owner of the Auction claims to have built this and used it himself, and it works wonders!
Lionel gets his hands on the information, and lo and behold…there are hundreds of listings of “wholesale” company names there, categorized by the kinds of products they “wholesale”!
Lionel is anxious to jump right in, so he goes to the Sporting Goods category, and sees a listing for what sounds like a large Sporting Goods “wholesaler”. There’s a phone number there, so Lionel calls it. The number rings a couple of times, and then Lionel gets a recorded phone company message telling him “this number is no longer in service.
Hmm. Well, thinks Lionel, companies do change their phone numbers. Or, maybe it was printed wrong in the information. So, he sends an email to the Email Address listed in the “Ultimate Genuine 2013 Drop Ship and Wholesale Connection Guide” for this Sporting Goods “wholesaler”.
Lionel waits a couple of days for a reply, then decides to send another Email. In the meantime, he’s busy getting other aspects of his business ready to go to selling brand name products on eBay. A week goes by, and Lionel still has no reply. By this time, he’s getting frustrated. So, he calls the Chamber of Commerce in this city where “Ultimate Genuine 2013 Drop Ship and Wholesale Connection Guide” has told him that this Sporting Goods “wholesaler” is located. He asks about the Sporting Goods company he’s been trying to contact.
The nice lady at the Chamber of Commerce tells him that the company went out of business nearly years ago. (That, by the way, actually happens. There was a Sporting Goods drop shipper in Pennsylvania that went out of business, and is still listed in many of the junk drop ship lists on eBay, as are tons of other useless listings).
Okay, now Lionel is getting a bit upset. He’s just wasted a week of his time, that he could have used creating Auctions for Sporting Goods products.
He’s not going to give up, though, so he goes back to the “Ultimate Genuine 2013 Drop Ship and Wholesale Connection Guide” and finds that there are several other Sporting Goods “wholesalers” listed. This time, he calls them all.
He gets two more disconnected numbers, one number is answer by a lady who says “Sherri’s Hair Salon, can I help you?”, and one answering machine that tells him that Jo and Bill are not in, but if he’s calling about the 1983 Buick for sale, it’s still available and they’ll call him back.
At this point, Lionel realizes that he’s been the victim of a Junk Information Scammer.
You see, it’s not good enough to simply have information. The information must be honest, accurate, and up to date, or IT IS USELESS.
Many people buy one of those junk lists you find for sale for a few bucks on eBay, for example, thinking that even if the information is mostly bad, there are bound to be a few gold nuggets in the cow flop. Some of that information must lead to real wholesalers, right?
Let’s give you another kind of example of how that kind of thinking will hurt your business, even if there are a few gold nuggets.
A couple of months ago, my Family Physician made a referral appointment for me to see another Doctor for a minor checkup. I hadn’t been to this other Doctor’s office before, but my Family Physician’s receptionist gave me an address that was way on the other side of Orlando. The address she gave me was in Altamonte Springs, about a 45 minute drive for me. So, on that day, I set off to go to this Doctor’s office. I drove all the way out there, got there about 10 minutes before my scheduled appointment, found the office building, and discovered that this Doctor’s name was nowhere to be found in the building’s registry.
I got on my cell phone and dialed 411 to get this new Doctor’s office number. I called his office and told them where I was. His receptionist told me that they had recently moved to Ocoee, Florida, which was actually only about 15 minutes from my house!
There was no way I could make it all the way back from Altamonte Springs to Ocoee in about the five minutes I had left before my appointment, and the Doctor was tightly booked, so they made me reschedule for another day.
So, because I had gotten outdated information from my Family Physician’s office, I used a quarter of a tank of gas, and wasted nearly two hours of time that I could have used much more productively.
Now, I know that doesn’t sound all that terrible. But, think of it this way:
What if I repeated that same fiasco with several hundred Doctor’s appointments, and only made it to an actual Doctor’s office a handful of those times? That sounds a lot worse, doesn’t it?!
That is exactly what happens to you when you buy junk information. For each one of the potentially hundreds of “drop shipper” listings in those bundles of garbage, you are going to spend time trying to contact each of them. Let’s be generous, and say that ten companies out of a list of 300 companies are real, genuine drop shippers. How many days, weeks, or even months do you think it’s going to take you to go through lengthy contact processes and sift through all that junk and find the few real ones?
You’re going to be making phone calls and waiting (possibly forever) for calls back. You’re going to send emails and wait hours, days or weeks for responses that will never come. All that wasted time could have been used productively on building your business if you simply had 100% honest, accurate, up to date information.
That $5 you spent on that cheap list will actually cost you hundreds, or even thousands of dollars worth of lost time. We call that the “save now, pay later” plan. You end up paying a LOT more than you save!
And if that’s not bad enough, just wait until you think you’ve finally found a real drop shipper, and it turns out to be a “middleman” who isn’t a real wholesale company at all, but instead is just some guy sitting at a computer in his bedroom claiming to be a wholesaler. All he’s doing is having you order from him, then he’s re-sending your orders to the REAL drop shipper. That middleman ups the prices you pay for the products, and leaves you with very little profit margin. He makes money for doing nothing more than lying to you.
Once again, It’s not good enough to simply have information. The information must be honest, accurate, and up to date, or IT IS USELESS.
“Time is Money”. Truer words were never spoken. You’ll find out, when you spend time spinning your wheels chasing down useless leads from junk information, that the time you wasted has cost you a lot. It may even put you out of business.
Deadly Sin #6: Forgetting about Mobile Shoppers
