Dropshipping is hugely popular with online sellers. That’s why we focus a lot of our time and attention locating and Certifying new Dropshippers every week. As you know, our Directory of Certified Wholesalers lists thousands of Certified Drop shippers (and grows weekly) giving our Members fresh new exciting products to choose from all the time.
Dropshipping offers a lot of conveniences to sellers such as low upfront costs, no inventory requirements and low risk. However, the flip side is that YOU have to do some extra work if you want to make drop shipping work for your online business. So if you plan on using a Dropshipper, then you need to plan on being more selective when you’re deciding what to sell.
So how do you pick the best products to sell for Dropshipping?
We asked the product research folks at Sell-Niches.com to put together a few tips to help answer this very important question.
Here’s what they said…
Tip 1: Don’t be stubborn with your product choices.
You can’t walk in with the mindset that “I’m only going to sell product x” or you’ll probably be disappointed pretty quickly. You’d be surprised how many new sellers have their heart set on selling (what turns out to be) highly competitive products for their first time selling online or products you simply cannot get as an online seller.
Here’s how it usually goes down…they have an idea for a product they really want to sell. They don’t do any research they just jump right to finding a Dropshipper, contact them, get their wholesale price and then their jaw drops to the floor when they see their wholesale price being higher than other people’s retail price they see online. They get upset, confused and then usually give up without ever considering any other products. That’s a huge mistake.
It’s imperative to understand that with Dropshipping, you get wholesale on 1 item. So in highly competitive markets, where other retailers are buying in volume to get deeper wholesale discounts, it’s not uncommon to see a dropshipped wholesale price be MORE EXPENSIVE than the other sellers retail price. For some products you have to buy in bulk quantities to really compete online. It’s not like that for ALL products though…
If you plan on using a Dropshipper then you need to be prepared to RESEARCH A VARIETY OF PRODUCTS. In fact some of the best products will be ones that you may have never considered selling before. Most new sellers tend to look only at products ‘they like’ or products they see advertised on TV and as a result, all they see are dropship wholesale costs that offer no profit margins because those types of products are competitive products with volume buyers and sellers.
If you’re a Member of Worldwide Brands you really have an advantage here that most other sellers don’t have. Worldwide Brands has got one of the biggest Dropship Directories we’ve ever seen with more dropship product choices than any other Directory so use that to your advantage. Start to include some products in your research that aren’t products you thought about selling when you started. Be open to selling products you may not know much about yet. By breaking away from ‘common mainstream products’ you’ll start seeing products you can dropship that have wholesale prices you can profit from.
Tip 2: Look for products with “Lower Demand”.
Sounds odd but it’s true. “Lower demand” products work better with Drop shipping because lower demand products typically have less competition from those big retailers.
You might be thinking…but doesn’t a low demand mean I won’t get many customers? Not at all. The online world is big. I mean…REAL BIG. So what’s considered “low demand” online can still mean hundreds or even thousands of customers a month. To a big retailer, only getting a few hundred customers a month isn’t enough to sustain their company, employees and other business expenses. However, to a small home-based online seller with little overhead, hundreds of customers a month add up really fast.
So when you’re doing your demand research, don’t be so quick to dismiss a product that you may think has ‘low demand’. It may just be a product worth researching further.
Tip 3: Focus your research on “Niche Markets”
As you may have guessed, at Sell-Niches.com we LOVE NICHE PRODUCTS. Why? Because we’ve found (like many others have discovered) that selling to niche markets is a great way to build a business as a NEW online seller. If you plan on using a Dropshipper, niche markets are *ideal*.
Most big retailers don’t mess around with niche products because big retailers have big overhead so they need to attract a lot of customers as fast as possible. They need to sell mainstream products that attract millions of shoppers. So for them, niche products are considered a waste of time. That’s great news for small home-based businesses!
When you start researching niche products you’ll start seeing what you’ve been hoping to see. You’ll start finding products with better profit margins, you’ll start seeing your dropship wholesale prices LESS than other retailers prices in that space, you’ll see cheaper advertising costs and the list goes on. So why isn’t everyone selling niche products? Simple. Most people don’t know how to do product research. They just know how to look for products they know, have used or see commercials on TV. When those products turn out to be too competitive for Drop shipping, they don’t know what to do next and like I said before, they just give up hope.
There are millions of products and tens of thousands of product niches you can research. There are so many untapped niche product markets waiting to be sold by online sellers. We often have people ask us “have all of the good products been taken?” The answer is NO. When you avoid common, mainstream product markets, you start to see an entirely new landscape of opportunity for online sellers. So when you hear people say “dropshipping doesn’t work” it almost always means they tried to sell a product they didn’t actually research first. Dropshipping does still work but you need to spend more time researching. If you don’t know where to start, here’s what you need to do…
First, make sure you have a REAL Dropshipper to ensure you are getting true wholesale. If you need help getting a real dropshipper look no further than www.WorldwideBrands.com. They are the most trusted source for Certified Wholesalers for a reason.
Second, make sure you understand product research and start researching niche markets! If you need help, we invite you to check us out at: http://www.SellNiches.com
Selling online is very popular these days, and there is a lot of competition out there. So you can’t expect trying to just “sell anything” and wait to see if you are going to be successful at it. You must take careful consideration of product ideas to ensure that you aren’t wasting time and money.
Once you have identified some possible ideas you need to do some more information gathering. This is where many new online sellers fail, because they will just run with those ideas instead of fully researching.
Still need to figure out product ideas? We can help! Our Directory has a section to browse by product types. We have members that use this section to see product keywords that they may have never considered. There are so many products out there, that it can be a daunting task to try to just come up with ideas. So having a list in front of you of available product types, can help you narrow down your options. Besides, who wants to set their heart on selling something, but you can’t find a supplier for it? All the product types in our Directory match suppliers in our Directory. So you know that everything you see on those pages, has a supplier for them.
