Dropshiping gives your business the ability to sell a wide range of inventory without the need to warehouse a single product! You simply advertise your merchandise through various marketing methods and when a product is ordered, your fulfillment supplier (Dropshipper) handles the merchandise delivery. Dropshipping merchandise can be a very lucrative alternative for those who do not have the upfront capital to purchase and warehouse goods. Lets take a close look at how drop shipping works by looking at the formula:

1. Your customer buys an item from your webstore or eBay auction
2. You take the funds from the purchase and buy the product from your dropship supplier
3. Your dropship supplier then ships the item to your customer.
4. Viola! Your profit is the difference between the sale price of your item and your dropshippers charge!

How to use a Dropshipper in your business

Step One – Find a distributor or wholesale company that offers a dropshipping service. This can be done by researching the internet or through finding a company through various trade publications. Do not select a wholesale distributor who charges a fee for dropshipping services. Tthere is no extra work involved in fulfilling a dropship order for your supplier. In fact, you will be actively advertising and bringing further business to your supplier…why should you pay a fee to buy from him? I recommend that you start with a minimum of three or four dropship sources to sustain your business. When drop shipper A is out of product, you would simply order from dropshipper B and so on. There are some very comprehensive dropship directory’s that you can take advantage of when looking for suppliers, I will talk more about those services later.

Step Two – You will need to get a website and this is not as hard as you might think. I personally use www.GoDaddy.com to purchase domain names and I have also used their “user friendly” website solutions. You can subscribe to several different hosting packages and use GoDaddy’s instant website builder. Depending on which plan you choose you can integrate a full featured shopping cart into your new website. Within a few hours you can have your website / webstore live on th internet without any technical HTML knowledge!

Step Three  – Advertise you webstore. You do this in hundreds of different ways including PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, purchase links, start a blog, email list building/marketing and other means. Traffic will be the main source for your sales. Probably the best way to bring free traffic would be to simply start a blog with your website and blog about the products you are selling offering reviews. For example if you have a website selling apparel you could have a complimenting blog which would talk about the latest trends in fashion. You would of course link each blog post to your website.