When you’re just starting out in ecommerce or online marketing, you hear about dropping, wholesaling, but also about affiliate programs, and you’re wondering what each is, and which is the best to start into.

Dropshipping is basically selling items through Ebay or your store, items that once the buyer purchases from you, they will go out from your supplier’s warehouse. You don’t have to worry about inventory, about shipping, only about making sure you have a really good and trusted supplier that can deliver on time, and of course, worry about getting mney from your customer.

Affiliate, on the other hand, is an entirely different ball game. With affiliate marketing you are doing even less actual work, because with dropshipping, you really have to be sort of like a middle-man (to take the order from your customer, to place the order to your supplier). With affiliate marketing, you can even walk away, and the money is still rolling in, as long as you did your proper SEO and advertising promotions on your site.

There is, however, a great advantage on being a dropshipper: you get your own customers, you can build your customer base list. When they say that ‘the money is in the list’, they are right. Once you have your list in place (and growing), you can always contact them later on again and again with new and related products that you know they might be interested in, since they did buy already something similar from you.

Affiliate marketing is mostly for making money, but dropshipping is more for making money and building a strong business in the process (which doesn’t mean that you can’t build a business with affiliate marketing, but it is a very different process). And one thing the internet has notice recently, is that more and more those that originally started out in affiliate marketing, are moving to dropshipping. The phenomena appeared already in the UK and in the US as well

You’re reading this, so obviously you are interested in starting your dropshipping, or wholesaling business.

Well, the short version of the story is this:

• Set up a site
• Add some products
• Add a lot of profit margin
• Sit back and watch the money rolling in

The long story is that if this is the way you see your new dropshipping business, you’ll most likely fail! There are a couple of more things in between that you need to pay attention to, and here are some of the top ones:

1. Find a reputable dropshipper – This needs a lot of research to do, simply because finding any dropshipper is not so difficult to do, but finding a good one, that’s a tough cookie. Once you found a dropshipper, you need to see what type of products they offer, what are the payment types that they want from you, how about their speedy delivery, what about customer complains. These things should be researched for each dropshipper you are looking into contacting. It might take you a bit more time at first, but you will save tons of grief in the process!
2. Possible membership fees – To be able to get products at a discount, many dropshippers charge you a membership fees. So shop around and ask them for their membership prices
3. Set up your site with the products from the dropshipper. It might be a nightmare, particularly if the dropshipper has let’s say 500 products in various categories. But it doesn’t have to be! You can build a very easy dropshipping site with this dropshipping starter pack. Very easy to use and saves  you again, a ton of grief!
4. So now you have a wholesaler, you have the products, you have your website, but how do you attract visitors (really buyers) to your site? You need to do some SEO on your site, you will need to advertise your site in as many ways as possible with flyers, signature in emails, word of mouth, business cards, link building, onsite SEO…and once you start, you cannot stop. Google loves those that always keep working on and advertising their site.
5. Now that your customers get rolling in, keep working on the site, and start the process from scratch (if you’re not already tired of it!) on a new site.

You have to keep in mind that starting a dropshipping business is not a get rich scheme. It will not make you rich overnight. But if you perserver at it, if you continue working at it and if you have fun, it will show and you will have success. Not today, not tomorrow but a few weeks from now, a few months from you might find yourself with a very profitable business that makes you some nice passive (or not so passive) income.

Did you know that there is a fast way to find dropshippers in your own niche in Google without having to do tons of research first? This tip is very useful particularly if you know what type of products you want to focus on importing in the future. Hopefully you will find it useful, do some research, use this quick method and find yourself a good dropshipping source.

Basically you need to use the trusted old Google search for it. What you do is this:

1. Go to Google.com (or your local version of Google)
2. Type any of the following in double-quotes (“): “drop shipper login”, “dropshipper login”, “dropship login”,”wholesale login” following +yourkeyword
   So let’s say if I’m searching for a dropshipper for watches, I’m going to type in:
   “”drop shipper login” + watches. If it didn’t find anything useful, then I’m going with my second option: “dropshipper login”+watches
3. Try these with and without quotes, different results might come up in Google depending on what you used

For example, you might want to sell perfumes. All you’d need to type in Google is “wholesale login” + perfume . Now have a look at the Search Results, quite a lot to chose from, right?

Instead of dropshipping, you can also use “distributor login”, “wholesale login”, “liquidation login”, “liquidations login”

So before you start your next Yahoo, Ebay or Amazon store, and you need some dropshippers, you know what to start your research with.

You can define dropshipping in many different ways, but basically it all boils down to this: if you are a retailer, you will sell the item, but have the manufacturer ship it to your customers directly from their warehouse. This will minimize and even eliminate your risk, because you don’t have to physically be a ‘middle’ man. You don’t have to buy the product and hold it until it has all sold. The supplier is the one who will take care of storing, packaging and shipping the goods. Imagine the money you are saving this way! So you might have the product images up on your website, but the actual products will arrive to the end user from maybe over 3000 miles away, from the supplier or manufacturer’s warehouse.

Here are the main steps on starting a dropshipping business, aka dropshipping 101:

• make your research (niche and then products you want to sell)
• make sure you have a website where you can list the products you have decided on selling
• advertise your website through various SEO promotion techniques, so you get traffic and ultimately sales
• once you sold the products, collect the money from the buyer
• place the order to your supplier – your cost is, of course, much less than what you charged your buyer, since you’re only paying wholesale price
• the supplier will ship the product directly to the end user
• rinse and repeat

Easy enough? Exactly. This is why dropshipping is such a lucrative business, since you ultimately make your profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.

When you search around for manufacturers, make sure that they allow dropshipping, because  personnel have to be assigned to process and ship these individual orders, which means the main shipping and receiving system may become bottle-necked. This is why not all manufacturers are keen on dropshipping business.