One thing me and my household do: eBay drop shipping

What is drop shipping?
-selling another factories product for them without holding your own stock of the items. you sell an item you don't own lol. Then take that money and buy it from the factory at its wholesale low price. Giving them your buyers shipping address. You keep the profits you make.


1) get your new ebay, paypal, and email accounts all set up. Separate accounts then used for personal emails or shopping. Keep them business only.

2) what to sell? Don't matter. Everyone wants to sell what they themselves like, and would buy and use them self. But money is money. Products don't matter. Anything is good enough if you got yourself a good profit margin. So this step isn't all to important for beginners.

3) finding wholesale distributors and supply:
You can Google it and find ripoff companies that want you to buy a package or pay a monthly membership. But its a ripoff. They themselves are playing the middleman that YOU should be. Upping the apparent "wholesale" price and hurting your profit and competitive price.

This is the hardest part. Its some footwork calling local distributors and factories asking if you can sell for them on your ebay account. But its the best way to find under-used supply.
If you want this part done online then you could start looking at alibaba website for distributors. Asking companies posted there if you can work with them, or contacting ones seeking drop shippers.

4) when you got your supply. They give you an online login to their catalog. Or mail you one. Wholesale prices for you. Your like a real business now.
(Some of the better distributors or factories will require you have a business tax ID for your "business")

5) sit at your computer in your underwear for 12 hours a day reading and sending emails, messages, feedbacks, answering questions. Or continue to find more distributors and sell even more stuff.

it can become to much work after awhile. So you get friends and brothers involved lol. My mom backed out so she could start her own company doing this. More cut for me.

Sounds like a good idea, the only problem is if you sell the product then contact the supplier and they dont have it, either that or they fail to send it or send it wrongly etc... Either way your customer doesnt get what they wanted and can leave negative feedback etc when it isnt your fault. Of course they get a refund but its still a bit of a risk. I guess a good idea is to buy one or a few products from the wholesaler and test them yourself and evaluate their delivery times/service and quality of the product, then sell those few then start "Drop Shipping" as you know it should all be good stuff.

Thanks for the info though, it does seem very interesting, if you dont mind me asking, what sort of profit do you make a week/month?

That's definitely a "mini-guide" !

It's actually quite a bit more involved than that, but it can work out well if you take the time to find a reputable supplier.

The secret in drop-shipping is to find someone at the supplier that you can contact by phone and establish a working relationship with. If they don't have a "live" help desk, that's a red flag and you should keep looking.

I'm actually doing a lot of research into this right now, so keep me posted on how it works out for you.

Steve

I have tried drop shipping before. Avoid using the paid guides, they are usually either scams, or provide a bunch of outdated resources and very few working suppliers. However, trying to drop ship for sites like Ebay, Amazon.com, etc. makes it very hard to create any type of profit margin for most items selling on online auction sites are not going for retail prices unless you buy item's in bulk (which decrease the price per item). However, since this is about drop shipping, you probably do not want to warehouse goods and the complications thereof. Also, since you do not control any portion of the shipping process, you will probably have more shipping issues since you have no "direct" control over that part of your operations. I also recommend you avoid any China drop shipping sites since they usually sell "counterfeit" products, especially brand names goods, shipping costs are sky high and you could have civil/criminal liability. This also apply to United States companies who sell counterfeit goods, especially Jewelry, Electronics, Brand Names, etc.