Dropshipping Your Way Out of Unemployement

With the failure of so many banks, large companies and now the automotive industry many Americans and people all over the world in general are finding themselves without a job or with a severely reduced income. Good luck in trying to find a job. Despite your lack of funds, the bills keep coming. Well all isn't lost. Most people have one of the most powerful money making tools right in their own homes.

Remember that computer you bought for your children to do research on, only they spend hours on social networks with friends they just saw at school? Or maybe you bought it the computer to write that best selling novel, which you never started? Or maybe you bought it because someone told you that you needed one, but you never really figured out why or what to do with it?

Well that computer can make you cash. I'm not promising you riches beyond your dreams, but you can make extra income and get started for under $50.00 USD (United States Dollars). How much you make will depend on how dedicated you are.

The economy is emerging from an industrial age into the age of digital technology. Companies are downsizing. They are opting to automate and out source. As the world becomes more integrated into the Internet, new opportunities are emerging. We have become so accustomed to working for others we have forgotten, that it was the individual businessman and woman who keep this new global economy working. We are afraid of taking risk. We forget that today's millionaires were born from the Great Depression. They understood that as large corporations fail they open the way for small businesses.

You may be thinking that if people can't afford to buy from major retailers, where will they get the money to buy from me? Major companies have major overhead. A major department store has lease obligations as well as insurance, utilities and staffing costs. A smaller business has lower overhead and therefore can offer lower prices. The digital age has reduced that overhead down to almost nothing.

As major distributors loose major buyers they are desperate for new resale buyers. They have a warehouse filled with merchandise that they have to move out. They are now willing to wheel and deal. They are not only willing to sell to you at prices that were once reserved for major buyers, but they will even package and ship it out for you.

It's called dropshipping. This is how it works; you the reseller place an order from your customers with your distributor. You charge your customer a retail price, you pay the distributor the wholesale price and they ship it directly to your customer, with your company name and return address on the package. Here is the best part; no one will ever know you are using a dropshipping service.

You are thinking that you don't have the money needed to run such a business. It's very easy to do and you can do it for under $50.00. The Internet has opened the door and leveled the playing field for everyone. Companies such as eBay and Amazon have seen this trend coming for many years and have perfected the technology so that anyone with a computer and high speed Internet connection can run a store out of their own home.

What you sell isn't important. The companies you do business with do matter. There are many companies out there just waiting to take your money. I will tell you how to avoid them later in this article. But for now let's go over what you will need to get started.

I will assume you already have a computer and an Internet connection. Basic dial up will do to begin with, if you are still living in the dark ages. But I strongly suggest you get high speed DSL or a cable connection as soon as possible.

* You will need a place to host your storefront. If you have some basic skills you can design your own storefront. Or you can go to eBay or Amazon and sign up for a very affordable storefront, which can be customized to fit your needs.

* Next you will need a domain name. (www.yoursite.com or www.yourstore.co.uk)

* Next you will need something to sell.

Let's start with your storefront. In terms of the Internet a storefront is the equivalent of the outside of the store the customer sees from the street. It's what lures them into your shop instead of your competitor's shop. Even if you use eBay or Amazon you will need to design a storefront. It is very easy to do. Most hosting companies have built in website design tools where anyone with zero experience can design a website in minutes. You will also need a name for your store. I suggest you choose several names and then go to a domain registration service such as Go Daddy and search to see if your domain name is available.

For the purpose of this article I will direct you to the site I designed. It is a working site, so if you click around it in take care not to buy anything, unless you want intend to buy. The name I chose for my site is "Pure Erotic Pleasures". No it isn't a porn shop. I mainly sell women lingerie and vintage items such as key wound grandfather clocks. As you can see the name really grabs your attention. And if a child does happen onto the site there is nothing there to damage their fragile and tender minds. So I registered the domain name www.PureEroticPleasures.com for $9.95 per year. You should buy multiple years to prevent loosing your domain name incase you forget to renew. You can always pay for additional years later, if you don't do it right now. If you want a domain for the United Kingdom you can get one for the same price, except that you have to register it for at least two years.

I already have a web hosting plan that allows me to host an unlimited number of domain names. Many domain registrars offer free web hosting when you register the domain name. You can use their template to create a simple storefront. If you go to http://www.PureEroticPleasures.com you will see my very simple storefront. I have a banner, a short tagline, a couple of photos (from one of my distributors who allow me to use their photos to advertise my site) and an enter button. I will explain the Shop Mania button later in this article.

The storefront is clean and simple. The customer has an idea of what I sell just from looking at the first page. This page is also called a landing page or splash page. For our purposes we will refer to it as your storefront. When you click on the enter button one of two things will happen. The customer will either enter a store on your server or they will get teleported to another hosted store such as eBay or Amazon. The best part is that they will never know the difference.

Since I have a hosting company already, I went to the Fantastico section and installed Zen Cart. Zen Cart is a free and it is more powerful than any other shopping cart program I have found. You can spend $1,000.00 and still not match this program. I can't go into every thing you can do with this program in this article. I will write another article about my love affair with Zen Cart in the future. You do need to have a basic understanding of html to use this program. If you can write Perl code, you will love this program. You will only be limited by your ability to program.

Now for the average person reading this article, if you have no idea what I'm talking about then this is the option for you. As I mentioned earlier eBay and Amazon were the early founders in this field. You can get a fully operational store ready for you to stock in minutes. At the time this article was written eBay has three plans. The Basic plan starts at $15.95 per month, the Premier plan starts at $49.95 and the Anchor store plan starts at $299.95 per month. Think of eBay as a hug virtual shopping mall. The basic plan is your smaller stores. The premier store is the heavier traffic stores. The anchor stores are the major retailers who draw people to the malls. They are usually places at both ends of the mall and some times in the center of the mall. I would start with the basic store to begin with. You can always upgrade as your sales increase.

Amazon has a similar plan. At the time this article was written they offer two plans. One is for people who are serious about running a business. There are two options depending on if you are selling books, music, and DVDs or another format if you are selling other items such as clothing, toys or just about anything else. Both options start at $39.99 per month. They also offer a plan for individual sellers who sell less than 40 items. This option has no monthly fee. They charge a flat rate starting at .99 cents per an item sold. If you want to try it out without any obligation sign up as an individual seller. You can always upgrade later. However, I suggest that if you are serious about doing this you may want to consider using option one and pay the monthly fee. This way you can add and remove products at will.

The advantage of using eBay or Amazon instead of creating your own site is that you have access to their network with millions of customers using it worldwide. Think of it like opening a stand alone store on a street where maybe two people will walk past your store in an hour or opening up in a major shopping mall where 1,000 people will walk past your store in an hour. You have a better chance of making a sale with greater foot traffic. If you are building your own store as I did, don't worry there is a way to level the playing field. I will go into that later in this article.

Now that you have your store, if you aren't hosting your own store go to your domain registrar and link your enter button to your Amazon or eBay store. If you don't know how to or don't want to bother with a storefront you can always forward your domain name to your Amazon or eBay store. You can log into your domain registrar and forward it to the web address assigned to your store. Some will charge a fee. Go Daddy will forward it for free. I would select the masked or blind forwarding option. This way when someone type in your domain name they will not know that they are being taken to another site. It gives you a more professional look and feel.

Now you need products to sell. Before you do this you will need an Employer Tax ID number and/or a reseller permit. You can go to www.irs.gov to apply for an Employer Tax ID. There is no charge and you get it instantly. For a reseller permit you will have to go to your State's website and learn how to apply for that. Most States don't charge for that either. You only need a reseller permit if you are buying from a wholesaler in your State. If you use out of State or International wholesalers you will only need the Employer Tax ID. You should also check with your county's recorder about registering your business name.

If you are in the United Kingdom you may or may not be required to resister for a VAT (Value Added Tax). The regulations surrounding VAT is very complex and there is no way I could even begin to explain it. The regulations and amounts charged differ depending on the product and region you are conducting business in. To find out if you need to register for VAT go to this site for additional information: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/vat-introduction.htm.

Deciding rather or not you need a business license in the UK is equally as difficult. But I found two resources to point you in the right direction. The first is a pdf download. It is a four page booklet that has some useful information. It also has a link to a government site which totally confused me. You can download a copy of the booklet from http://www.limeone.com/forumimages/mind%20your%20own%20business.pdf. You will need a copy of the Adobe reader which you can download for free from http://www.adobe.com.

Now if you are still totally confused don't panic. I found a wonderful forum for small business owners. They seem to give solid advice, but as with any advice you get from the Internet verify it before you take it as the gospel truth. To ask questions go to http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/. You may find that your question has already been answered.

Now that I got all of the boring legal stuff out of the way, it's time to find a wholesaler. Since you are setting up a virtual store from your home or flat, you don't want to store a lot of inventory. You need wholesalers who will dropship directly to your customer. Now before I go any further stay away from companies trying to sell you dropshipper lists. Most of them are outdated and useless. Below is a list of wholesalers who will dropship directly to your customers and require no minimum order. You may ask why they will do this. As I stated earlier, they are hurting due to the global downfall of our economy they need to find new clients. They are not licensed to sell to the public, so they need resellers. So they can't compete against you by offering lower prices.

Wholesalers who dropship:

* A1A Wholesale.com http://www.a1awholesale.com/ they are based in the USA but will ship worldwide. See their site for details.

* Fashion Go.net http://www.fashiongo.net/FGSite/MemberRegister.aspx they are an exchange connecting buyers to sellers. It is free to join. You will have to contact the seller to check their dropshipping policy.

* Sensual Mystique Lingerie http://www.sensualmystique.com/ they will dropship worldwide.

If you opt for an eBay or Amazon store you may want to look into these options. These charge a fee, but they also provide a service. They will automatically update your site when products go in and out of stock or when new products are added.

• Inventory Source http://www.inventorysource.com/ it is free to register and see if they are right for you. At the time I wrote this article they charge $50.00 for the first supplier you sign up with and $30.00 for each additional one. I suggest you look this one over carefully and contact their customer service for more details.
• Product Sourcing.com http://www.productsourcing.com/ they charge a little more. My suggestion is to sign up for the free service and wait a few days for their sales person disguised as a support manager to give you a call. They will try to up sale you. They have a great service to push items to your eBay store. If you hold out a few minutes they will offer you a special reduced price.

There are many other sites and companies out there willing to dropship for you. I gave you these examples so you will have an idea of what to look for. There are local wholesalers in the UK who also ship worldwide. So your location, your customer's location or your distributor's location is not important for the most part.

Now if you are using eBay or Amazon they will handle all of the billing for you. They of course will take a cut, but so will the bank, if you sign up for a merchant account. They will even calculate shipping for you.

If you are creating your own site I strongly recommend Zen Cart. Incase your hosting company doesn't include Zen Cart for free you can download a copy of it for free and upload and install it yourself. Most hosting companies offer Fantasico as a free bonus. Go to that section and you should find Zen Cart there under the shopping cart section. Fantasico will install it automatically for you. It will also update Zen Cart as new versions are released.

This option requires a little more work; you have to customize the program to match your store. If you mess up don't worry you can usually undo it. Worse case scenario, uninstall and reinstall it. If you make a back up before each major change you can resolve most problems by reinstalling the backed up version. This way you will not have rebuilt from scratch.

You can use PayPal.com to receive payment. What I like about PayPal.com is that you can accept currency from anywhere in the world and PayPal.com will convert it to your currency automatically. PayPal.com also makes your funds available immediately. Most merchant accounts make you wait before you can use funds. Sign up for a Business account, it's free to do and you have many other tools available to you.

Now if you are hosting your own site you will need customers. The best way to do this is to get listed with a shopping comparison site, such as ... yes you guessed it ... Shop Mania http://www.shopmania.com/. Shop Mania is free to get listed. They do have premium listing options for a fee. But this will give you exposure when potential customers log onto the Internet and search for an item, you will come up on Shop Mania with a direct link to your product. I suggest registering with as many comparison sites as you can. If you are using eBay or Amazon you may need to create a storefront if they require a link back to them, which Shop Mania does. Simply forwarding your domain to your eBay or Amazon web address will not work, unless you have the ability to add the link directly to your eBay or Amazon store.

At this point you are probably expecting for me to tell you that all you have to do is sit back and watch the money roll in. Not so. Even if your store is 100 percent automated, which it never is, you still have to log in every day and check to insure prices are set correctly or that everything is working the way it should. This is a business. You should treat it as one. You will get out of it only what you put into it. To quote an old programming acronym, GIGO, Garbage In Garbage Out. Give the level of customer service you would expect from any other retailer, online or in a traditional brick and mortar store.

According to Internet Retailing, Internet sales for Christmas 2008 is expected to increase by 50% despite the economic downturn, imagine that. Even in hard economic times people still need services and products. When one large company fails they open the door for 50 smaller businesses. You have the edge because you have little to no overhead and can offer lower prices.

Now you have a choice to make. You can either sit back and complain about the economy and wait for a government bail out to fix things (which will never work). Or you can fill the void left by that mega corporation that just failed. The choice is yours. I wish you well in whatever choice you make.