The wholesaler you buy from is one of the most important aspects of your dropship business. A quality wholesaler, with affordable prices and a spotless record, can not only increase the efficiency of the process but also reduce prices – giving you a higher profit margin.
Therefore, it’s key to find a wholesale that fits you perfectly. The best way is to use the internet and look for UK wholesalers and dropshippers, but beware of polished websites that claim to be wholesalers or dropshippers but are solely middlemen who’ll only create a lower profit margin for you while adding no benefits. Look for companies that do not have monthly subscription fees, and low or no initial costs. These are the true wholesalers and dropshippers.
Aside from the internet, trade shows are a good place to find them as well – as a rule of thumb, these are frequented by established, or at least reliable, enterprises. Look for dropshippers and wholesalers that offer products that you like, at a price range that’s palatable to you. The relationship goes both ways – you’ll need to know exactly what you want for your online or brick and mortar business through extensive research.
Whether you’re looking for a dropshipper or wholesaler depends on your infrastructure, capital and volume. For new businesses, dropship os perfect because of the low capital investment needed and dropshipper handling all aspects of storage, packaging and shipping. Of course, due to the relatively lower volume it’s clear that the prices would be higher. Therefore, as business grow larger in size, they tend to buy in bigger quantities and transition to a solely wholesale supply model. This needs infrastructure for storage, packaging and shipping but has lower prices due to the increased volume.
Now that you’ve found your supplier, there comes the small matter of selling it. eBay is one of the most popular aggregators to sell your goods. You’ll need to create an account, but there’s no need to make your own website to sell your products online. Amazon caters to a more organised market and you may wish to work with them. Further, AliExpress is one of the slightly unknown websites that is the nonetheless incredibly popular and tailored to dropshippers.
Of course, there’s always the choice to abandon aggregators altogether and use your own website to sell the goods. The clear advantage is the absolute control you get – you can install your own traffic light model, product viewing platform and several other bells and whistles. If you choose to go down this route, you’ll need to advertise extensively and research the latest trends and products in order to maintain steady demand and a healthy profit margin.
Dropship is absolutely legal as long as you abide to the terms and conditions placed by your supplier, but it does have its problems. While we believe the pros vastly outweigh the cons, it’s still important to note them. Dropship may lead to a loss of control for you, and have higher prices as compared to regular wholesale. These problems can be rectified by using a good dropshipper, perhaps even a dropshipper-wholesaler that manufactures its own goods. This creates lower prices for you – and therefore a larger profit margin.
