This may seem like the easiest part, but you have to put some careful thought into this step. I started out on eBay about nine years ago, selling electronics. My love has always been electronics and I thought this was the perfect product to sell online. I found two great drop shippers, started listing items, posted ads to draw buyers to my eBay listings, and sat back waiting for the big money to roll in. A week of listings went by and, you guessed it, no sales. Why? Because I just threw it all out on the line with very little thought about my potential customers. What are they looking for? How do they search for it? What makes them buy? What makes them click the back button and look elsewhere? It took me a good year to finally figure out that it’s not about me and my wants; it’s about my customers and their wants. Keep that in mind throughout this process and you’ll be a step ahead in every phase of your startup.
Now, to throw you off a little (and after all that talk about them) let’s talk about you for a minute, lol. What do you have a passion for? What do you sit and daydream about when you think of the perfect life and the perfect career magically blended into one? Are you a worker bee who is most fulfilled when you’re building a birdhouse, or quilting, or working on a craft that you love? The worker bee may prefer to ship the products they build or craft themselves. They may be happy drop shipping similar items to what they make, while also offering an exclusive line of their own hand-crafted items. The thing to remember here is the word time. If they’re going to craft the items they sell, they must have the time to do it. If they are going to drop ship items that can be customized or personalized, that takes time, too. Even if the manufacturer is doing the customization, it will still require more interaction between them, the customer, and the manufacturer or drop ship supplier.
You’ll notice I refer to the worker bee as “they”… that’s because I’m a touch, well, let’s call it “less motivated” than the worker bee. I’m not lazy, but I already have a full time job plus a million irons in fires all over the place. When I daydream about my perfect career, I’m not thinking anything like a busy worker bee. I’m picturing a white-sand beach with crystal clear water and an old wooden dock reaching out to a gazebo at the very end of it. In that gazebo, with a perfect breeze blowing over the water, is a laptop and the most comfortable chair ever built. In my mind, the perfect career can be done from anywhere (or any dock) in the world – as long as you have a computer, and an Internet connection. No wood working shops, no craft rooms, no assembly lines. I’m thinking about products that require nothing from me in order to have them “sale ready”. I don’t want to have to build or craft what I drop ship, so I lean more toward items which are built or, otherwise, ready to deliver. I chose children’s furniture and gift items. All I need from the customer is an approved payment, and an address to ship to. The manufacturer takes care of building, warehousing, packing and shipping it to my customer, and all I had to do was send an e-mail to the manufacturer. That can be done from that gazebo at the end of that dock, in the most comfortable chair ever built! All of which I, well… don’t have – yet.
The point I want to make is this: When you pick the products you’re going to drop ship, you really need to put a lot of thought into how much of your time that order is going to take in order to be fulfilled. The next question is obvious: Do you have the time available for that? If not, you’ll probably want to go back to the drawing board and come up with similar products in the same category that take less (or none) of your time to have sale ready. You can always make the change from employee to employer once your business grows to the point of matching, or exceeding, your current income. Once that happens, you can have more time to craft more of your own products.
Now let’s shift gears for a minute and think about your potential customer base. What kind of products can you drop ship that won’t attract scam artists, but instead, will attract honest, responsible customers? I personally like the “children’s furniture and gifts” business for a few very important reasons. Let’s compare it to what I first started drop shipping, “big screen televisions and electronics”. Think about the customer that buys those two completely different items. I found that moms, dads and grandparents were my customers with the kid’s furniture items. A very reliable, and trustworthy customer base with whom I had very few (almost no) problems, fraudulent orders, returns or complaints. On the other hand, the customer base I had with the electronics was so littered with scammers that it was very hard to decipher who was an honest customer and who was a scam artist that wanted to refuse a charge to try and get (steal) a free TV. The product line you sell will attract different groups of buyers who will be more or less littered with scammers. I don’t know about you, but I like the “less littered” option. That’s why I chose kid’s furniture.
Now that you know what you want to sell, let’s move on to Step 2: Make A Name For Yourself