Are you searching for wholesalers on your own? The Search Engines are overwhelmed with fake 'wholesale drop ship' and 'wholesale products' sellers. These fake Suppliers pretend to be a wholesale distributor, but are really just a fake wholesale merchandise scammer that's known as a Middleman. There are others that call themselves "Dealer Networks" of "millions of brand name products". They are lying to you. They make their money by getting in between you and the real wholesale distributor, charging you falsely inflated prices. This means your business makes less money, if any at all.

There are also a lot of absolutely worthless lists and directories of so-called 'wholesale products' and 'the ultimate drop ship directory' advertised on the Internet. They look real. They promise you instant success, 'guarantee' that you'll be among 'the small percentage who will succeed', then they take your money and leave you with useless mis-information.

I am an eBay Gold PowerSeller and have made a full-time living on eBay since 1999. About 1/2 of my products are profitably dropshipped. Myself, and several top eBay sellers I know, have had long and varied experience with both eBay and web site drop shipping programs. In our opinion, the vast majority of them are worthless and many are pure scams.

What is drop shipping?

If you know what drop shipping is, you can scroll down to the next section. But, if you don't --here is a quick tutorial:

Simply put - drop shipping is selling something you don't yet own. That may sound illegal or unethical --but in principle it's not. A drop shipper is usually a middleman that owns either a real or virtual warehouse where he stores products. He gives you photos and descriptions of the product and sets a 'wholesale" and a "retail" price --or sometimes you can set the retail price yourself.

You then offer the product on eBay, or your web site, at the retail price. When and if the product sells (a big "if" depending on the price) you send the wholesale cost and your customer's address to the drop shipper. The drop ship company then ships the product to your customer. If you are lucky they will usually ship the correct product and ship it right away. In our experience we have had incorrect products, poorly packaged products, late products and even no product shipped to customers by many drop shippers.

If you Google the term drop shipper you will get hundreds of responses. You might think that with so many companies in the business this must be a great deal.

The advantages of drop shipping are many: No inventory, positive cash flow, wide variety of products and so on. But what good are these advantages if you can't sell the items.

By now you may be thinking that you can't make money drop shipping. Actually you can, and we will show you how --so keep reading.

It is most important that you understand what "wholesale" is. Real wholesale companies sell products in large quantities. If a drop shipper is buying at wholesale --he can't really afford to sell at wholesale can he? Otherwise how would he make a profit? So drop ship companies sell at a price higher than wholesale. Also, large retailers buy in very large volume.

Let's take the example of the Garmin GPS navigation units. A large retailer who buys units in case lots of 144 at a time might get a price of $90 a unit. A drop ship company can not afford to buy in that quantity, so they may only purchase a case of 12 at a time. This price may be $110 each. Now they have to mark it up to sell it to you at a profit, so they charge $130 each + a $5.00 drop ship fee. Your cost now is $135.

If you are selling on eBay, you need to make at least 8% to cover eBay and PayPal fees and say another 10% profit for yourself so you list it for $164. OK - this all sounds good until you go on eBay and see others selling them for $149. What ??? You see, the big retailer who buys in gross-size lots is getting his for $90 each and he can sell them for $149 and make $59 a unit. If someone does buy yours (highly unlikely but it could happen), you will make $16.40 after eBay and PayPal fees.

In addition to this, many drop ship companies charge a monthly membership fee, or a one-time sign-up fee of several hundred dollars, while others will mark up the shipping cost by 200% or even 300%.

The worst deals are the companies that charge you money to join the program and give you a ready-made web site where they claim you can make millions selling their products. Think about this for a minute. Let's say this company has sold several thousand identical web sites all with the same products. How are people going to find your web site. And if they do, your web site will still not have the lowest prices.

There are several reasons why these web sites are a bad deal. First of all Google, and the other major search engines, peanalize web sites that have identical format & content and they peanlize web sites further if too many similar web sites reside on the same server. These pre-made web sites all suffer from these problems --so you can forget about Google or Yahoo ever finding you.

There is one more problem with many of the membership drop ship sites. Many of them are offering fake or counterfeit merchandise that can get you kicked off of eBay for listing it.

Is there a way to drop ship profitably?

When buying wholesale, the closer you can get to the manuafacturer of a product, the lower your price will be. If you can buy directly from a manuafacturer, instead of a middleman or distributor, then you will realize the absolute lowest price.

It is not generally known but there are thousands of small and medium sized manufacturers in the US and Canada, that will drop ship their products directly to your customers.

Our Recommended Drop Ship Resource

I usually try to recommend at least two sources or programs in each category, but we could only find one legitimate drop ship source in this category.

WorldWide Brands OneSource.

The key word in that title is "OneSource." OneSource connects you with actual manufacturers and real wholesale distributors who have all been contacted by WorldWide Brands in advance and agreed to drop ship to eBay and small web site sellers.

The owner of the company,Chris Malta, is the product sourcing editor for eBay radio. Chris and myself (www.skipmcgrath.com) are the only two information sellers allowed to exhibit at eBay Live.

Chris shows you where to find and how to work directly with real Manufacturers and Wholesale Suppliers who Drop Ship. These manufacturers and their direct distributors will all ship their products right to your customer's door, and you won't spend a CENT for inventory, drop ship fees or warehousing.

In addition to drop shippers, OneSource also includes hundreds of other real wholesalers who will sell to you in small quantities and you get a free research tool that shows you how popular the product is on eBay before you decide to buy or list it. This is the only drop ship sourcing program that I currently recommend.

Your Directory gives you REAL-TIME UPDATES of all the Drop Ship Wholesale Supplier Information. They ADD NEW Suppliers every single business day of the year, and you will see them immediately.

All that constantly growing information is yours for a one-time fee, for life!

Click here to access the Drop Ship Source Directory.