Selecting the best niche to focus on and the best wholesale products to drop ship is very important and critical for any drop shipping business. Did you know that selecting a good item to sell can make or break your business! Many people feel frustrated when comes to chose a wholesale product and niche to focus on. In this chapter I will show you some tips to help you pick valuable and profitable products to drop ship.

5 Tips to choose the best wholesale products

Let’s start first of all with the following 5 tips to help you choose the best wholesale products to drop ship:

 Tip #1: Start Small

Many people often tend to drop ship big products that they think it will make them more profit like for example TVs or Jewelry. I do not say you should avoid drop shipping expensive products, but you know how hard it is to make people trust you and give you their credit card number on small purchased items. How about big items?

Remember first to build good reputation with customers. Sometimes the best wholesale products may be the ones that sell for $10 to $50 which tend to sell very well. Money should not be always in the big box!

Tip #2: Consider Shipping

when you sell a stuff online, you need to consider how shipping will affect the price.

The price of the item plus shipping cost should be equal to the same item as if customer buys it from traditional physical store. Obviously there are exceptions, for example if an item is very rare or is not currently sold in any  local store, than it will have a very good demand online.

Generally, big drop shipping items like refrigerators don’t work successfully because of the shipping cost such items may have.

Tip #3: Specialize in one niche

It is hard to compete with the variety of products available online from ebay, target , amazon and many more. However, you can easily compete in a specialized niche market.

Focusing on one niche will give you more time for better marketing, SEO, and it will be easier for you to build reputation. Remember the rule that says “start small and grow big”. Do you know that amazon was started as book store only and now Amazon is the biggest internet store!

Tip #4: Be different:

It is good to learn from other established websites like amazon and ebay but remember your website should be different with its own unique value. If your site is exactly like other websites out there, how are you going to compete?

 Tip #5: Get the idea out of yourself!

If you run out of ideas of a wholesale products to drop ship,  you may  look at the items you’ve bought online in the recent years. Ask yourself: What items did you buy? Why did you buy it? And why you bought online instead of local mall? Why did you select x website? How did you find the product? Analyzing your own purchases can give you product ideas for your drop shipping business. it can also help you build your business plan and marketing strategy.

Steps to pick the right wholesale products

Step One: Measure Market Demand

To be honest with you, if you do not measure the market demand for your selected product you will not be selling much. So you must measure the market demand for your selected product and understand the supply and demand of it. Following websites help a lot in understanding the supply and demand of your product:

Google Keywords Planner: using keywords research tool like Google keywords planner is indispensable for any marketers. It helps you measure the demand for any item on the internet. Here in this post it is hard to cover Google keyword planner comprehensively, however there is a geek guy called Brian Dean who is an expert in backlinks and seo. On his website backlinko he has written a shining guide on keywords research. Personally I benefit a lot from it. Here is the url of the Google keywords planner guide:

http://backlinko.com/google-keyword-planner.

Ebay and Amazon Categories: ebay and amazon are great websites to get profitable niche ideas from. They are among the best places on the internet to know what people are buying and selling and what is trending nowadays. Both websites has lots of categories to browse like Fashion, Electronics, books and more.

Compete.com: compete.com can give you accurate and analytic information about any website on the internet. You can dive into helpful info like traffic, demographics, SEO and many more.

Google trends: Google trends is a great slight tool you can use to find out lots of information about an item or about certain keywords. Google trends can measure demographics, search volume, and if the item has shown an increase in searches over a certain period of time.

Watchcount.com: If you open this website you will see a headline or slogan states that “What’s most popular on eBay, as voted by ebay users”. So watchcount.com is a great website to discover how many watchers a certain item is getting and what items are selling the most on ebay.

Step Two: Analyze Your Niche

The following considerations will help you analyze your niche and therefore select the best wholesale products to drop ship:

Selling price: The selling price is very significant, so you are highly recommended to smartly pick a product with price not very much and not very little. I proposed going between $50-200. Remember, the less expensive the product is, the less calls you will get and the more expensive the product is, the more customer service calls and inquiries you will expect to have.

Market Size: If you are fishing in a big pool you are likely to pick lots of fishes, on the other hand if you are fishing in a small pool you will get little number of fishes. This is exactly applies in marketing. Therefor, it is important that you go for big market size and avoid small ones. In small market size you might encounter problems like getting visitors to convert, lot of competition and higher PPC fees.

Market Age: You must consider the age in your marketing plan. Are your products fit into seniors people or young. While most people nowadays are web savvy there are seniors out there that still lack the experience shopping online. Furthermore, they afraid of reveling their credit cards numbers online. While people younger than 18 might not have a credit card. So if your drop shipping business target seniors or young you have to tailor your plan for such customers.

Product shortage on local stores: Are your products easily available in local malls or stores? If yes, it may be hard to sell electrony because who wants to waste money on shipping and wait for an order to arrive when he/she can get it easily at the local store?

Product Obsolescence: Ideally, you are better to sell an item that won’t go out of fashion, become obsolete or outdated. For example it is not smart to establish new online store that sells accessories for iphone 5 while the new iphone 6 replaces the old one, some of your accessories may become obsolete. Ideally you want to target product that is expected to stay longer in market and then build your website, contents and marketing plan around it.

Product Seasonality: There are many products that designed for special season like for example winter fashion and summer fashion. So you have to carefully consider the season factor.

Product Size & Weight: the more the product weight is the more shipping fee it will cost. If your products need much shipping and handling fees then you may face two big pricing issues – either you will have to boost your product’s price to cover your loss in shipping or you have to charge a lot for shipping itself. Both situations will let your customers to abandon your shopping cart and to unfortunately move to your competitors.

Profitability: Profit is the main reason why you are in business. While some products like accessories and fashion can make you 75-100% profit. However, most products are not the same in term of profitability. So, you want to select a product that can make at least 20-30% profit. With this good profit, you will at least have the ability to compete in the market and make enough money to stay for long time.

Passion: Following your passion can always be helpful and affect positively on your business growth. But notice that following passion does not mean that you have to fall in love with a product before you start marketing it. In many cases the passion will come side by side as you see profit’s rolling in.

Lots of accessories: In general, retailing low priced accessories have higher margin than those of high priced items. For example mobiles stores may only make a 5% margin on the latest mobile released; they’ll properly make a 100% or 200% margin on the accessories that come with that mobile.

People usually negotiate the price of big items and care less about the price of smaller accessories.To show you real life example, you may visit 3 stores or more to determine the best price for an expensive mobile. But when comes to buying simple accessory like mobile’s cover or case which may cost around $10 – $30 you will likely to visit one store and in many cases you will get it directly from the same store you purchased the mobile phone from.

Therefore, selling items with many accessories is an excellent technique to improve your overall margin.

Finally, I wish by now you’ve got some helpful tips on how to select the best wholesale products for your drop shipping business. sure there are other tips you will discover once you begin your actual business. If you have other tips please add your commend below and do not forget to like and share the post with friends.

Summary

Article Name

Picking wholesale products to drop ship

Description

Selecting the best niche to focus on and the best wholesale products to drop ship is very important and critical for any drop shipping business. Do you know that

Author

Amin Saleh