Dropshipping Business


by Mat Siltala - Date: 2007-04-18 - Word Count: 740 Share This!

If you are thinking about starting an Internet business that involves dropshippers, suppliers and selling products online then I want you to consider what I think are the 5 most important steps you must take to launch your business the right way.

Establish a Business Entity: Even if you do not know what product line you are getting into, it is critical to establish a business name and receive a Tax ID in order to work with a dropshipper. Most dropshippers will not work with you if are not a registered legal business entity of some sort. If you establish a Corporation that is more general (general in name and not specific to the product line and website idea you have), then you can always establish your specific websites as DBA's (or doing business as) under your main Corporation.

Product Line: Think about getting into a product line you know something about. I hate to put it like this - find a niche, but you really do need to find something that you are passionate about. When you go to build the website including content, product descriptions, finding images and other elements you must have some knowledge to be believable to the potential customer. They will be able to sniff it out from a mile away if you have no clue what you are doing or talking about.

Dropshipper: Establish a good relationship with your dropshipper. Make sure you don't put all your eggs in the basket of the first dropshipper you find. Take in to consideration what your pricing is and any rules they have, and compare that to other dropshippers you may have found. Once you have this information then go to places like eBay, and do an advanced search for completed auctions and find out what some of your products are selling for. You can also go to Google and other major search engines and type in keywords that would bring up the competition sites, and they you can get into their pricing and see what they are selling the products for (and compare that to what you have access to). If it does not look good then you need to keep looking for another dropshipper, or consider another product line that you are interested in.

Extensive Analysis: Proper keyword research and analysis including website competition analysis. If you have no clue what the competition is doing then they are already many steps ahead of you. You need to look over their sites with a fine tooth comb (as the saying goes) and find out things like; keywords they focus on, product pricing, navigation, site design, general information, page rank, how many pages do they have indexed on the engines, what is their cache date, how old is their domain name etc.. but those are some of the biggies that are a must to look into.

Website Hosting, Domain Name and Designer: Once you have figured out what product line you are pursuing then there is no reason to wait on purchasing a hosting plan, domain name, and website designer. It is best to find a keyword or phrase that best represents your site when considering a domain name. It will also be easier to rank for your name and that keyword phrase if it is included in your domain name. Most people think that Go Daddy is the cheapest (or best) place to purchase a domain name, and they are a great place, but not the only place. Once you have a web host plan and domain name you need to start thinking about the website design. Most really good hosting plans offer free web building services, but you have to have some background in web design to really make them work for you. There are places like Templates Box (just Google it) to find really great web site templates (designs) and there are open source (free) shopping cart systems out there like OSCommerce and Zen Cart that you can learn to customize. If you do not want to tackle website design yourself then here are some free lance web sites that can build the entire website (from start to finish) for you: elance.com, guru.com and getafreelancer.com

I really hope this gives you some ideas, and a good start if you are looking to get into a dropshipping business. If you follow these steps it will make establishing your business so much easier and help you avoid some headaches and possible pitfalls.


Related Tags: dropshipping, dropshipper, dropshipping business

Matt Siltala has been doing business online since 1999 and has many people set up dropshipping business correctly. He has also been heavily involved with dropshipper companies like The Shipper in order to help them better educate the businesses that use their services.

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