The Allure

A flashy website that hits every target marketing focal point gets your attention. It’s splashed with pictures of name brand items while boasting the huge profits that they are currently selling for on auction sites such as Ebay along with testimonials spinning tales of the amazing success that average people that only spend a few moments a day on it are having. It walks you through a simple step-by-step process how to sell their wares, assuring you that there is really no way that you can NOT make money doing this. All the while, continuously throwing out the fact that they have over 500,000 products available to be sold at discounted wholesale prices.

After reading and taking in all of their pitches, and researching the company’s history and credibility, the relatively small price ($49 in my case) for the smallest membership package doesn’t seem like such a gamble.

The Actual Products Available To Be Sold

So you decide to give it a shot. You sign up and pay your price of admission. With great anticipation, you begin to pour over the vast catalog of the promised poplar brand name items at rock bottom prices. Unfortunately, you find a lot more cheap looking, off brand crap than anything else. Finally, you find one the promised name brand products shown on the website! Unfortunately, the excitement is very short lived, because either the description lists the item as ‘Refurbished’ or it is ‘Out of Stock’.

The Rock Bottom Prices

After you come to the realization that most of the products aren’t what you thought they were, you go back and check out some of the more saleable things offered. There you find a number of different prices, a List Price, your Wholesale Price, a Handling Charge, and Shipping Charge and finally a Total Price. Now this wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the Total Price wasn’t more than the List Price you could get the same thing at the store for.

Now this is how this works, you take your price, then add how much profit you want to make on the item. That is the Listing Price that you sell it for. After your customer buys it, that is if you can find one, they send you the money.  You then add the your wholesale price, all of the handling and shipping charges along with the customer’s shipping information. Once you have added all of the that up and sent it out,  everything that is left (if there is anything) is your Profit!  Wait, before you get too excited, you need to make sure that once you actually find a way to sell something, that they still have it in stock.  You’re not out of the woods yet though. Once you’ve placed the order and the product is indeed in stock, you need to make sure that it gets to the customer and the customer is happy with it. If any of those things don’t work out so well, then you get to start the long painful process of trying to get the company to refund the customer’s money before they kill you with negative feedback. If you do manage to leap over all of those hurdles, then break out the champagne and bask in your profits.

Customer Service

The customer service isn’t always what is promised. In my experience, after encountering my first problem, I’ve found that the award winning phone support I read about is at a cost of an additional $99. This little fact isn't really revealed until you search their website for the phone number. Now if I already paid $49 to join, and am really not happy with the company, why would I pay another $99 for the privilege to have someone put me on hold? My only other option was to send them a message on their website that took on average three days for them to reply with the most vague and general response possible. Usally leaving me with more questions than I did to begin with.

Staying Competitive On Ebay

This shouldn't be that hard right? I mean after all you do have the advantage of your discounted wholesale prices.  Before I ever listed a product, I always looked to see what it was selling for on Ebay.  Almost everything I looked at, especially anything electronic, I found a whole list of the same items listed for quite a bit less than what I could even get them for. I mean the exact same items. Since there are a ton of drop-shippers out there, a lot of them use the same products, with the same pictures and descriptions. The only thing that isn't the same is the prices. Now what are the chances of selling a cheap off brand MP3 player when there are 15 or 20 of the exact ones selling for $15 less than your discounted wholesale price? Now this can actually end up costing you more money that you think. Like a lot of auction sites, Ebay charges you a listing fee for each item you list. The fee is based on the amount that you set the opening bid to be. Most of the time the fees aren't that much, but if you aren't selling the items you are listing they add up pretty quickly. If you're not careful, you can end up paying out more money than you've made at the end of the month.

The Honest Reality Of The Whole Thing

I’m not telling you that a person cannot make money with a drop-shipping business. I’m not telling you that all drop-shipping companies are like this, but after I joined DROP SHIP DESIGN (www.dropshipdesign.com), I’ve done quite a bit of research on drop-shipping and this describes just about every company I’ve looked into. I've also learned that a lot of the different companies out there are all owned by the same parent company and use the same product list. If you think that this is something that you need to be a part of, do your research and start with the smallest membership package available. You can always upgrade your package at anytime, but this will keep you from getting in too deep just to find out that the company is a joke.

Take a look at www.dropshiponauction.com before you spend a dime on anything. This is the product-ordering site for several companies including DROP SHIP DESIGN. Yeah folks, these are the 500,000 brand name products at rock bottom prices that you can retire on.

Good Luck!