Where are those Drop Shipper Suppliers?

There's a discussion going on in the eBay forums (link here) that I see pop up every so often. It's the "where's the drop shipper for product x" series of questions. People want to know how to find them and sometimes can't understand why they are so elusive. Why are drop ship suppliers so hard to find?

The answer is easy to understand when you consider what drop ship suppliers really are. Except for the rip-off drop shippers, real drop ship suppliers are actually just ordinary wholesale suppliers. Wholesale suppliers who happen to perfom the service of shipping items directly to a business's customer. The only real difference between drop ship wholesale suppliers and other wholesale suppliers is whether they will perform this service or not. So drop shippers are just a subset of wholesale suppliers.

And legitimate wholesale suppliers are hard to find for one simple reason: they don't want to be found by everyone! True wholesale suppliers have little incentive to come up high in general search engines such as Google for keyword searches, because they only sell to trade resellers or retailers. These businesses already know where to find them and how to order from them.

Although Worldwide Brands OneSource does a pretty good job of aggregating drop shippers and other wholesale suppliers, there is no one complete wholesale directory and this is the reason why. Many of them don't want to be shown in a directory and therefore will not submit their names to directories. They only want to do business with genuine businesses and generally do not want the kind of exposure that a printed or online directory will give them.

So how do you find them? Techniques for finding wholesale suppliers are are beyond the scope of this blog but you can find ways to track down wholesale suppliers in the Guerrilla eBay Research System (link here). In general you must realize that the legitimate wholesale suppliers - drop ship or non drop ship - are not that easy to find and you can't expect someone to just hand them to you. You'll have to find them, they usually won't find you.

Tags: Drop Ship Business, Home Based Business, Drop Ship Home Business, Drop Ship eBay Business