kvmcable
Supreme Member
- Dec 28, 2010
- 1,354
- 2,823
I've been building and running drop shipping websites for many years. The key as Dave points out is to find items not typically sold at Walmart and sell items that are at least $100.
Research competition a bit to make sure your drop shipping source isn't just a middle man. Many will claim they're selling you wholesale when all they're doing to relaying your orders to the real wholesaler. Doba and others do this. Don't get involved with those companies. There are good drop ship businesses that you can work with directly.
Make sure your drop shipper has accurate inventory control that is updated daily or minimum once a week. Make sure they can provide images and reasonable data. Most of the time you have to clean up the titles and sometimes the descriptions but this allows you to stuff keywords in there that your lazy competitors won't take the time to do.
Target drop ship items that have low competition long tail keywords. Build your traffic to your website by ranking 100 of these long tail keywords rather than chasing one monster keyword or highly competitive brand. You'll find much more success ranking #1 for 100 low traffic keywords (100-1000 searches a month) than trying to rank a high searched brand or competitive kw phrase.
I find much more success in drop ship websites than affiliate websites. I don't need half as much traffic and keep all the profit.
Lastly, be an authoritative on the products you sell. 3 of my websites sell a brand of tools that are very popular on Amazon. Those sellers are beating the shit out of each other with pricing. They raced to the bottom and now working their asses off for little or no profit. Screw that. Our prices are 10-20% higher than Amazon on most of the 2,000 items the tool provider carries but we're experts on those tools, we answer our telephone during business hours, we ship same day and offer support after the sale. We get some jackwagons that want us to answer questions so they can order from Amazon but for the most part when we provide the answers we get the orders. We get many Amazon seller support calls because they don't offer support and we kindly tell them to contact the seller they purchased the item from and if that seller isn't answering their questions then please consider us for your next purchase.
That's a few tips that mimic grabapple's methods. For the most part, Dave is spot on and will lead you the right direction. I'd rather have a website that sells just 2 items a month and makes me $50 than build affiliate websites that most likely will never see that sort of return for any length of time. I have some AFF sites that bank decent but I know it's just one update from Google or a rule change from the affiliate and that effort is wasted. I've never built a drop shipping website that didn't make money and continues to make money. I can't say the same for AFF sites.
Research competition a bit to make sure your drop shipping source isn't just a middle man. Many will claim they're selling you wholesale when all they're doing to relaying your orders to the real wholesaler. Doba and others do this. Don't get involved with those companies. There are good drop ship businesses that you can work with directly.
Make sure your drop shipper has accurate inventory control that is updated daily or minimum once a week. Make sure they can provide images and reasonable data. Most of the time you have to clean up the titles and sometimes the descriptions but this allows you to stuff keywords in there that your lazy competitors won't take the time to do.
Target drop ship items that have low competition long tail keywords. Build your traffic to your website by ranking 100 of these long tail keywords rather than chasing one monster keyword or highly competitive brand. You'll find much more success ranking #1 for 100 low traffic keywords (100-1000 searches a month) than trying to rank a high searched brand or competitive kw phrase.
I find much more success in drop ship websites than affiliate websites. I don't need half as much traffic and keep all the profit.
Lastly, be an authoritative on the products you sell. 3 of my websites sell a brand of tools that are very popular on Amazon. Those sellers are beating the shit out of each other with pricing. They raced to the bottom and now working their asses off for little or no profit. Screw that. Our prices are 10-20% higher than Amazon on most of the 2,000 items the tool provider carries but we're experts on those tools, we answer our telephone during business hours, we ship same day and offer support after the sale. We get some jackwagons that want us to answer questions so they can order from Amazon but for the most part when we provide the answers we get the orders. We get many Amazon seller support calls because they don't offer support and we kindly tell them to contact the seller they purchased the item from and if that seller isn't answering their questions then please consider us for your next purchase.
That's a few tips that mimic grabapple's methods. For the most part, Dave is spot on and will lead you the right direction. I'd rather have a website that sells just 2 items a month and makes me $50 than build affiliate websites that most likely will never see that sort of return for any length of time. I have some AFF sites that bank decent but I know it's just one update from Google or a rule change from the affiliate and that effort is wasted. I've never built a drop shipping website that didn't make money and continues to make money. I can't say the same for AFF sites.