Graham Solutions and www.cargocatch.com started as a small manufacturer of automotive cargo management accessories about 6 years ago. After working in small manufacturing for a spell, we licensed our patents while continuing to manufacture our products. While exhibiting our products at the SEMA spring show in Indianapolis in 2005, we began to meet other people and businesses in the industry and started to develop quality long-term relationships with other manufacturers and distributors of similar products. So, drop shipping began.
Drop shipping is a very simple concept that has been around for a long time. My customer places an order with me either via telephone, internet or mail, I receive the order and order the product from either the manufacturer or distributor, which then ships direct from their location to my customer. The manufacturer or distributor of the product charges my account or credit card, I charge the clients’ and I keep the difference minus whatever the bank takes which is typically about 3%.
In some cases you need to be authorized to sell certain products. In most cases you must have permission from the manufacturer or distributor in order to be able to resell their product lines. If you are not, you can be in serious trouble, even if you’re doing it through someone else. Always make sure you get authorization to be able to sell all lines that your vendor offers you. This way you can market their marks how you see fit to attract your customer base.
There are a couple of different ways to approach drop shipping, one is from an internet retailer’s point of view, the other is from a manufacturing point of view. If you’re an internet retailer, you want to find more products that you can sell on your site based on your niche of products, or not, and if you’re a manufacturer, you can find internet retailers to market the products you manufacture for free on their internet sites.
We do both. We are not only a manufacture of many cargo products for vehicles, we also buy and resell other companies’ products. So, not only do we participate in other drop ship programs provided by manufacturers and distributors in our respective industry, we also have our own drop ship program marketing the products that we manufacture.
The first thing you need to do, if you’re a retailer or want to be, is to decide what exactly it is that you want to sell. And whatever you’re going to sell, you’ll want to check out the competition before investing too much time or money in trying to compete against well established companies or websites for those particular sorts of products or keywords. A great place to start is to find one product or type of products where there isn’t a lot of competition but growing demand. Or, if you’re going to compete for products that are already readily available on the internet, it might be a good idea to choose some keywords for your domain name or theme of your website where you believe you can compete.
After you get a general idea of what you want to do, it may be a good idea to speak to a professional website developer/internet marketer, somebody you trust of course, who will give you their two cents worth of advice relating to your business desires. Bottom line, just don’t jump into something, think about it, talk about it, research it and consult about it before moving forward. One simple move could make or break the ability of your company to be successful on the internet when it comes to marketing certain products or services.
Do a lot of writing about your product or niche of products, or at least as much as you can. Unique text about the products and/or services that you have will help build a unique environment for your online presence and will also help when it comes to search engines, they love that unique writing, straight from the heart. And if you do no writing at all, you’re most likely wasting your time. We’ve seen more websites pop-up with no unique writing at all, and they do absolutely no business at all. So, keep an open mind and start planning how you want your website to feel, not just look. And once you get started, keep making changes, changes of course that will benefit you, it keeps the search engines hungry to index your site if you are constantly updating/adding/adjusting things. Just make sure you speak to your web developer before making any significant changes or any changes at all for that matter, it could make a big difference, even a slight change.
Whether you’re a manufacturer or a retailer, or both, all you need to do is either send or receive, or both, high quality images, pricing, marketing material, video, product instructions and whatever else you think you’ll need to sell or have your drop ship accounts market your products online. It’s really that simple. And of course, you’ll need an e-commerce site set up and preferably a blog to write unique text about your new and existing products.
A great place to start is a website called www.worldwidebrands.com . You can either register yourself as a supplier and/or you can request to have access to all manufacturers and other participants who provide drop ship programs. Got questions or would you like to become part of our drop ship program? Welcome! And Good Luck!
Graham Solutions
619-884-8563
