The most important thing for the success of any business is trust. If your clients know that they’re in for a treat when dealing with you, they’re definitely going to spread the word about your credibility, which will bring in more customers. That’s why it’s vital to have reliable business partners, who won’t let you down and will help you to make your venture flourish. Searching for dropshipping suppliers is one of the most crucial problems newcomers have to sort out before starting this kind of ecommerce business. However, this issue might be a bit tricky.
What suppliers you need
Definitely, dropshipping has many advantages over the traditional brick and mortar business model. You don’t need to invest a huge amount of money to buy products for selling in advance, rent warehouse to store the goods, hire people to manage your business process. In other words, there is no need for any inventory. All you should have is a website where you can exhibit the products in a way that makes them appealing to customers. When somebody buys something from your online store, you just send all the necessary information and money to your business partners, who store the goods. They, in turn, carry out the rest of the tasks including packing and shipping the items.
However, if problems related to the product quality, delivery, refunding the money, etc. turn up, you’re going to bear the brunt of solving them. It’s obvious that, if you don’t store your products, it will be harder to control these issues. Thus, you have to find suppliers you could count on as if they were you. Ideal business partners have to live up to the next requirements:
- their goods should be of good quality;
- you need to be sure that, they won’t mess up something while packing and sending the products to customers, and your clients will receive their purchases on time and with no damages;
- their prices need to be low enough to ensure a good profit for you.
There are three ways commonly used while looking for a dropshipping supplier.
Looking for dropshipping suppliers by using a search engine
If you choose this option, all you need is access to the Internet and being lucky.
You can just type some words related to the products you’d like to sell and look for your future business partners in Google search results. However, it’s not going to be so easy as you could imagine. Usually, the top of Google results is occupied by well-established companies that heavily invest in digital marketing. These companies don’t either produce goods or sell them for wholesale prices - they have their own suppliers. Therefore, it makes no sense to buy from them.
Real manufacturers and wholesale distributors are extremely bad at marketing. You need to wade through dozens of search results before you come across one of them. Apart from that, even if you manage to find a supplier by using this way, you’ll probably face a bunch of problems:
- Most wholesalers have minimal order requirements. They simply won’t cooperate with you unless you buy a decent number of items per order, which makes the traditional dropshipping model impossible.
- Wholesale distributors and manufacturers are usually inclined to work only with companies that can ensure a long-term partnership. If you can’t officially confirm your legitimacy and financial resources, they won’t be interested in you as a business partner.
- Many suppliers put some restrictions such as the maximum markup on their business partners, which really hinders you to make a profit.
- And unfortunately, many of them don’t work with dropshipping stores.
Suppliers from dropshipping directories
So searching for dropshipping suppliers on the Internet is not an easy thing to succeed. However, to alleviate an entrepreneur's suffering, there were created dropshipping directories.
In plain language, these directories are the list of wholesale distributors. As a rule, suppliers presented in there have undergone a special procedure to prove their reliability. Directories are well-structured, so you can easily find what you need by using their service.
Unfortunately, suppliers from directories usually have the same requirements for their business partners that we’ve already mentioned before. Besides, you have to pay for using dropshipping directories, which means that they’re quite useless, especially for newcomers in this business.
Searching for dropshipping suppliers on ecommerce marketplaces
One more way to find a supplier for your dropshipping store is looking for them on global ecommerce marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress. This option is the most suitable for those who mean to adopt the traditional dropshipping model.
Many entrepreneurs tend to search business partners on AliExpress, which is understandable. This platform is famous for:
- its low prices;
- wide range of products you can find;
- free access and usage;
- no minimal order requirements;
- no restrictions on partnership;
However, some people think that it could be troublesome to find trustworthy suppliers on AliExpress. The reason for their doubts is the lack of knowledge about how to approach the issue properly. In fact, those entrepreneurs who carefully explore suppliers’ statistics and customer reviews are able to find reliable business partners quite easily and make their businesses take off.
AliExpress Dropshipping is the most popular marketplace for every ecommerce dropshipper.
You can import products directly from AliExpress to your shop.
You also have the freedom to change your prices and markup.
Aliexpress Dropshipping is a good way to start an ecommerce business without having to worry about inventory or shipping.
You can choose Salefreaks for better dropshipping services.
Getshop Today connects UK based wholesale suppliers and retailers using our unique automatic dropshipping tools https://getshop.today/dropshipping-suppliers-uk/
