Someone private messaged me from a forum today. This person is from Australia. He was asking if I knew of any dropshippers in Australia and if I could give him any other advice. I wanted to post something in my blog and since I would probably be sending him a one page reply I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. I’m going to write what I would tell him in this article.

I don’t know of any dropshippers in Australia, but you might be able to email someone at World Wide Brands to see if they might have a list of dropshippers or wholesalers in Austrailia.
I would suggest selling something you are first of all interested in or have knowledge of. I deal with A/V equipment on a regular basis so I’m able to dropship A/V related equipment since I’m knowledgeable in that area. If I wasn’t knowledgable on the equipment that I sell, I would sound like an idiot to those asking specific questions about the products I’m selling.

There are some products out there that take very little knowledge to sell. If you come across this type of prduct, I think as long as you can believe in the product and you can make a profit, sell it.

It is good to find something as niche as possible. Your profit margins seem to get smaller as everyone and their brother starts selling the same product that you are selling.

Okay, I went out and bought a membership to the World Wide Brands Drop Ship Directory. The bad news is I can’t post any more dropshippers on my websites unless they are not in the World Wide Brands Directory. It’s part of their user agreement not to post their lists of dropshippers up on websites or any other venue. I will keep the dropshippers up that I found previous to my membership purchase since I found all those on my own.

Now, with that all said, the $69 membership fee is worth every penny. There are tons and tons of dropshippers on their list. Each dropshipper on their list is the real deal. They screen every business that claims to be a dropshipper only true dropshippers end up on their list. My frustration as I flipped through the list is there are too many to choose from.

My whole reasoning of purchasing the membership is to find a good product that I can sell on Ebay. The products I currently sell do great on my websites, but not on Ebay. From the two product sites I own, only used versions of my product sell well on Ebay. I deal with all new products so they aren’t hopping on Ebay. I just want to venture out on Ebay more just for the fun of it. This will also diversify my business a bit more.

I heard so much talk about World Wide Brands. Most people said they were awesome. A few said this and that. But if I were to grade Worldwidebrands.com, I would give them an A+. Check them out some time.

In my last article I asked the question: are Ebay drop ship lists worth buying? I received the third list that I purchased and all that was on it were dropshippers that I already knew about. The ones I already knew about are ones that I’m leary of, “the one stop shop” kind. I like dealing with manufacturers who drop ship. These “one stop shop” guys have to be border line grey market, or just a rip off. I don’t want to mention any names of websites that I think are “one stop shop”, but what I mean is, there are these websites that say they can drop ship Xbox 360s, name brand clothing, and other name brand products. The manufacturer for Xbox doesn’t want Joe Shmoe selling Xboxes on a street corner. So how are these companies supposedly drop shipping them for you? My thought is they are either actually selling them a little below retail, or they are grey market. Anyone out there experience in this area reading my blog, please enlighten me.

Wow, I just rambled a ton. My whole point is the third list I bought from Ebay got a negative 10 on my good buy scale.

There are quite a few pro audio dropshippers. The pro audio market is much like the car audio market. There are companies who manufacturer high-end pro audio who don’t drop ship, but they usually have territorial distributors. You can just consider those distributors “the middle man”. The distributor purchases large quantities from the manufacturer and then little fries like us can purchase from these distributors.

There are also manufacturers in the pro audio industry who dropship. These are the best kind of dropshippers. I wrote in a previous article how you want to find manufacturers who dropship because there are less issues with products going out of stock. If a product goes out of stock for a manufacturer, they just build another. In some cases these manufacturers outsource some of their manufacturing. But even then, the product may only be out of stock for a week.

Pro audio is a great niche market to be in. With pro audio your customers tend to be a huge variety. You get everything from schools to the kid that has a garage band.

The one thing about pro audio is you need to have a great wealth of product knowledge. Customers will ask you techinical questions. And you really feel dumb when you don’t have the answers. For myself, I deal with sound boards and other audio equipment on a weekly basis. I know my stuff well enough to help customers.

There aren’t too many dropshippers out there for magic supplies. From my experience, with magic products you would probably want to stock your product. It was hard for me to keep up with the drop shippers stock so I never knew if the product I was selling was available. You don’t want to have a product up on your site and then have a customer purchase it to find out your dropshipper is out of stock. I ended up just selling to people I knew that needed stuff. I could check to see if it was available before I bought it for them. I may consider getting back into the magic scene, but not at this time.

It’s not the end of the world if you can’t use a dropshipper. If you have the money to stock some magic, you can still get a very profitable magic website going. Most Magic tricks are marked up 50%. That’s a nice profit margin. Besides that, most magic tricks are small and therefore take up very little space. You could probably get a magic website with products set up between $500-$1000, assuming you build your own site. It would be a good idea to find out what products are hot before you purchase your stock. That way you know that you can get rid of your stock.

Just a note on car audio dropshippers, I believe if you are wanting to sell car audio, you need to have a shop and not rely on online sales. The reason why I say this is there are people out there who will dropship high end car audio for you, for example: JL Audio, Kicker, MTX, Rockford Fosgate, Alpine, Pioneer, etc, etc. But you are getting into grey market car audio. The high end car audio companies have territories and usually require you to either have a shop of some sort or you have to purchase a certain amount of their equipment and it usually isn’t cheap. Besides all that, installing it is the fun part.

If you are interested in selling mid or low-end car audio, it is usually best to contact the companies direct. The middle man is getting a cut. If I remember correctly, they do sometimes dropship. Buy a car audio magazine and all the car audio companies list their contact info. Call them up and find out what they require.