Home Working Ideas

If you are thinking of setting up a home business and want to do some buying and selling, then drop shipping could be the answer for you. Drop shipping allows you to buy and sell a huge variety of products, without the hassle of receiving stock, holding it and actually sending it out to paying customers.

But what is it all about, why does it work and how can you sell the stock? Most importantly, where can you find people willing to work with you and supply the items?

There are plenty of companies that run warehouses that for one reason or another are more than happy to partake in drop shipping. Your side of the bargain is quite easy. You go out, find customers and take orders including the payment. You then send the order details to the warehouse who will despatch the items for you.

Any decent company who is supplying drop shipping will at worst send the package direct to the customer with plain shipping information. That is, the enclosed paperwork will just provide a return address and no company information. Some more well prepared drop shipping warehouses can actually put in the company information of the person who generated the sale, but this is not really essential. The buyer should have your receipt or invoice so should find you again.

It sounds easy, what are the problems? Well, some of the drop shippers have small print that you should watch such as hidden charges. Maybe there’s more postage than you expect or minimum monthly orders. Just read carefully before you sign up.

So the only question left is how do you sell the stock? Many people use Ebay, and similar systems, for this purpose. Make sure that the starting price and postage charge cover all of the fees involved and anything above that is your profit. With Ebay, it is probably safest and most reassuring for buyers to use PayPal for receiving payments.

Once you are established you might like to try using your own website to sell the items. It’s quite easy to build a website, you can create the pages individually selling just a couple of items per page. Add to this a Google Adsense or a scheme to maybe earn more cash whilst visitors are on your site and then get promoting the website. This can be relying on search engine visitors, so build links to your site, or it can be through Pay Per Click marketing and other schemes.

Using your own website just leaves the question of how to accept payments? You can still use PayPal, it is easy to use and provides a basket. But Google Checkout is also a good alternative that doesn’t cost too much and is equally easy to set up, plus if you are running Per Per Click advertising, link the accounts and you receive a discount.

If you want to find a free directory of drop shipping merchants or are interested in more work from home ideas, just visit the blog.