How to Find Drop Ship Wholesale Products

Knowing how to find drop ship wholesale products can be the lifeblood of your online business. Any online retail business needs a consistent and reliable source of products to sell. This is called product sourcing. Finding that reliabe source of product is the primary obstacle that new Internet entrepreneurs face. It's an ongoing challenge that existing businesses face as well, as they try to compete and grow.

For new entrepreneurs and for existing entrepreneurs, product sourcing is an essential and often difficult process. Whether you sell on an Internet Store or you sell on eBay, you need to know how product sourcing works.

If you are going to sell products on the Internet, you need a steady, continuous source of those products. And you need to be sure that you can buy those products at genuine wholesale prices, to be able to make a profit when you sell to your customers at your retail price. That means you have to find legitimate wholesale product suppliers that are willing to work with a home-based Internet business, which is not as easy as it sounds.

One obstacle is that most real wholesale suppliers will not work with you, unfortunately. A wholesale supplier's business is based on high volume sales. A wholesaler's profit margin is low, so they have to sell a lot of product in order to make money. Therefore a wholesaler's main business is selling truckloads of products to large retail chains like Walmart, Target, Macy's, etc. And retailers who can't buy in such large quantities simply aren't profitable for wholesalers to deal with.

That's why most Internet lists of wholesalers are useless. You've probably seen them if you've searched for wholesalers on the Internet - "trade directories" claiming to contain thousands of names of wholesale suppliers from aound the world. The problem is that the wholesale trade directories are often so outdated that many of the companies listed aren't even in business anymore, and also that most of the so-called wholesalers are not properly researched and verified, so that the lists and trade directories are filled with middlemen posing as wholesalers, charging more than true wholesale prices.

Most of the suppliers found in those Internet lists who ARE still in business and who ARE legitimate wholesalers, will not work with small, home-based Internet business owners because of the small scale involved.

Even in the rare case when you find a legitimate wholesaler in a search engine like Google.com, even they can be bad for your business. Why? Because when a wholesaler gets too well known on the Internet, they get overexposed to millions of people, which means you get too many other Internet sellers like yourself using them, which creates too much competition for their products for anyone to make a decent retail profit.

So that's how NOT to find legitimate wholesale sources. How CAN you find them?

For wholesale product sources, you're searching for wholesalers who are legitimate wholesale suppliers and not middlemen posing as wholesalers, and for wholesalers who are not overexposed or who don't spend a lot of money becoming well known on the Internet.

That means you have to go directly to the source. For example, if you wanted to sell Callaway Golf equipment, you'd go right to the top. You would call Callaway's corporate headquarters in Carlsbad, California, and ask for the sales department. You'd tell their sales department that you own a retail business and you want to sell some of Callaway's products. You'd ask them for a list of their wholesale distributers in the United States. They should be willing to give that information to you, and will problably give you the name of a regional sales director for you to contact as well. Then you would call the wholesale distributors they give you, and ask if they will sell to your Internet business at wholesale. That is how you find real, legitimate wholesalers that aren't over-exposed on the Internet, which gives you a competitive edge in your profit margin and over your competition.

Of course, you still have to get past the issue of whether they will sell to a small home-based Internet business. Most of them won't, so this research takes a great deal of time, but it is very important to your business that it's done and that it's done right.

All this has created a real business need that some Internet businesses are stepping up to fulfill - the need for providing that time-consuming up-font research to identify real, legitimate wholesalers willing to deal with small home-based Internet retailers.

Here are two of the most reputable Internet businesses providing that service:

The first is at doba.com which has developed working relationships with over 200 wholesale distributors, manufacturers, and craftsmen. When you sign up, you gain full access to all the drop ship wholesalers and their wholesale product catalogs. All in one place, at Doba, you can search and find wholesale products, as well as ordering and tracking your product orders in one central location.

Doba claims to add about five new wholesale suppliers or manufacturers every week. Doba does not warehouse any product, rather they have established relationships with suppliers and manufacturers all over the United States that agree to drop ship products for Doba members. Because of Doba's large member base, they are able to work with some of the largest and best wholesalers. Many of these manufacturers would be extremely difficult for most small and home-based businesses to work with, but Doba provides the services that allow you to work with them right away.

Another such service worth checking out is WorldWideBrands.com who has researched and developed an even more extensive list of legitimate drop ship wholesalers who are ready and willing to work with small home-based Internet businesses. WorldWideBrands.com also provides useful tools and services for identifying what products are selling well online - regarding what products and keywords people are searching for most, and how much competition exists for those products.

Having access to such a list of pre-qualified wholesale dropshippers and low-volume wholesalers is a huge time-saver, where the needed research and leg-work has already been done, and is frankly an invaluable service to any small home-based online retail venture.

Those two sites offer different pricing structures, with Doba.com having a monthly service fee, and WorldWideBrands.com having a one-time only lifetime membership fee. Both sites are worth looking into, when considering what your time is worth and the service they are providing.