Dropshipping and eCommerce

[jayson_co]

I have been working in the eCommerce field for a while now, dealing with design, SEO, PPC and email marketing. I am at the point now where I think I want to test the waters and work on developing my own eCommerce site.

I have heard a few good things about Worldwide Brands for dropshipping, but was wonder what others have heard, or thought of it. Is there a better place to go? Can you search for companies that dropship without going through a place like Worldwide Brand?

Also, what about a simple, yet powerful eCommerce platform? I have a solid background in XHTML and CSS, but fairly limited in PHP. I plan on working hard to teach myself it, and can outsource if the need comes, but was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for a platform that may be good to start out using. I have gotten recommendations for Magneto, but I think the con with them is the $ that comes with finding a company that hosts a Magneto site without lag time. I have also wondered about Volusion and/or using Yahoo!

Any words of advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[patrick24601]

IMO Yahoo is great because when people are shopping there is NO database access. You deal with everything on the backend and publish into native HTML. People can hop around your store like a jackrabbit.

That being said you get NO database access in Yahoo and NO api access. I am looking at Magento for a secondary store right now.

 

[zorba]

WWB is the way to go if you want to deal directly with wholesalers; their list is better than any other I've seen, by far.

There are little services like InventorySource that will hook you up easily with a data feed, which makes making an eCommerce site a lot easier, but all those services have only dozens of wholesalers, while WWB's list is massive.

As for eCommerce platforms, I use ZenCart -- very customizable. It's all PHP, though, and its performance is merely okay (it's been good for me on a dedicated server, but was really slow on shared) -- and even if you know PHP, learning ZenCart's architecture is challenging. However, I may have different requirements than you -- I'm a developer, and for me, being able to hack on the code was requirement #1, which ruled out most commercie eCommerce platforms.

I would not use Yahoo for anything of decent size. It's fine if you're only selling a couple dozen products on your site.

 

[DreamMachine]

I did some research into dropshipping a while ago and didn't end up doing it, mainly because I've read that at the end of the day you can never really get true wholesale price until you start actually buying wholesale (ie. in bulk).

I did read an excellent article an it though (don't have the link, sorry) that said that if you think you can really make money out of it, ramp up slowly. Start off with your site and buy the first few products retail (yes, retail). You obviously won't make any money, but you can gauge the sort of response you will get and the size of the market. Once you have proven there is a market that will buy online, then start to source different suppliers and delivery options.

Keep in mind that all WWB is selling is a list. Apparently it is the best list though.

Oh and 95% of merchants on alibaba.com are scammers.