Drop Shipping Premium/Higher Priced Goods - Suppliers Needed

How do ya find and get in with suppliers of the non-generic and higher quality products? I'm interested in products that I can be excited about. Not a race to the bottom with iphone cases!

Hi Ben and welcome to the forum,

It kind of depends on what product/brand names you are talking about. Brands like Nike, Apple and so on are sold through tightly controlled distribution channels only, they are never made available for drop-shipping.

Give us an idea on what you are looking for by product and brand and we'll see what options we can find for you to follow up with.

Cheers

Hi Mark,
Thanks for your response.

TBH, I couldn't give you any products or brands that i'm looking for. I guess I could say what I'm NOT looking for.
I'm not interested in marketing Chinese look-alike GoPros or trying to skim meager profits off of dollar store items or stuff easily found at Harbor Freight.
I don't expect to be able to dropship DJI's line of drones or any of the big, global brands. And I don't have the budget to dropship Mercedes, if that were even possible. LOL
But there's gotta smaller, quality products out there to work with.

I haven't niched yet. So i'm still pretty flexible in that regard. But for arguments sake, let's say Amazon ungated categories. Though I might be interested in Men's big and tall apparel.

I'm not working with a shoestring budget. But I don't plan to just throw money at everything neither!

And for now I think I'd like to stick with North American suppliers.


I dunno if that narrows things down any for you. But I hope it helps you help me!

I think that Big and Tall Men's apparel is an interesting market, but since you do have some working cash-flow and you're in the North American market, would you consider looking at surplus stock?

You're not going to find current fashions, unless you are dealing in customer returns, but I don't know that, that is such a big deal with men's fashion as it can be with womans fashion. You should be able to find last years fashion in a lot of cases, so perhaps liquidation might be a good option for you.

Is that a crazy idea?

So, buying pallets of mixed product? Or something else? I'm mostly looking for dropship opportunities, preferably from sources offering better than 5%-10% discounts(I see a lot of that in your directory). My goal is for me to not, personally, be in any particular market while I run my business. I'm hoping to setup shop in a manner that allows me some freedom to travel.

Many liquidators will sell you solid loads (specific loads, not mixed) Also, with clothing, you'll usually find that you can buy that by the box, you don't need pallet sized purchases. It does depend on the clothing of course and also on the supplier.

Margin and drop-shipping don't always work in the same sentence unfortunately, yes, it does depend on the supplier and on the product of course, but drop-shipping in general isn't known for delivering great margins on products. Combine that with the cost of selling on sites such as an eBay, plus the competitive pressures of a multi-seller platform like that and whatever margin is on offer from a drop-ship supplier can diminish rapidly to a very minor one.

If you are wanting to develop a business that offers you the freedoms as you mention, I'm not sure drop-shipping alone is going to be the best option. Drop-shipping has some great benefits, but in my opinion, one of the biggest benefits is using it to build on an already working wholesale style stock profile.

It's a cost effective way of test marketing products really cheaply and so on, but to build that sized business around purely drop-shipping, well you're talking about having a mass listing strategy I would think. Listing bulk products in an effort to convert at least some percentage of those listings into revenue.

Plenty of people use that strategy, it's been used for many years now and you'll find the really successful drop-shippers are usually employing that type of model, so it's more than possible to do, but you really need to know the products you are listing. The last thing you want to do is list blind without knowing the market because all that will happen is that you'll end up running up an expensive listing fee bill each month with low to no sales to off-set that cost.

I don't want to keep returning to liquidation if that's not the market you want to be in, but I can't help but think there might be some opportunities there for you that you can then build on with drop-shipping. We've got several good liquidators in the directory, but one I am always happy to suggest to members in Via Trading because of their customer service.

You can ask those guys anything at all and I've never known anyone not to get a straight answer from them.

I'm not being much help here, I know lol, but I'm not sure there is an easy answer for you unfortunately. If you have products in mind then you can easily just contact Link hidden: Login to view and the team there will do their best to chase up possible supplier leads for you.