Is the secret to drop ship winners to keep quiet about their sources?
I’ve worked in wholesale, distribution and more recently dropshipping for quite a considerable time, and one trend that I keep on seeing is that the wholesalers and distribution guys are missing a trick when it comes to offering a drop ship service.
I know this sounds like a bit of a sweeping statement, but I have lost count of the number of wholesalers and manufacturers I have visited who do not even have a web site. In this day and age it sounds completely ludicrous. Just how much money are these guys prepared to leave on the table?
In my opinion it comes down to mindsets. For example, a manufacturer possesses the ability to make something, this is where they invest their resources and work hard to attract the brightest engineering minds or creative beings in whatever field they hope to serve. Once they have a finished product, they leave it to the sales guys to set up a sales channel which often includes resellers or partners and in some cases, direct to consumers. This is the way it has always been done, when I talk about mindset I am referring to this, since we have always done things this way, why should we change now.
The point is, everything changes. Banks have changed how they communicate with their customer’s, supermarkets now offer home delivery services and loyalty cards. We no longer view the world through a small number of fixed mediums, we have multiple TV channels, a choice of newspapers or magazines, a choice of devices to be kept up to speed with the latest news, and of course the Internet.
So I am on a one man crusade to wake up all of those manufacturers and wholesalers yet to embrace the Internet, think carefully about the opportunity for you and more importantly just how many new customer’s you might attract.
The alternative? Many more so called drop shippers popping up and becoming middle men. Sure there is a gap in the market for them and yes they are serving a market, but essentially this is because the top of the food chain is either too lazy or does not process the skills to do it themselves. Forget creating a new sales channel and manually knocking down doors, there is a whole army of sellers on the Internet crying out for new and innovative products to sell. Surely it’s more attractive to have people knocking on your door than you doing the knocking?
Come on wholesalers and distributors, get your act together! Embrace the drop ship model, remove the middle men and start delivering value to a new and hungry horde of top class sellers with expertise in shifting product via the Internet.
