Using Wholesale Drop-Shippers to Catapult Earnings
If you thought that you needed to buy and stockpile products in order to make or raise money with a website, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You don’t have to do either. You can sell other companies’ products and a wholesale supplier will send the items to your customers directly, through a process called “drop-shipping”.
Drop-shipping works like this…
- Your customer buys an item that you’ve listed on your website.
- You send a receipt and “thank you” message to him/her.
- You forward the order to the distributor.
- The distributor then packages the item and ships it for you to your customer (customized with your business name).
- You keep your portion of the profit.
What’s really cool is that you pay a wholesale price for the products, and charge your customer a retail price (that you determine). The difference between those two prices is your profit.
This is also a popular way to make money with online auctions such as eBay. A lot of eBay “Power Sellers” do this since there are so many products available this way. Over a million at last count!
How can you use this for fundraising?
You can employ a money raising website using these approaches:
- Target your local market – spread the word to people in your community about your cause and show them how they can help your group by buying merchandise through your site. If you feature products with solid demand, your customers will gladly purchase the items through your site, especially if they know it’s for a good cause. This works best if your fundraiser group is large like a school or church because you have a built-in customer base that is easy to communicate with.
- Target a national audience – build a high traffic site based upon a particular niche. ( click here to see some examples ) Then you can make money from visitors around the country, and possibly around the world. This can work for groups of any size since you’re not depending on the group itself for the bulk of your traffic. For some great ideas, and a free 5-day e-mail course on how to do this, see the last page in this website fundraising series.
Or, you could do both.
After you create your website, choose several products that your target group will be interested in and add those products to your site. If you have a very specific niche and you only have a few products to sell, you can have your visitors buy them with a simple link to PayPal.
If your site features lots of products, you may be better off with a shopping cart. These are available through many web hosts ( see our recommendation here ).
Where to find the best wholesale drop-shippers
Worldwide Brands – provides a high-quality, manually-compiled directory of verified drop-ship distributors. Each distributor will single-item drop ship product directly to your customer — no minimum orders required, and no stocking of products. Choose from over a million different products.
Next: No products at all – fundraising with affiliate programs
Or jump to another page in the series:
- Wholesale products drop-shipped to your customers.
- Fundraising with affiliate programs.
- Turbo-charging sales of traditional fundraising products.
- Google Adsense – one of the coolest ideas ever.
- Where’s the best place to start?
