9Aug09 Dropshippers – Part 1

Evey week dropship chat will post several accomplished dropshipping companies, free links if you will, which you can check out and possibly use them to dropship your goods.

1. Flirty Sensations -  One of the largest Wholesale Lingerie, Fancy Dress Costumes & Dropship Clubwear suppliers to trade and dropshipping.

2. Puckator Dropship – Large wholesale and dropshipping of giftware.

3. Pixmania Pro -  Pixmania-Pro are Europe’s largest b2b wholesaler of electronic products, such as digital cameras, cameras, camcorders, Printers, Scanners, USB keys/MP3 players, other Computer components, ipods TVs, DVD players, VCRs, and more Video and sound equipments, Mobile telephones and more..

Next week, and every week after, we will post 3 more links to established dropshipping companies.

A dropshippers uk list can be obtained from iwebshop ecommerce and dropshipping solutions.

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25Jul09 Auto Update Your Products

Updating your products can be a pain, and a very time consuming one. Constantly having to check if your products are in stock, what new products there are, price changes etc. The administration for making sure your shop products are up to date can be a nightmare, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of products. An impossible task to be done accurately and quickly.

The majority of suppliers can provide a data feed containing their products. For zencart shop owners this can be a life saver. However, what you find is that the data feed is not compatible with importing into Zen Cart so manual amendments have to be made to ensure the file can be imported. Whats more, you have to look for new and amended products where you have to manually upload the images.

iwebshop has come up with a solution to this.

iwebshop will create a zencart module specific to your suppliers data file, to ease the workload of updating your products. Features, may include:

  • Automatically take your suppliers data file and rearranges it into a format compatible for importing into zencart.
  • Automatically import the new data feed into your zencart shop, updating/adding products.
  • Automatically copies the product images from the suppliers website to your hosting space.

Once the addon is implemented, cron jobs are used to run these tasks. Saving you time and money! Click here for more details.

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23Jul09 Moderators for Dropship Chat Forums

We are currently looking for volunteer moderators for our ready to launch Dropship Chat Forums.

The Dropship Chat forums will bring together dropshipping companies and people wanting to use their services. There will be forums for: looking for and using dropshipping companies, marketplace to sell your services, webmaster section, SEO section etc.

To apply, please contact the admin at the forums, with any experience you have with moderating forums.

http://www.dropshipchat.com/forums/private.php?do=newpm&u=1

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22Jul09 Shopping Site SEO

If your dropshipping items, typically you will be using a free open source shopping system like zencart, cubecart, magento or oscommerce. Lots of other systems out there but I would say those are the most popular.

To enable you to get ‘free sales’ you need to ensure your pages are indexed on google and other search engines. Free sales meaning that you dont have to spend money on marketing your site to get sales.

Many people who setup a shop to sell products from a dropshipping company import a product CSV or other text delimited file into their shop to populate it quickly with products. Although this saves an immense amount of time (try adding 2000 products manually…..) getting your products into your shop there is a big downside.

If your supplier routinely provides their product CSV file to many shop owners then every single one of them will have the same Meta tags (title / keywords and description). So getting those free sales through google would be a challenge. Google may even consider all those sites as ‘duplicate sites’ and penalise your index ranking. At the very worst not even rank you at all, not all your pages anyway.

So, what can you do about it?

If your using zencart, which is our choosen system based on its flexibility, features and masses of addons, then the job is easy! Although it will take time.

In Zencart you can edit all your category and product pages and specify your own meta tags (title / description / keywords). Even if you just change them slightly then it will make a big difference with search engine rankings.

Simply go into the Menu Item Catalog -> Categories/Products and browse to your category or product and then click the meta tag icon on the far right, change them there and then move onto the next item.

It will take a long time, but its worth doing! Even if you do a handful a day, you will be making all the difference.

iwebshop provide a service to install an addon called easy populate, to allow you to import products from a CSV or other text delimited file.

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10Jul09 So Sweet Emporium: New Dropshipping Company

So Sweet Emporium are the biggest dropshipper of Retro Sweets, Novelty Sweets, Gourmet Sweets and Chocolates in the UK. They dropship the most delicious range of Retro Sweets, Novelty Sweets, Gourmet Sweets and Chocolates that no customer will ever be able to resist!

They have a large range of types of sweets, for more information visit their site at http://www.sosweetemporium.com/

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7Jul09 How to start in Dropshipping

Dropshipping is an ideal way to sell products online without holding any stock. But where do you start?

I suggest taking things slowly, identify several dropshippers preferably ones that do not need a sign up fee. Then test out their products on ebay.co.uk or ebid.co.uk to see how much potential there is.

Once you are happy that you have found some good dropshippers to use, then look at setting up an online shop.

iwebshop provide a list of over 150 UK Dropshippers and services to build an online dropshipping shop.

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2Jul09 Zencart Security Fix

There has been a security issue identified in the software zencart, which you may be using to run your online shop.

The files to download (v1.3.8 only) are here:

http://www.iwebshop.co.uk/security_patch_v138_20090619.zip

Complete instructions are in the download.

iwebshop also offer a free service to have the patch installed for you:  http://www.iwebshop.co.uk/apply-admin-security-patch-june-2009-p-60.html

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2Jul09 Dropshipping Distance Selling Regulations

When selling items online, whether by using a dropshipping company or a normal trade account with a supplier then you need to comply with the DSR (distance selling regulations).

Info taken from the office of fair trading website.

If you sell goods or services to consumers by:

  • the internet
  • digital television
  • mail order, including catalogue shopping
  • phone
  • fax

then you need to know about the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000.

The key features of the regulations are:

  • you must give consumers clear information including details of the goods or services offered, delivery arrangements and payment, the supplier’s details and the consumer’s cancellation right before they buy (known as prior information)
  • you must also provide this information in writing
  • the consumer has a cooling-off period of seven working days.

The full regulations are here: Distance Selling Regulations.

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30Jun09 Checking a Dropshipper is Legit

When you look at which dropshipping company to use, you need to do a little bit of research to determine if the company is legit. There is certainly some out there that I wouldnt trust.

But how do I determine if the dropshipping company are legit?

Although you can never guarantee that the dropshipping company is real, there is several things to determine if they are likely to be or not.

Chances are that they have a website, so go there. Check:

1. They have a contact us page, showing their trading address and a contact telephone number.

You may find some dropshippers omit this information. That doesnt necessarily mean they are a bogus company but it should certainly be a black mark against them.

If they have a telephone number, give them a call and have a chat to their sales department. That should ease your mind one way or another, or certainly give another black mark or tick.

If they dont have a telephone number, personally I would stay clear. It makes them easy to ‘disappear’.

2. See if they are listed at companies house (all UK limited companies must do this, but granted not all dropshippers are limited).

3. Do a google search on their business name, that can sometimes give indication if anyone has complained about the company, also look for any praise posts.

4. Check at our dropshipchat forums for any mention of the company.

5. Have alook at the following review sites for any complaints:

http://www.sitejabber.com

www.canyoutrustthem.com

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com

Bear in mind that theres always going to be unhappy customers, they are just much more vocal in voicing this and more difficult to find praise posts.

Running through those 5 points, should indicate whether to use them as your dropshipper.

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26Jun09 Dropshipping UK List

iwebshop have put together contact lists covering a wide range of UK dropshippers including:

Apparel and Clothing Arts and Craft Automotive and Acces
Baby Goods and Clothing Bags and Leather Goods Books
Cameras and Accessories Candles Collectibles
Computers and Software Consoles and Video Games Cosmetics
Decorative Products Electrical Accessories Electronics
Footwear Furniture Gadgets and Gizmos
General Merchandise Gifts Health and Beauty
Home and Garden Jewellery Kitchenware
Lamps and Lighting Lingerie Media Players
Mobile Phones and Telecoms Music Movies CD and DVD Musical Instruments
Office and Education Party Pet Supplies
Pictures Frames and Paintings Scooters Cycles and Bikes Security and Self Defense
Smoke Accessories and Gourmet Sporting Goods Sunglasses and Eyewear
Tools and Hardware Toys Games and Hobbies Vitamin and Nutrition
Watches and Clocks    

This list is accessible here Dropshippers UK List.

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