Worried that SaleHoo isn't for me

ahartzell

Hey guys,

I've only been around SaleHoo for about 2 hours and I'm already having second thoughts.

Here's my situation:

I am wanting to sell electronics via dropshipping. I know what you're thinking-that market sucks! Well, I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. Back to topic. So far on SaleHoo, all I can find electronic-wise is no-name, no-brand stuff from china/japan. I don't see how that stuff would even sell - I'd never buy it. I want Canon, Sony, Garmin, Bose, LG, Samsung, etc.

Am I looking in the wrong spots or should I start trying to get a refund?

irene_salehoo

Hi ahartzell,

In general, the profit on drop shipped items is not as high as for items purchased in bulk, because drop shippers charge a slightly inflated price to cover the storage and handling of the products they offer.

I can say there is too much competition with brand name electronics and you will be up against sellers with a lot of buying power. For brand name electronics you will need to get them directly from the companies and will be required to purchase the merchandise wholesale, which will involve a lot of money ($10.000 minimum).

Here are past forum posts that discussed about this matter - Link hidden: Login to view

As one seasoned reseller has pointed out, you are not going to make money selling name brand electronics at eBay, especially as a newbie.

The SaleHoo directory contains small wholesalers, bulk wholesalers, drop shippers, liquidators and manufacturers for hundreds of popular products such as baby clothes, DVDs, cell phones, designer jeans, computers, jewelry and much more. You may want to explore other products to test the waters of dropshipping. We will be more than willing to help search suitable suppliers that you can use.

It would be too early to give up when you have just started. I'm sure we can get our way through. The SaleHoo community has experts in the business who can pitch in golden pieces of advice. Just stay put!

Kind regards,

grace-salehoo

Hi Andrew!

Welcome to SaleHoo. Is there a particular reason you are wanting to sell electronics? As Irene has explained, it's a very low-margin market, so it's a tough one to jump into. The level of toughness varies a bit depending on when you sell them though. eBay is incredibly competitive - your own ecommerce site is slightly better, although then you've got to work hard to get traffic.

Selling accessories for electronics, on the other hand, can be a good earner - how would you feel about that instead?

One thing that I always recommend is having a think about what items you have bought online (or tried to buy), and either haven't been able to find, or weren't completely happy with the shopping experience.

This is a good way to spot opportunities in the market, even a crowded one, for you to slot into. And it is really important to think of some point of difference like this before going ahead.

If you want some more ideas for doing market research of this kind, don't hesitate to ask :)

Ciao,

Grace

ahartzell

Well, mainly because I've already purchased a domain name geared for selling electronics and have spent the time setting up the cart software :-/

grace-salehoo

I see - well at least DigitalDealsOnline gives you quite a bit of scope!

What I suggest you do is spend the weekend doing a bit of serious market research with our Research Labs, Google's keyword tool and eBay completed listings and seeing if you can narrow down your ideas to a more defined section of the electronics market to focus on, e.g. Canon camera accessories, cheap no-brand digital cameras (despite what you say, there is a market for these - think of people buying cameras for their kids - there are a lot of people searching the web for children's digital cameras too by the way, or just wanting a budget underwater camera for a holiday etc), digital tv recorders...the possibilities go on.

Google's keyword tool is great for brain storming, and so is Google Trends. Just type in a really broad product, like iPod, and then that'll give you a whole bunch of related searches, like ipod earphones, ipod docking station. Then you can do a new search for those keywords and drill down even more, to get further niche ideas.

Once you've come up with a few ideas, send a staff member PM or post on the forum, and we can find some suppliers for you - even if it means searching outside our directory. Don't limit yourself to what we've got at the moment. We are more than happy to find extra suppliers for you if need be.

Happy researching!

ahartzell

Yeah - I'm willing to narrow my scope a little bit and just do digital cameras, TV's and related accessories.

However, with these, I'm still having a hard time finding suppliers. Maybe I had the wrong idea? I had this idea that I could find someone to drop ship name brand cameras and TVs, but so far I haven't found them. Name brand = bulk.

zmodo

It's tough man. I would suggest finding trends, new hot items, etc. You can use eBay's tools and Google for a lot of the work (Amazon?).

I would recommend a product that does well in any economic situation. I used to do hot items for Christmas. Basically the whole year was research and setting it up just for 3 months out of the year.

Hope this helps!

Damon

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