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Has anyone tried doing a drop shipping business?

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BradClark
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Has anyone tried doing a drop shipping business?

Post by BradClark » Sat, 08 Feb 2014 11:43 pm

My wife and I were talking about this the other day. She was telling me that during the day I'm teaching Oral ESL and in the evenings and my days off I'm just sitting about the home. She kept giving me grief that idle time is not productive, blah, blah you know how wives are when it comes to money management.

I know Etsy is an easy way to make a side income. My sister does that, she goes around to garage sales and gets cheap nick nacks, cleans them up or merges them into something different. She's pretty clever, lets just say the artistic gene in our family didn't reach my DNA, it stopped with her.

I did think about those cheap t-shirt stores where you can get touristy junk clothing, but by the time you add in shipping costs to send it all the way to a customer in America or elsewhere, you are at a minus. Kind of defeats the purpose of doing this in the first place. I guess the retail stores back home must be buying these cheap clothes by the container load.

Or they are making a loss on these items, but using it as a cheap thing to get more customers into their stores and up sell them on the more expensive quality items? I've no idea how big business works these days, I'm surprised more haven’t gone bust with the way everything is shifting to online.

I have an Uncle that does paintings, brush style artwork or what ever you call that, dunno as I said I'm not an arty sort of guy. He sells them from his studio which is a small shed down the back garden. He has a sign on the side gate and all the locals know he sells them. I phoned him up and asks if he sells them on the internet, he said nah too old to work out this young generation technology haha.

I did start to look into doing some Ebay & Amazon selling. I do know that the competition is tough on there but as we live in a developing country, I should be able to price stuff at a decent enough price that undercuts the other guys in theory. I'm following an online video training course that is simple enough to follow for a dumb ass like me. I mean I understand computers and the basic concepts, but some of this internet selling stuff is pretty complex.

I'll keep on going with this, I know nothing in life is an overnight thing. Even with my real world job of Oral ESL teaching, I had to work my way up though the pay grades to get to where I am today. So there is no way in hell I'm going to be giving up that any time soon.

I am curious though, has anyone done anything like this before?

Or should I just tell my wife to bugger off and go play cards with the neighbours and leave me alone? Though if I go this route she'll be loosing even more of my cash. It'd be nice if she won a game once in a while, even enough to buy me a few cold beers would be great. :D

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Strong Eagle
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Post by Strong Eagle » Sat, 08 Feb 2014 11:52 pm

It can work. As you may know, many stores in the US stopped selling toy guns and swords. The son of a friend of mine imported to a bunch of toy guns, swords, you name it, and sold it all on eBay. Made about $50,000 doing it as he was going through college. It was a one time shot kind of thing.

You might also want to look at "The Four Hour Work Week" - http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Work-Week- ... +work+week

A lot of good information on marketing and fulfillment.

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sundaymorningstaple
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Post by sundaymorningstaple » Sun, 09 Feb 2014 1:06 am

I'm just curious as to why you are posting from New York & California but the majority of posts are coming from China. Any clue? And who would have though that your link is to a brand new site (created in 2014). Telling, isn't it. Give me a good reason why we shouldn't ban you? This is especially so, seeing you are using the nick of a Canadian Politician. Hmmmm?
SOME PEOPLE TRY TO TURN BACK THEIR ODOMETERS. NOT ME. I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW WHY I LOOK THIS WAY. I'VE TRAVELED A LONG WAY, AND SOME OF THE ROADS WEREN'T PAVED. ~ Will Rogers

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zzm9980
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Post by zzm9980 » Sun, 09 Feb 2014 3:54 pm

sundaymorningstaple wrote:I'm just curious as to why you are posting from New York & California but the majority of posts are coming from China. Any clue? And who would have though that your link is to a brand new site (created in 2014). Telling, isn't it. Give me a good reason why we shouldn't ban you? This is especially so, seeing you are using the nick of a Canadian Politician. Hmmmm?
Do a Google image search for his Avatar. Quite amazing how many different forums he is registered in, mostly expat forums of all different countries. He's in the US, he's in Argentina, he's in China, he's here. He even has diabetes in the UK, and uses a Blackberry! :D

Others are suspicious too: http://www.huahinforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=25198

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sundaymorningstaple
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Post by sundaymorningstaple » Sun, 09 Feb 2014 5:50 pm

I had already done that, and banned him. Was just being a wee bit rhetorical. :wink:
SOME PEOPLE TRY TO TURN BACK THEIR ODOMETERS. NOT ME. I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW WHY I LOOK THIS WAY. I'VE TRAVELED A LONG WAY, AND SOME OF THE ROADS WEREN'T PAVED. ~ Will Rogers

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