Product sourcing - find trustworthy wholesalers and dropshippers and avoid the scammers

Last summer, prompted by a neighbor who has the UPS guy at her front door even more than we do, my wife decided to get into "selling stuff online". It's not just beanie babies on eBay apparently.

There's a lot to learn about - wholesalers, drop shippers, light bulk, liquidation sales, importing and weird new acronyms like MAP and MOO and what they hell does "keystone+20" mean? *

The trick of course, other than getting off your butt and actually doing something rather than talking about it, is finding things to sell. Buy cheap, sell high, right? Yeah...not so easy.

Day 1, we're looking around on Google for wholesalers. There are millions of them, awesome!! No minimum order, no upfront costs, etc, etc. But comparing the prices to those on ebay it looks like people are selling them for just 10% markup or in some cases below cost...ouch.

Turns out, the wholesalers all over Google..well, they aren't wholesalers.

They're regular Joe's who have an account with a wholesaler and are just acting like one themselves while they take their cut off the top. Middlemen - one step up from spammers, but still below pondscum!

Anyway, to cut a loooooong story short, there are a lot of scams, and a few good companies. One impressed me a lot with their website and tools, but what really convinced me was the after sales content that we've been sent.after giving them our money. The first to arrive was a five part video series interviewing the "Queen of eBay" Sydney Johnston which I thought was pretty fricking amazing.

So, in my opinion a trustworthy company and one I now wholeheartedly recommend.

They give a lot of good content away up front; you'll find the links useful if you're into this sort of thing. I signed up as an affiliate, so although this is all free, if you ever sign up after clicking these links they're going to make me filthy rich. Or something.

The first thing I did was try out the tool itself, that's really the most important part. Then I took the tour, then I watched some video, read the books, listened to the show - all listed on this page.

* Keystone in the wholesale business means a 50% wholesale discount or 100% markup (however you want to look at it), so selling at "keystone+20" means you buy at $100, sell at 120% markup, or $220.