Newby questions about drop shipping. (item quantity, different suppliers and custom label)

1) The number of items depends on your niche. What would a customer who was trying to make the best choice expect to see?

2) We almost always have multiple suppliers. Every shopping cart that I can think of allows you to split orders and have different tracking items for different products in an order. We've never had a complaint because items arrived on different days. That can even happen when everything was ordered from the same supplier and they are shipped in multiple packages. Plus, it happens all the time when you order multiple items from Amazon and they seem to do just fine.

3) Most real dropship suppliers already do not put their label on the package. Even if they do, so what? A real dropshipper usually does not sell direct to the public, so who cares if it has their business name on it? Plus, if yours is the type of site where you sell one-off products (not a repeat customer kind of site), it really doesn't matter. All of this comes down to how you present things on your website - whether you claim to be shipping it or whether you spin it by saying something like "you know our products are authentic because they ship directly from [the manufacturer] / [manufacturer's distribution warehouses]". You can bury that somewhere in your shipping policies if you like.

Depends on the niche, some sites are pulling good revenue with just 2-3 products (in some cases even one) and others need at least 5-6 categories to get to decent income (usually apparel or accessories)

Hello Eddy Ed

I don't know a lot about drop shipping and dave_hermansen seems to have you covered there, so I'll just answer one question - "How many items are suggested, thus the customer won't get confused, or perhaps there isn't a strict rule how many should be?"

My Daughter Sherri started her first IM business when she was 14. She designed her website to drop ship American sporting and teen clothing, selling to other pupils at her high school. By the time she left school she had expanded her sales to cover 5 high schools, selling around 260 items from 4 suppliers. She still has the dropship website, she runs it as a training ground for young entrepreneurs. Each year she selects and trains girls from her former school to run the business and the pupils share the profits between them.

She is 22 now, has a number of IM businesses as well as 3 high street fashion boutiques, importing her own label clothing from Alibaba manufacturers.

One of her IM businesses is a SuperStore for musicians. She has 5 Amazon Music Stores plus a Poster Store and 2 ClickBank products in her Superstore. The 5 Amazon Stores would offer over 100,000 products between them and the Poster Store maybe 8000 or so products.

We are mainly an Agency now but we still do some affiliate marketing, and make around US$2.6 to 3 Million in commissions each year.

Again, one of the reasons for our success is that we do things different to most. We read advice saying to only promote a limited number of items, or even 1 item at a time by review sites, so people don't get confused.

Have you ever been to a large Department Store or Mall and noticed hundreds to thousands of confused people???

All of our affiliate sites would offer large number of products. An example is a cosmetics/hair care/skin care website that also has a range of products for men. I has over 24,000 products in total.

Like Sherri's SuperStore for Musicians we also set up similar SuperStores. As an example we have one for women targeted to young women in their 20's to 30's. It has the cosmetics store plus stores for clothing, jewellery, sportswear and so on. In total it would offer more than 140,000 products I think.

Our thinking is that if you have a very limited range you are forcing your customers to go elsewhere for their needs, and they may not come back. Our customers come back time and time again as we cater to most of their needs.

Cheers
Lindy

You have some good answers in here already, but I will add my two cents worth. I agree with Dave it would be a huge mistake to move from Shopify to Woo Commerce.

I would add a bunch of products at the beginning to see what sells best. You may be surprised what sells well and what does not. Your store should always be a work in progress..

It can be a pain dealing with several suppliers, but sometimes you don't have a choice. As long as you have a system to keep the information straight. For the products that take longer, make sure you list it in the product description to cut down complaints.

While on products, make sure you change your titles and descriptions to be different from your competition. You can always find someone on Fiverr to do a few product descriptions that will help you with the rest.

Good luck

start of every work is hard but your efforts and progress make you stronger then before, just keep trying , forget about the income
it will become eventually.