Newb needs help planning dropship store

Dropshipping can be lucrative if you target it right. Remember, with dropshipping you have a lot of other people in the same market selling the same products, especially on Ebay.

Targeting focus to a niche with Wordpress is a good way to go, especially if you target authority content to that market and then wrap your products around that content.

Selling as a store takes a little more work and you may be able to use an off-the-shelf sales platform like X-Cart or something to handle product feeds, sales and then also promotion to places like PriceGrabber, Google Products, etc which can also help drive traffic and sales.

We used to dropship art and automated everything between Ebay, the store and other outlets and we were one of the largest art suppliers in America for a time. However, with dropshipping the profit margin is tight and you have to drive a lot of traffic to make it worth while. The more you automate the more profit you will keep.

Hope that helps with a little insight from the trenches

All the best

Sean

Shopperpress.com is a fantastic solution for Wordpress. X-Cart is a professional store type solution.

Automation is everything and Tim Ferris has a lot of the right ideas for self created (or re-branded) products. One key thing you should take from that is "Take yourself out of the sales funnel"

All the best

Sean

Also anyone have any experience on how much my monthly overhead will be?

haha i do that all the time. Interesting to see how this works out, I have something too I'm working on. My problem is it's probably not legal to sell here in the U.S. because it's a licensed brand name, manufactured overseas. Thank you OP for your post, learning stuff from it, and good luck in your efforts

I use Shopperpress and loving it so far.

I love handling the shipping of my own goods. Maybe because I had to do it for so many years I've gotten use to it.

If you are having people do your drop-shipping then try to get some companies that will allow you to include creatives or marketing materials in your delivery packages. This way you can capitalize on back-end sales.

This is the advantage of why I love being in control of my own delivery. You could also increase you business by doing joint ventures or co-operative marketing where you either exchange or allow them to place marketing pieces in your packages. If you can find people with related products or services then this can work out well.

Outsourcing - This will definitely help you take your business to the next level because it allows you to leverage. Just make sure you provide your workers with detailed instructions on how you want things done. If not you will waste a lot of time and be sadly disappointed with the results
I use tools like:
Jing
Camtasia
Skype
and sometimes just plain audio recordings just to convey what I would like done.

Much success on your venture.. If you need any help let me know

After doing some research I now know that there's a lot that I don't know. Here are the topics that I have and will be looking into

SEO
Data Feeds
Blogging
Adwords
Affiliates
Video Marketing
Auto-Responders
Social Media
Web Analytics
Copy writing
link building

And I only listed stuff that pertains to the marketing end. I just hope that my work will pay off. I may be wrong, but most people probably stop short of creating a comprehensive plan, implementing it, and tweaking/split testing it to maximize value.

I figure if I really learn all of this stuff, it will make it a lot easier for me systematize and outsource later on. And I can apply lessons learned in one campaign into future websites and niches. Of course it will be easier said than done.