Finding Suppliers/Dropshippers

Hello Everybody

I am currently delving into the world of E-commerce stores at the moment. I have been messing about trying to learn a little here and there about SEO using adsense and affiliate marketing. I have a spare month or two now where I'm only working part-time before I have to go back to doing University full-time alongside my job.

I want to take some action and build an e-commerce store. I'm happy for it to be a failure as long as I learn some valuable information from all of this. In order to avoid wasting a massive amount of time I'm going to use a sort of micro niche approach to the site. As a mechanical engineer I intend to create my own products in the future along with some informational products, but for now I feel reselling would give me good experience.

Because my first one or two e-commerce sites aren't going to be huge sites it would be a bit silly to start buying clothing in wholesale and then either renting storage space or paying for fulfillment. Rather, it would be ideal for me to use a company that offers a drop-shipping service. This is where the headache starts.

There are a great deal of "drop-shipping" websites out there that supply a "drop-shipping" service. I'm a bit wary of them though. Firstly, because you're not meant to get your products drop shipped off of a "drop shipping company", you are meant to get them off of wholesalers. I thought that was meant to be the whole point behind it.

The dropshipping websites out there seem a bit scammy anyway. I don't like the idea of having to pay them before you get to see who the suppliers are. The other reason it doesn't work for me is that I'm looking towards smaller niches. It would seem to me that the products on these websites would be massively competitive (because everybody is trying to drop ship the same stuff).

My niche is in the clothing niche, and it's based on a particular style of clothing and a particular type of clothing e.g. trousers, skirts, hoodies (as I said micro niche).

I have tried going through suppliers out of the yellow pages in the UK and I'm not having the best of luck. I have looked on AliBaba but I'm sure it would be way too expensive and too slow to do P&P from places like India and China to the UK. I can see there are people selling this stuff online on ebay, and I have a hunch that they are also dropshipping product. How


Does anybody have any suggestions or tips for me for finding the best possible suppliers for dropshipping online. Any tips or help that you can give me? Anything to watch out for or avoid completely?



I have another related question as well. Another niche I am looking into later on is a small niche for very expensive mechanical equipment. My best bet would be to go directly to the manufacturers themselves and speak to them I would guess. Do you have any tips for me for how to approach them on this subject? Or about which angle to take when speaking to them.

Thanks a lot for any feedback given. Sorry about my grammar and unstructures writing in this post. Hope it isn't too confusing, I have to rush it as I'm just dashing out to work now.

Thanks a lot for any feedback given guys