Drop Shipping 101: How to Identify Drop Ship Suppliers and Source Products

Do you need to identify drop ship suppliers for your growing eCommerce business? Are you in a place where you want to source more products through drop ship suppliers, but don’t know the ins and outs of the best research methods?

You’ve come to the right place and I’m excited to share my 7+ years of knowledge on finding suppliers that are able to support the drop ship business model. While there are hundreds of websites that will sell you a database of drop ship suppliers and give you “access” to their products, that is not the route that you want to go if you’re looking to build a long term and profitable eCommerce business.

At the core of identifying drop ship suppliers is understanding their business operations and who they are already working with so that you can understand if they will be a fit to work with your company as well.

In this article, I will dive into the steps that you can take to identify drop ship suppliers and start to confidently source products that will work with your eCommerce business. I’ll provide insights from my 7+ years in the eCommerce and drop ship world while giving you access to my research secrets that has allowed me to form drop ship relationships with over 1,000 suppliers within the United States and Canada.

How to Identify Drop Ship Suppliers

At some point within your eCommerce journey, you are going to run into the need to add new products to your inventory. Whether it be through white labeling your own products or attempting to sell a supplier’s already branded products, you will need to create your own methods for finding the best suppliers to work with that are compatible with your business model. For the sake of this article, I will be talking about the drop ship business model.

Quickly, How Not to Identify Drop Ship Suppliers

When I first started in eCommerce in 2009, my business partners and I did not know a whole lot about drop shipping and so we learned a lot through running into the many scams out there on the Internet. We dropped search terms into Google like “drop ship suppliers” or “drop ship baby products,” and we opened all of the links to the sites that offer you the ability to gain access to hundreds of products through a one-time fee or a monthly fee.

The sites claim that you can gain access to hundreds of products for this simple price and then can take those products and list them on your store. As you receive sales, you send the information to them and they ship it out to the customer. All sounds great when you’re reading their simple sales page, but if you get into the process of working with them, you quickly realize that it’s not it’s all hyped up to be.

Because of sites like this, drop shipping has gained a poor reputation to a lot of companies and individuals within eCommerce. To set the story straight, the reason why these companies don’t work out is because their communication with the suppliers is very poor hence providing you with out of date stock updates leading to you selling products not in stock, the pricing they offer is very poor providing you with very slim margins, and the user interface makes it extremely difficult to get all of the product data that you need to actually list the products on your store.

Needless to say, avoid these sites like the plague. Invest the right time and effort into the three research methods that I will outline below and you will see drastically different results. Instead of being trapped into a monthly fee with a company that cares nothing about you, you’ll set your eCommerce business up for success with long term supplier relationships where you are completely on the same page with the people making the product.

Method #1: Find competition that drop ships

If you are in the business of selling branded products through your online store or marketplace, researching your competition and finding companies that are working through drop ship relationships is one of the absolute best ways to find new supplier leads.

How do you do that? Let’s say that you are selling home goods on your online store within a very specific niche of the entire home goods market. Maybe you are offering a bohemian collection of home goods that is hitting a specific niche of customers who really enjoy the store that you’ve created. You are operating your business with the drop ship business model and you’ve hit a wall of finding new suppliers that will drop ship for you.

In order to identify drop ship suppliers within your niche for the products that you want to sell, search those products on Amazon or on Google and get a list of the online retailers that are selling them as well. Search each online retailer in Google and add the word “drop ship” next to the company name. Sift through the first 2 pages of Google results and open articles where the word drop ship appears. Read into the article to learn more about how drop shipping applies to that company.

If the articles start to tell you that the company drop ships a lot of their products, this is a great sign. When you find out that a particular online retailer or seller is drop shipping, they become a sourcing lead for you that you can consistently tap into.

Let me explain. Since you now know that a particular online retailer is working with drop ship suppliers within your given niche, you can make a conclusion that products on their site and suppliers on their site have the ability to work with other eCommerce companies that are drop shipping. You can then go to that retailer’s website, search the products that you are interested in selling, and get a huge list of products. Once you have that list of products, you can look at each one, see the name of the manufacturer or supplier that the online retailer/seller has assigned to the listing, and you can research that supplier on Google.

Once you find the supplier’s website, you can reach out to them to set up a drop ship supplier relationship knowing that this is a model that they can work with and are currently working with. Repeat that process across different products and different retailers and you can quickly build up a database of suppliers that you can consistently reach out to until you receive an answer.

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