Mixed Vendor Dropshipping (E142)

Sponsors: Drip – Get a free demo of Drip using this coupon code!Spark Shipping – Dropshipping Automation Software Transcript: Charles (00:00): In this episode of the Business of eCommerce I talk about mixed vendor drop shipping. This is a business of eCommerce episode, 142. Charles (00:17): Welcome to the business of eCommerce. The show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow a eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. And I'm going to tell you about mixed vendor drop shipping. What we'll cover in this episode is how to use Mixpanel drop shipping, to beat out your competition in both product, selection and price at the same time. So let's get into us. Today's episode is sponsored by drip, drip. It's a world's first e-commerce CRM and a tool that I personally use for email marketing and automation. Now, if you are running an eCommerce store, you need to have drip a try. And here's why drip offers one-click integrations for both Shopify and Magento. There's robust segmentation, personalization, and revenue dashboards. To give you an overview of how your automation emails are performing. One of my favorite features of drip is the visual workflow builder. Charles (01:05): It gives you a super easy way to build out your automation world visually and see the entire process. It lets you get started quickly, but also build very complex automation roles. It's powerful, but also to learn, unlike a lot of email tools that offer the same type of automation to get a demo of drip today, you can go head over to drip.com/boe that's drift.com/b O E. Now onto the show. Often when I'm talking to retailers, they kind of go one of two ways when it comes to drop shipping, they're either working with very large established distributors that have a large breadth of products, or they're working with smaller mom and pop type manufacturers, even just very, very small run tech manufacturers. And that's kind of their decision on how to source products, right? And often it's, you know, one of the other AOV mixed vendor drop shipping is where you take the best of both worlds and combine them. Charles (02:06): So you have hair and I've seen some retailers do is very successfully. They work with large distributors. They're able to get a large breadth of products, right? So some of these largest submariners can have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of products. So it allows them to scale up very horizontally and everything in their niche. They can go very wide, have a lot of auxiliary type products, right? So ways to kind of mock up their products cross sells upsells, that sort of thing. So it looks very well at the larger distributors. But when you start combining that with smaller manufacturers, this is kind of the Trek. You could find very rare products that maybe distributors don't yet carry don't yet know about not everyone has on their sites. And also sometimes you're able to then negotiate better on price with larger distributor. There's good chance unless you're doing any sort of real large volume, you really can't go in and negotiate that with them. Charles (03:05): But if you go some real small manufacturers, you might be able to get a lot better price. And even if you have a distributor kind of in the mix, you can cut out the middlemen on some of these products and go right to the manufacturer, talk to them. So you can get your breadth of products from the distributor, but then go deep on a very small subset of those products. So on those you can get better prices and also products that just maybe a half made to distributor when you're a retailer and you blend both of these on your site, what that gives you is these unique products you can kind of hook in uses with, right? You can put them in your ads, not everyone has seen them. So if you're targeting Facebook ads, for example, social ads, someone's going to see a product in your niche that has never been,