Title: Sourcing Products For An Online Shop

Hello,

After choosing a profitable niche, sourcing products is one of the
most critical elements of the potential success of your shop.

There are three main ways to source products:

1. Buying directly from the manufacturer or a wholesale middleman

2. Using a drop shipper

3. Creating your own products

Traditionally, most stores have used the first option. Companies 
like Walmart purchase most of their products directly from the 
manufacturer at the lowest possible prices, or they go through a
wholesale company that buys from the manufacturer and inflates the
price a bit so they can make their own profit. 

It’s always best to buy straight from the manufacturer, if possible,
but they often require a lot of business documentation or huge
minimum orders, so most smaller stores go through wholesalers. This
is the main reason larger stores are often less expensive than 
smaller ones.

If you don’t have a lot of money to buy inventory upfront, or you
don’t want to have to deal with packing and shipping products, 
you can use drop shipping as your source.

With drop shipping, you don’t have to worry about keeping inventory 
on hand or packing and shipping, because the company does all that
for you.

It’s kind of like ordering a product from Amazon and shipping it
to someone else as a gift.

There are plugins you can use with Shopify and WooCommerce that
integrate with various drop shippers to make it easier to handle
the orders that come in. Some are even automated.

Finally, you can make your own products. This requires the purchase
of materials, or finding a company to manufacture the product for 
you, so the cost can be prohibitive in the beginning. But it’s often
the most profitable option overall.

If you want to learn more about sourcing products, I recommend
checking out Ecom Smart Start.

>> http://www.promotelabs.com/ecommerce

This is a complete guide to starting your own e-commerce store
from start to finish, and covers a whole lot of stuff we can’t
cover in this short series!

Watch for tomorrow’s email, because it’s a really interesting 
one!

Until then, 

{YOUR NAME HERE}

PS- Tomorrow, we’re going to talk more about developing your 
own product, so stay tuned!
