The question all eBay users ask when they want to start an online business is "Who is a good Drop Shipper?" or "Where can I find a Wholesaler?"

A drop shipper sells items to you at a wholesale price and when you order, they ship directly to the customer. There are some big name drop shippers who supply electronics and software to major online retailers. When you order from one of these retailers, your package is actually shipped from the drop shipper using the retailer’s information on the receipt. You may have noticed that when you receive items you ordered from different companies, sometimes they have exactly the same type of receipt in the box. This is because they use the same drop shipper and that drop shipper simply changes the company name when they ship.

A wholesaler is a company that will sell single items to you at a price below retail. True wholesale prices are usually at 50% below retail costs. You must purchase items in bulk and then re-ship them to your own customers.

These are the two types of companies every eBay entrepreneur dreams of finding. If you search eBay, you will find many claiming to offer such services and you may receive such messages by email but every one of these offers is a scam.

You sell item X on eBay, then you login to your drop shipper’s website and tell them to ship product X to the customer and bill you the wholesale amount. Your profit is the difference between the amount you sold the item for and the amount the drop shipper charges. At least that is how drop shippers are supposed to work.

The majority of drop shipping services are con games to obtain an up-front fee. Commonly you will pay $100 or more or pay a monthly fee to become a member. You cannot see what they offer or pricing until after you are a member. When you do login to their database, you find their items are junk, are overpriced, or are all listed as out of stock.

Drop shipping companies will never sell items at a large discount to individual sellers. Unless you are buying 10,000 items at a time or guaranteeing to buy $100,000 every month, you will never receive preferred pricing.

There are outright crooked drop shippers. These companies will charge up-front fees then when you try to order anything, the status will change to unavailable even if it was available ten seconds earlier. If you just sold this item on eBay, you have a customer expecting an item to be shipped and you have a drop shipper saying the item that was available is no longer available. This creates a serious problem for the seller.

Some of these dishonest companies have nothing but junk. They purchase items from China for $0.25 and then try to sell them to you for $7 while telling you the retail price is $30.

If you check eBay first, you will see that no one is buying the items that are already listed, and they are listed for much less, maybe even less than $7. No one wants a flower vase from China and no one in their right mind will pay $30 for one on eBay. These companies offer worthless products. If the products were good, they would be selling the products themselves. The companies make money by collecting your name to re-sell to other companies and by charging you a monthly fee. They know the average person will stay with their service three to seven months before giving up and canceling.

Don’t fall for the eBay drop shipper scam. If there were a good drop shipper, everyone would know. In my ten years on eBay, I have never found a good drop shipper. They are all either dishonest, incompetent, or they misrepresent the services they can provide.

This includes the ‘big-boys’ who drop ship for larger electronics and computer parts websites. Those sites make six figure deals to get better pricing. Then the drop shippers offer you the same service but they will charge you an upfront fee plus you must pay higher than retail price for your wholesale items. I have personally signed up and paid a $100 registration fee for a certain major drop shipper who offered a computer harddrive for $120 as their wholesale price but the same drive was selling retail for $80 at hundreds of sites on the web. Their so called wholesale price was higher than the actual retail price.

No company has any incentive to be a good drop shipper. If they could ship the items and they had good items to ship, they would sell the items themselves and would not need you. They will only offer good pricing to companies that buy hundreds of thousands of dollars per month from them. There are no good drop shippers.

All is not lost!

Now that I have debunked the two biggest myths about making money on eBay, drop-shippers and wholesalers, you may be wondering how anyone obtains a product to sell on eBay. This is how you can do it:

• Make your own product

• Find a specialized niche wholesaler

• Re-sell someone else’s information product

• Modify or combine an existing product to add value

Each of these methods allows you to sell a valuable item with little or no investment. You do not have to pay any upfront charges or membership fees for any of these either because you are in control.

Among these choices, making your own product is by far the highest profit and easiest. This is part of a new marketing trend called Information Marketing. Information marketing is a system that allows anyone to produce inexpensive eBooks, CD’s or audio files, video files or other digital products quickly and easily which they can then re-sell at extremely high mark-ups. You do not need any previous experience in these fields. It can be as simple as talking about a topic you are familiar with and letting someone else do the work. Some of the advantages of Information Marketing are the low startup cost, sometimes zero, ability to target niche markets that have little or no competition, ability to test a market without any risk, and the ease of producing a valuable product at a low per unit cost.

You can find more information explaining how Information Marketing works both with eBay and through your own website and how the other money making techniques can help you start a business at www.dontbidonit.com