It never fails to amaze me about these ’services’ that charge to buy Drop Ship sourcing lists, or membership fees or want you to buy from their warehouse (like there is any profit left for you after that!)

Wikipedia defines Drop Shipping as: “Drop shipping, a retailing practice of sending items from a manufacturer directly to a customer.”

Like it says, from the manufacturer. Not a middleman distributor. Not a company that sells you a list of drop shippers. And certainly not anybody that charges you fees to do business with them.

There are too many scam artists to count in the drop shipping industry. Some of the biggest own multiple sites that sound like legitimate, independent, unbiased information sources when all they want to do is direct you toward their own website while trashing their competition.

Some of these sites offer you a month or two free if you join…well, after you spend countless hours posting the products on your site are you really going to not pay whatever they want you to pay each month to keep them on your site? So you pay them for the honor of selling their products for them!

Then there are the guys that sell you a website already loaded with their products. If they are legitimate they charge you for the site and a small monthly hosting fee and allow you to add other products and if you choose to remove all of their products you can, because you own the site.

How about the folks that want to sell you SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to drive traffic to your site, promising to get your site to the top of your category on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Ask yourself this…if they sell hundreds of these sites and promise everybody top positioning on the search engines, exactly how do they manage that? If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!

Find a legitimate drop ship sales rep. Just Google “Drop Ship Rep” or “Dropship Rep”. See if they are a legitimate rep group or want to sell you a list or a membership. Legitimate sales reps don’t take your money, they are paid by the factories that they represent.

Find suppliers that do not charge you handling fees, drop ship fees, application or membership fees. A good drop ship rep will have an strong relationship with the manufacturers that they represent. If something goes wrong with an order they can get it fixed very quickly. They are paid by the manufacturers represented and will not be dealing with ‘distributors’.

Real drop ship reps set up the website owner to DEAL DIRECTLY WITH THE MANUFACTURER or IMPORTER. No middleman. The manufacturer will then ship directly to your customer. If you have your own UPS and/or FedEx account you can take advantage of any discounts available by having the shipping charges put on your account. This also makes tracking even easier for you and the consumer. “Dropship Companies” want to ship for you and charge you for the full UPS or FedEx charges and pocket whatever discount you may have gotten if you had your own account.

If you are paying handling fees, monthly membership fees and paying full shipping costs to a wholesaler that also had to make a few points on the goods they handle, how do you expect to be competitive?

Do you think top 500 eCommerce Sites Buy Lists, pay memberships or deal with middleman distributors? NO! Then why should you? Think big or you’ll never get there! As soon as a supplier wants to charge you for anything except the goods you sell, be afraid. Bevery afraid!

S.J. Husak is CEO of Continents Apart, LLC and is rated as an expert columnist by ezines.com.

Continents Apart LLC is a national, independent sales organization specializing in working with national and regional accounts within the home furnishings, gift, garden/patio and licensed sports products space. Their focus is on direct to consumer, commonly known as drop shipping or dropshipping.

S.J. has worked and lived across 3 continents in furnishings and gift industry for over 30 years. He’d rather be a baseball coach.