Setting Up My Drop-ship Relationship - Part 1

I ran into an old acquaintance while visiting my home town of Afton, Wyoming. He started telling me about his business of collecting herbs and making herbal extracts, blends, and tinctures. It sounded like an interesting business so I asked him if he was selling online. He said yes, but he wasn’t generating a lot of new customers through his Web site.

“I’ve tried professional SEO people, spent money on different campaigns, but nothing seems to bring me a return on the investment I put into it.” he said.

Alarm bells and flashing lights were going off in my head. It was just the sort of opportunity I was keeping my eyes open for. I knew right away it might be a perfect fit for this project. So I made the preliminary pitch: I’d set up an entirely new website selling his herbs.  I would take care of the programming, marketing, and generating traffic. In return, I’d get to keep a percentage of all sales made on the new site.

At that point in his business, he’d tried several different approaches online and didn’t want to invest anymore resources into promoting his existing site, so he agreed and said he’d send me his wholesale price list.

Before putting together an agreement, I did some research on the herbs he told me he was selling. I needed to know if anyone was searching for the herbal products he was producing before investing any time or resources into the project. I used the reverse search tool and the keyword analysis tool. The keyword analysis tool helped me take a look at the competitive picture. If there was too much competition out there, I wasn’t sure I would have the time to make it happen. After all, I still have to do my day job.

Using the reverse search tool, I found there were certain herbal products my friend produces that aren’t widely available and a good number of people are doing searches for them. My plan is to optimize the site I build toward sales of those products. For example, where my friend lives, he’s able to harvest an herb called arnica from the wild. That means he can sell it to me for a low enough price that will allow me to sell it very competitively. And there are some other good possibilities, as well.

In my next entry I’ll talk about the details of setting up the deal, how to approach the negotiations, etc.