The holiday season is swiftly approaching, and online store owners should start planning and executing their marketing campaigns now. Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the start of the holiday shopping season for millions of  shoppers - and they're just around the corner.

Here are 5 quick tips to get you started: 

1. Create a Gift Guide

The holiday season is all about purchasing and giving gifts. We're all expected to purchase items for loved-ones, friends, and even co-workers, but how do we know what to buy? Not everyone makes a wish-list anymore, so many online shoppers are starving for gift giving advice. Take a look at Amazon's Gift Central below - this is a smart way to suggest items to purchase for every type of person.

This is called a holiday gift guide, and they can take the form of lookbooks, blog posts, or even magazine-like articles. Amazon does a great job at suggesting gift ideas, but also check out RedEnvelope's Christmas Gift section, or the holiday gift guide I published last year on the Shopify blog.

2. Offer a Shipping Calendar

Not only are consumers rushing to buy presents for everyone on their shopping lists, but they also have to manage the logistics of getting those presents to their destinations on a deadline.

If a shopper orders a pair of slim fit organic denim jeans from the Hiut Denim Company (awesome Shopify store), when will the jeans arrive in San Diego, California? Will the order arrive before Christmas? 

Include a holiday shipping chart somewhere prominent in your ecommerce store. Let your visitors know exactly what type of shipping is required to ensure that an order will arrive on time. Take a look at Net-A-Porter's holiday shipping cut-off chart:

It's well designed, clear, and has all the information a hesitant shopper needs to know. Also check out this Holiday Shipping 2012 Infographic from ShipStation will help you put together a shipping calendar for your online store.

3. Offer Black Friday & Cyber Monday Discounts

Shoppers expect to see sale prices during the holidays, and this is especially true on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Not offering a discount on either of these days is the retail equivalent of Santa dropping a lump of coal in someone's stocking. You don't need to discount every product, but make sure you run some type of promotion. 

This is a guest post by Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com. 

Few companies can strike fear into the hearts of ecommerce merchants like Amazon. Its massive scale and focus on growth over profits allows Amazon to offer pricing that many smaller merchants simply can't compete with.

As an ecommerce entrepreneur myself, I would have an easier time hating on Amazon if it wasn't such an outstanding company. But unlike many huge organizations, it does a great job of providing quality customer service. And if you're an Amazon Prime member – like I am, full disclosure – you get free, fast shipping on just about anything you'd ever want.

So how can small merchants like us compete with such an appealing giant? 

Brand Yourself as a Specialist

Amazon's massive size allows it to benefit from economies of scale, but such a wide scope can also be a weakness. With so many products for sale, it's impossible for Amazon to offer specialized, expert guidance.  

SonicsOnline founder Dave Huckabay has taken the opposite approach, choosing instead to become laser-focused with his ecommerce catalog. He focuses exclusively on ultrasonic cleaners for jewelry and industrial use, a niche most people probably don't even know exists.

Take a product found on both his site and Amazon: the GemOro Ultrasonic Jewelry Cleaner. The item costs $120 on SonicsOnline, almost double the $67.95 it's listed for on Amazon. Yet it still manages to sell well on Dave's site. 

Amazon

SonicsOnline

So how does SonicsOnline compete with Amazon? Though not professionally designed, the SonicsOnline page is chock full of information, including videos, manuals and detailed specs. Perhaps most important is that customers know they're buying from a company with highly focused niche expertise. They can get specialized help for specific questions or problems. 

The combination of quality information and industry expertise is powerful and has helped SonicsOnline grow to approximately $300,000 in annual revenues. When asked about successfully competing with Amazon, Huckabay said:

When done properly, real expertise comes across in a website. You can't fake it, and reviews by your customers are not a substitute.

By becoming a true niche expert – and successfully conveying that through your ecommerce store – you'll be much better equipped to compete against Amazon without having to rely on razor-thin pricing.

Create Your Own Products

Creating your own product is undeniably the hardest (and most expensive) way to get started with eCommerce. But if you have a great idea and the resources to pull it off, it's probably the best way to build a highly profitable business and successfully compete against Amazon.

Just ask Dan Andrews of ModernCatDesigns.com. He and his business partner, Ian Schoen, were surprised at how expensive – and ugly – cat furniture was. So they decided to create their own line that would blend in with modern homes. Here's their popular 'modern kitty litter box' as an example: 

One of the biggest advantages of manufacturing their own product was drastically better margins, which led to increased profits and growth opportunities. While many small resellers don't have enough margin to profitably advertise, pay-per-click has been an integral part of helping Modern Cat Designs grow to approximately $120,000 in annual revenues, despite having a catalog of only eight products.

Perhaps best of all, manufacturing allows you to control product distribution and set pricing guidelines to protect your margin. On competing with Amazon and pricing issues, Andrews said:

People buy from us because our products are unique. You just can't find them on Amazon. We also make sure that the dealers we do sell through follow strict pricing guidelines to prevent pricing wars.

Creating your own product isn't for everyone, but it's a great way to successfully compete against Amazon. 

Sell With a Deeper Purpose

By connecting with the core values of your customers, you can build a loyal and passionate customer base that isn't shopping based on price alone. A quick Amazon search reveals more than 330,000 different shoes for sale. Yet Tom's Shoes has built a successful business based on the premise of donating a pair of shoes for each pair sold.

Hipcycle.com is another site with a deeper purpose: to reduce waste by selling products made from previously discarded material. The concept, called “upcycling,” is used to turn bike sprockets into bowls and computer waste into light fixtures. Here is one of their most popular products, Grey Goose Vodka rocks glasses:

Founded barely a year ago by Andrew Sell, the company already has two full-time employees and a sizable presence on Facebook. 

When asked how Hipcycle positions itself to compete against Amazon, Sell replied:

We are passionate about diverting materials from landfills, and our customers want to support that. And we're definitely in the business of building the company one customer at a time and turning them into evangelists for our brand and for waste diversion.

Notice that he didn't mention fast shipping or insanely low prices. Instead, Hipcycle connects with customers over a deeper purpose – one that can't be found on Amazon.

Opportunities Still Exist for Small Merchants

So how do you plan to compete against Amazon? Let us know in the comments. 

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Written by Andrew Youderian. For more on successfully competing with Amazon, download  Andrew's popular free eBook on growing a successful ecommerce business. You can also follow him on his blog, eCommerceFuel.com. 

Operating an ecommerce store without conversion testing is like running blind. 

In this article we're going to cover what conversion testing is, why it’s important for online store owners, and give you nine popular tests you can start running on your store today.

What Is Conversion Testing?

Simply put, conversion testing is the process of testing various elements on your website to ensure maximum conversion rates. 

Why Is Conversion Testing Important for Online Stores? 

Without conversion testing you're making important decisions based on intuition, instead of fact. There are countless case studies that show how a minor change resulted in x% increase in sales. Conversion testing is all about optimization. You make small changes, measure the results, rinse and repeat. Monetate put together a diagram that shows the most popular tests: 

This is Part 4 of our Google AdWords series by ex-Googler Anton McCarthy. 

• Part 1: Five Ecommerce Google AdWords Tips
• Part 2: Google AdWords Conversion Tracking for Ecommerce
• Part 3: Understanding AdWords Keyword Matching to Increase Sales

Are you an online store owner who has to manage a site with dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of products? Managing your ads and keywords to reflect the availability of your products in stock takes a lot of time. Do you wish there were a quicker, easier way to manage your campaigns, freeing you up to spend less time on AdWords - and more time on your business?

Well, Google has a solution for you. Introducing: Dynamic Search Ads.

What Are Google Dynamic Search Ads?

Simply put, Dynamic Search Ads are ads that are automatically generated for you by Google. Unlike traditional Google AdWords ads which rely on you inputting lists of keywords, Dynamic Search Ads allow you to target users using the content on various pages of your website. This means that you don’t need to choose keywords that a user might use to find your product. Instead, Google automatically scans your website to determine which searches are a good match for the products on your website.

When a customer’s search is relevant to one of your products, Google dynamically generates an ad headline that includes words from the customer’s search and the content of the landing page on your website. The result is a dynamic search ad. Here's an example:

Why Use Dynamic Search Ads?

Dynamic Search Ads are a great time-saver for busy ecommerce merchants. Let’s say that you have a large variety of products to advertise, and are finding it difficult to find the time to manage all of your AdWords campaigns. Instead of having to invest lots of time matching keywords to landing pages and creating corresponding ad text, you can let Google generate relevant ads which match the searches users are performing to find the products you sell.

You also have full control in that you choose which pages on your website are to be used to generate ads. You can limit these pages to specific categories, e.g. your ‘Blue Widgets’ landing page, or you can choose all pages on your website. In addition, you can prevent ads from showing for products that are out of stock, reducing the need to monitor and then update your ads in such a manual fashion as before.

How Dynamic Search Ads Work

As mentioned, instead of using keywords to target your ads to searches, Dynamic Search Ads use content from your website to target ads to searches. You begin by letting Google know whether you wish to target ads to your entire website, or to specific sections:

• Pages belonging to specific categories
• Pages with titles containing certain words
• Pages with URLs containing certain strings
• Pages containing certain words

Once you have chosen your ad targets, Google then determines which searches might be relevant to the products listed on your website. When their technology locates searches that are a good fit for your dynamic ad targets, a headline is generated for your ad.

This headline includes text from the search phrase, and content from the landing page chosen for your ad. The remainder of the ad (i.e. the two description lines) is a template that you write when you first set up the campaign.

Dynamic Search Ads and Your Account

How do Dynamic Search Ads work relative to your regular keyword-targeted AdWords ads? 

Here are 5 important things to note:

1. Same Ranking As Normal Ads

The position or ranking of Dynamic Search Ads is determined in the same way as regular keyword-based ads. Dynamic Search Ads enter the auction as equals to keyword-based ads, with the position of your ads ultimately decided by the usual factors - the maximum cost-per-click bid you have selected for the dynamic ad target, and the dynamic search ad’s Quality Score.

2. Interactions With Keyword-Based Ads

If a customer’s search term is an exact match for one of your keywords, your dynamic search ad won’t show. An example is: [red shoes]. If a customer searches using this exact term, your text-based ad will display instead of a dynamic search ad. However, Google may show your dynamic search ad if there is a broad or phrase match with one of your keywords, and when your dynamic search ad has a higher Quality Score than your text-based ad.

3. Full Control and Flexibility

One of the big advantages of Dynamic Search Ads is the time-saving and efficiency they permit. For example, you ideally don't want ads to show which will lead the user to a ‘sold-out’ or ‘out of stock’ page. With keyword-based ads, it can be time-consuming and difficult to track each ad that might lead to such a page, especially if your site contains hundreds or even thousands of products. With Dynamic Search Ads, however, you can prevent your ads from showing when you add dynamic ad targets that exclude landing pages which contain these words.

4. Reporting and Statistics

You still get a full set of statistics and reports for your Dynamic Search Ads as with regular keyword-based ads, e.g. conversion rate data, click-through rates, cost-per-click averages, and so on. This means you can run analyses and compare how your Dynamic Search Ads are performing alongside your keyword-based ads - helping you to increase the performance of your AdWords campaigns and gain additional insight into your overall ROI.

5. Don't Forget Negative Keywords

This is a guest post by Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com 

People LOVE to talk about revenues. The numbers are big, impressive and easy to fixate on. But when was the last time you heard someone bragging about growing their margins or improving business efficiency?

These metrics aren't nearly as sexy, but they're immensely important. As the saying goes, “It doesn't matter how much you make. It matters how much you keep.” With that mantra in mind, here are three highly-effective and unintuitive strategies to improve your business's bottom line.

Raise Your Prices

Raising prices is a terrifying prospect. As entrepreneurs, we assume that customers will abandon us, sales will dry up and our business will collapse into the dust-heap of failure. But like most fears, we tend to grossly overexaggerate the consequences and underestimate the benefits. Especially if you're reselling an existing product in your ecommerce store, a small increase in price can do miracles for your bottom line. 

Imagine the following scenario for a popular item in your online store: 

• Item Retail Cost:  $100
• Wholesale Cost:   $80
• Profit:                   $20
• Profit Margin:      25% ($20 profit / $80 cost)

Now image that, after being inspired by an article on the Shopify blog, you re-priced this item at $110:

• Item Retail Cost:  $110
• Wholesale Cost:   $80
• Profit:                   $30
• Profit Margin:      37.5% ($30 profit / $80 cost)

Our minor 10% increase in prices resulted in a massive 50% increase in profits and gross margin!

Under the best-case circumstances – assuming you have a strong unique selling proposition and aren't competing on price – your conversion rates won't dive and you'll have achieved an instant 50% increase in your overall profits. Even with a significant 30% drop in conversions, you'd still be making more money than under your old pricing model, but with fewer customer servicing costs to consider. 

I successfully used this approach with my own ecommerce store to instantly increase my bottom line by 25%. It was, bar none, the most effective technique I've ever used to increase profitability. 

When implementing this strategy, keep the following in mind: Make sure you test different pricing levels. While raising prices is often very effective, you'll need to confirm it for your market/business.

If you have a large catalog, testing pricing on thousands of products can be a tall task. Start out testing pricing on only your best-selling products instead.

This strategy relies on having a unique selling proposition and offering value to your customers. The more price-sensitive your customers, the less effective this will be. If you don't have a unique selling proposition, you need to get one.  

Don't Obsess About Per-Order Profits

Many businesses are unwilling to lose money on an order, even if that means ending the relationship with an unhappy or dissatisfied customer. You may have had a similar experience, which often goes something like this:

“I'm sorry, sir. We only made $X on your purchase, so if we (fill in your reasonable request here), we'd lose money on your business. I hope you understand.”

This is a penny-wise but pound-foolish approach, and a terrible way to do business in today's highly social and connected world. If you're not consistently losing money on orders to quickly and pro-actively resolve customer problems, you're missing out on the chance to improve your bottom line.

Customers are so accustomed to mediocre service that when a business goes out of its way to proactively resolve a problem – without charging them – they're blown away. Apart from the life-long value of that customer, you'll receive valuable referral marketing and recommendations that are impossible to purchase.

If you're running an ecommerce store, here are four ways you can invest in the future of your business and, ultimately, your long-term bottom line:

1. Did something inexpensive break? Ship customers a free replacement immediately without requiring them to hassle with the return.
2. If an expensive item needs to be returned, ship them a replacement as soon as they submit tracking confirmation of the return, instead of waiting until it hits your warehouse.
3. If a long-time customer needs something ASAP, overnight it to them at no charge.
4. If a customer wasn’t happy with a purchase, proactively issue a partial refund to help compensate him for the disappointment.

Serving customers like this will cost a bit more in the short term, but will pay incredible dividends as you build a loyal and highly vocal fan base that results in a very healthy bottom line.

Reconsider Offering Phone Support

Would you be willing to reduce your workload by 50% if it meant only giving up 15% of your business? I would, and did, when I stopped advertising my toll-free sales number on one of my sites.  

We were able to take the savings – both in terms of time and money – and pour them into better serving our online customers and improving our site. While phone support is a rarity among many online businesses, it seems that a disproportionate number of ecommerce merchants still feel it's necessary. 

After the previous section, which championed outstanding customer support, this may seem like a major contradiction. But great customer service doesn't mean being all things to all people. It simply means taking outstanding care of the customers you've chosen to do business with. Based on your product and market – especially if your price point is lower - offering phone sales support may or may not be a wise use of your time.

Try measuring the impact removing your phone number has on conversions. You'll likely be surprised that the vast majority of people simply order online. If you do decide to offer a sales line, try to place it in strategic places such on the “Contact Us” page or in the shopping cart, where only qualified prospects will see it. If you serve both individuals and businesses, you can also experiment with a business-only phone line.

If you decide to scale back your phone support, make sure to:

1. Be honest with customers and let them know WHY you don't list a telephone number. Tell them you prefer to invest in a quality website and outstanding customer service for your existing clients.
2. Ensure you have a highly detailed, informative website to answer customers' questions.
3. Have fantastic email support if customers can't reach you easily via phone. Using a help desk like Desk.com, Helpjuice, Zendesk, or Kayako will ensure that your email correspondence is top-notch, and that requests don't go unanswered.

Also, don't write off the phone entirely. If a customer requests a call back, or if you need to resolve issues that require personal attention, make sure to pick up the phone.

The Biggest Danger Is Inaction

Change is always scary, and you may be reluctant to implement these suggestions for fear of what might happen to your business. But experimenting with these ideas will likely go unnoticed by most of your customers, especially those new to your business. If the changes aren't beneficial, you can always revert back to your old policies and pricing.

Without taking action, you'll never know how much money could be added to your bottom line. 

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By Andrew Youderian, an ecommerce entrepreneur and the owner of numerous online stores. You can learn how to create a profitable online store with his free 55-page eBook. Also check out his blog, eCommercefuel.com.

We've asked our team of Shopify Experts for their best advice to help you build and grow your online business. The response we got was fantastic, so we'll be sharing their advice in this ongoing series.

If you're not familiar with Shopify Experts, it's our directory of ecommerce pro's who know Shopify inside and out. You can browse and hire designers, developers, marketers, and photographers to help you build or maintain your Shopify store. 

Here are five valuable tips, provided by five of our Shopify Experts:  

Product Photography is REALLY Important 

"Your online store sells products and your photographs ARE your products - do not skimp on product photography, your own snaps won't always cut it! It's crucial to think about how they will appear in advance, try and visualise how they might be laid out and how this could effect the look and feel of your site. 

Will your collection thumbnails be portrait, landscape, or square? Will they be on a white or transparent background, on a model, or in situation? There is no right or wrong answer but before starting down the design path it is important to think about these things as they will determine to a large part what the site ultimately looks and feels like. 

Shopify store Official features all of their caps on a black mirrored background and they look sick, but this was certainly no spur of the moment decision. It looks amazing.

Another of my favourite client sites is Elizabeth Bower's. She uses a carefully curated mixture of shots to display her jewelry, including some on a model and some close-cropped shots. Again, this was planned in advance and is also accounted for in the code - you will not see a model shot as the primary product page detail shot even if it is a featured Collection thumbnail. 

Finally, Blu Kicks have a beautiful site that I built out from designs by Fernando Munoz. He was also the product photographer on the project and was super careful (really!) about being consistent with the product shots' exposures, angles and overall dimensions. I really think it shows in the site.

In all three cases, every single image was planned, shot and then pre-edited to a consistently sized and dimensioned canvas prior to being uploaded, which has resulted in uniform, consistent, and great looking product displays." 

By: Rick Davies, Tricky3

Size Your Images Correctly

"There is nothing worse than looking at stretched out images. The trick to resizing photography is to hold the shift button down while sizing. Never forget that trick! It will become your best friend. And besides retaining the correct aspect ratio, make a decision about what size you want to make your product images and stick to it. Choose a square for example, and pick a size (let's say 800 x 800). Now be sure to center your product inside that square each time.

Do you know how much your products are worth? How low are you willing to price an item to compete with another ecommerce retailer? 

With the advent of highly competitive pricing tools, winning the online pricing war can be a lose-lose for ecommerce retailers. Large online retailers like Amazon have an advantage in competitive pricing, as they can set the price low enough to run smaller retailers out of business. But there are other ways to compete - and it all starts with developing (or at least thinking about) an ecommerce pricing strategy.

Here are 6 tips that will help you develop an ecommerce pricing strategy:

1. Know your Margins

The reality of online retail pricing is that the lowest price doesn’t always win. In fact, pricing battles usually end with you pricing your products too low. Even with enough customers, you still may not make a profit. If you are lowering your prices to a point where you are losing money, you should consider finding a better source, or adjust your product offerings to include more profitable items.

Getting your online store into a pricing battle can hurt you in the long term as well. When you consistently price too low, your customers will always expect the lower price, even when it is unsustainable to your business. As a result, you could lose those customers over time.

2. Know your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

What makes us different? Every company has to tackle this question to determine their value proposition and target market. For online retailers, a unique factor could be excellent customer service (i.e. Zappos), free or timely S&H (i.e. Amazon Prime), or product you can't find anywhere else (DODOcase). Of course, there are many more.

With pricing competition at an all-time high, retailers have to think outside of the box when crafting a marketing or promotional strategy for their online store. Some retailers have found success by appealing to a sense of charity, especially around the holidays. For example, Shopify store owner, Ricky Padilla (pictured above) donates $1.00 to fund clean water projects every time someone purchases coffee from his ecommerce shop Brown Water Coffee. He also offeres free shipping on orders over $20 - which is a great pricing strategy that encourages people to buy more than 1lbs of coffee. 

3. Lose-Leader (Selling Below Market Value)

Highly discounted pricing can be advantageous if paired with the appropriate merchandising strategy. The Lose-Leader Strategy assumes that an item sold below market value will encourage customers to buy more overall. Using this strategy, online store owners have the opportunity to upsell, cross sell and increase the total shopping cart value (average revenue per user).

Even if the profit is not impressive, this strategy stimulates client acquisition, opening the door for further marketing efforts. The value of customer acquisition outweighs the value of the transaction. A corollary strategy is to choose products that have a low CPA (cost per acquisition), to minimize loss. The end goal is to sacrifice losing money on one item in order to make a profit on the rest of the products sold (i.e. cereal cheap, milk expensive). 

4. Offer Incentives

Once you know your margins, and price accordingly, then you can offer incentives to motivate your customers to buy. Even if you can’t sustain an ultra-low price in the long term, you can always offer limited time pricing to reach these customers. For example, “Purchase in the next hour and receive 20% off!”

Semantics are also important here, as the language you use can attract customers and minimally affect your bottom line. If you have a surplus of products, you can profitably offer a ‘twofer’ (2 for 1). Additionally, people perceive large percentages as big savings. For example, “Buy one, get one 50% off!” The customer sees the 50% off, but really they are only getting a 25% discount. Shopify App Product Discount will let you run sales in your ecommerce store based on a variety of conditions: by product brand, type, collection, and more - so "buy one get one free" , "buy 3 get one 75% off" and similar sale situations are easy.

Being savvy with your incentives allows you the ability to garner attention to your products, and build a reputation for having good deals, without breaking the bank.

5. Diversify Product Offerings

To offer a diverse product offering that will sell, ecommerce store owners must first understand their market demand. Make sure that you are up to date with current trends by reading ecommerce news. Use products like “Google Trends” or “Google Insight” to check the popularity of a SKU and try to attend local Meetups with fellow online retailers.

Having a better idea of what your customers want gives you the opportunity to sell and generate profit from diversified products. When in doubt, give your customers multiple options to help them figure out what they want. In the lecture, "Are We In Control of Our Decisions" Dan Ariely recounts an MIT experiment he conducted to test the effects of product and pricing diversification. The entire video is worth a watch, but skip to 12:30 for the most applicable example.

By Andrew Youderian, ecommerce store owner, eCommercefuel.com

Many people shy away from starting an online store because of the startup costs and fulfillment hassles. But imagine if someone offered to pay your up-front inventory costs on thousands of items and manage your fulfillment operations. It'd be much easier to get started, and you could run your business from anywhere in the world. Sound too good to be true? It's not, if you know about drop shipping. 

In this article, I'm going to teach you all about drop shipping. I'll go over a simple definition, list the benefits, show you how to find drop shipping wholesalers, and give solutions to some common problems associated with drop shipping. 

What Is Drop Shipping? 

Drop shipping is a retail method in which you don't keep products in stock. Instead, you partner with a wholesale supplier that stocks its own inventory - you transfer customer orders and shipment details to them, and they ship the goods directly to the customer. The biggest benefit of drop shipping is you don't have to worry about fulfillment or inventory issues. 

Also, most customers don't know you're drop shipping, since "private label shipping" lets you ship from the wholesaler with a return address and invoice customized to your ecommerce store.

The Benefits of Drop Shipping 

There are a number of reasons you should consider drop shipping:

1. You Don't Need Buckets of Money: Drop shipping makes it amazingly easy to get started selling online. You don't need to invest heavily in inventory, yet you can still offer thousands of items to your customers. 

2. Convenience & Efficiency: Successfully launching and growing an ecommerce business takes a lot of work, especially if you have limited resources. Not having to worry about fulfillment is incredibly convenient and frees up your time to concentrate on marketing, customer service, and operations 

3. Mobility: With all the physical fulfillment issues handled, you're free to operate your business anywhere you can get an internet connection.

4. It's a Trusted Model: You might be thinking that this sounds like some sketchy, fly-by-night model – but it's not. Plenty of Shopify online stores, even major retailers like Sears, use drop shipping to offer a wider selection of products to their customers without having to deal with increased inventory hassles.

How Do I Find Drop Shipping Wholesalers? 

Before contacting suppliers, you'll want to make sure your legal ducks are in a row. In the United States, most suppliers will ask for your business EIN number and a copy of your state sales tax and/or resale certificate. Once you're properly established, you can start contacting drop shipping suppliers. 

There are various ways to find drop shipping wholesalers, and the video below outlines your options:

If you already know what products you'd like to drop ship, contacting the original manufacturer is the easiest way to find qualified distributors. Not all distributors will be willing to drop ship, but it will give you a list to follow up with. Unfortunately, the market is littered with scams and low-quality information. If you do decide to invest in a directory, I can recommend the paid directory World Wide Brands as a reputable source of drop shipping wholesalers - but it's still very important to exercise caution.

Google can also be an effective tool for finding drop shippers, but you need to keep a few things in mind. 

3 Ways to Use Google to Find Wholesalers 

1. Search Extensively: Wholesalers and drop shippers are notoriously bad at SEO and marketing, and usually aren't going to pop up on the first page of Google for a term like “handbag wholesaler.” Instead, you'll need to dig deep into the search results, often going through 10 or 20 pages of listings.

2. Don't Judge by the Cover: Suppliers also tend to have outdated, late ‘90s-era websites. So don't be scared away by abysmal design and layout. While a sleek, modern site could signal a great supplier, a low-quality one doesn't necessarily indicate a bad one.

3. Use Lots of Modifiers: As you hunt for suppliers, don’t stop with a search for “wholesale” - make sure to use other modifier terms, including “distributor” , “reseller” , “bulk” , “warehouse” and “supplier.”

4 Common Problems With Drop Shipping 

Despite my glowing recommendation, drop shipping isn't ecommerce nirvana. Like all models, it has its weaknesses and downsides. With some planning and awareness, these issues can be managed and need not prevent you from running a successful drop shipping business.