Brokers, Manufacturers, Drop Shipping, and Affiliate: What to Do?

This week was very interesting to me. In fact, as I was reading about drop shipping, I found myself getting so excited that I wanted to find a product and company and start at that moment! Thankfully I needed to go to bed and so I didn't have time to do anything too quickly. The ideas of drop shipping and working with an affiliate are both intriguing to me. I have been working on redoing some areas of our home and organizing differently and so I have been to many sites over the last few months. As I would click on different links to see the products they used, it didn't even occur to me that the site I was originally on was actually advertising for these other companies. This was quite a novel idea to me. I obviously don't know what happened behind the scenes for the work they put in to create the content, but it didn't seem like it was too hard because they were just putting links in their article or instructions of what they did or what products were used.

I also appreciated learning more about choosing a manufacturer and/or a wholesaler. It makes sense to buy a product for less so that you can make more of a profit; however, after doing the readings, videos, and discussion boards, I realized there is so much more to consider. It's always been cheaper to get products from China but ever since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, it is more challenging to get things in a timely manner. Besides the supply chain for products and components, the shipping time has increased immensely. This is definitely something that needs to be taken into account when choosing a company to go with because while the profits may be better with a company that sells to you cheaper, if you're not able to get the product(s) to customers in an acceptable timeframe, you won't have customers and therefore your profits will be nonexistent.

Being able to have a class meeting this week was very helpful. Many of my fears were put to ease as we talked and learned more about expectations of the class. This was great because I want to enjoy the class rather than be so worried about everything that it's just a "going through the motions" course.