You may have thought about venturing into the world of online retailing and heard about using drop ship for your product supply. There’s plenty of information about how to improve you drop ship options, but what does drop ship really mean?

Essentially, you advertise the products you choose, and the drop shipper fills your orders for you. There is no advance purchase, no storage requirements, or shipping hassles involved for you. Your relay your orders to your drop shipper and they fulfill it.

Your drop shipper may have the products on hand, or more likely, they will send the order to the manufacturer themselves. Because the drop ship company has a standing agreement with the manufacturer for wholesale prices, you get to take advantage of those prices, too.

The advantages to that are fairly obvious. You don’t have to invest a ton of money into purchasing products, keeping a place to store them, or pay for the costs of domestic or international shipping your products to your customers.

You can think of yourself kind of as a middleman between the customer and the manufacturer. Your Web store provides the place where customers can locate and purchase the products they want. Your drop ship company provides the product to your customer.

The object is to find a drop ship company that provides the products you’d like to sell and still make a decent profit. The drop ship company will require you to pay for the products you sell, and covering the shipping and handling costs. You will likely also need to pay a membership fee. But, none of these costs are going to be nearly as expensive as doing it all yourself.

A good drop shipper will also have tools like articles, blogs, marketing strategies, and marketable images and descriptions for you to use so that your Web store can become successful.

It will still take time and attention to create a profitable store, but by using drop ship for your products, you’ve cut your load in half. You can focus your efforts into marketing your products online and let your drop shipper take care of the rest.

Jake Sabey is Doba’s Education Specialist, helping to being wholesale dropshippers and retailers together by providing universal access to over 300 wholesale suppliers offering more than 1.4 million products ready for drop shipping direct to the end customer.