Hi guys,
I would like to introduce myself and ask for an advise.

My name is Alex, I am a business development guy for IdeaMama Ad Network.

Watching how much our affiliates can sell for our merchants/advertisers (online retailers), we have decided to develop few (10-20) of our own ecommerce portals which helps us to understand our customers challenges better.

I would like to ask all of you for an advise on how exactly we can go about it as we are a marketing company. We serve retailers, we are not retailers ourselves. And now we need to build eccomerce portals/stores/malls and make them operational.

So, I am designing the process flow and would like to ask for your opinion on where are the flaws in my thinking.

1) We sign a reseller contract with suppliers (wholesalers-dropshippers). QUESTION: How to make sure that a dropshiper is not a fraud and have an actual inventory and is going to take care of shipment properly? Is there a possibility to pay only after the porduct is shipped? But then how do we receive the confirmation that it’s received?
2) Suppliers provide us with datafeeds (XML/CMS files – product catalog) and images. QUESTION: We want certain size of images to be provided. Is it reasonable to ask supplier to resize all images to let’s say 100x100. Is there any standard size that suppliers use to avoid resizing?
3) Visitor comes to our online store through affiliate sites and email campaigns run by affiliates of our network
4) Visitor buys an item from a wholesaler-dropshipper
5) Payment arrives to our account
6) We automatically send an order to the supplier. QUESTION: Is email alert enough? Or how data should be pushed to the wholesaler.
7) We take our commission (profit) and the rest is sent to a supplier. QUESTIONS: a) How and when? Can it be once a week by invoice via PayPal? How to automate it? We need a fully automated process for order/inventory management. b) What if a feed is not updated and the product is not in stock? What happens then? We rebate and also pay Paypal commission (carry losses since suppliers didn’t provide us with fresh feeds). How to avoid it?
8) Supplier ships the product to a buyer. QUESTION: What if supplier ships the product, but user didn’t receive or claims that he didn’t receive the product? How do we have reports on the status of each order? What format of the files?

There are of course many other questions, but I guess I will be respectful to your time and may be ask them some times later.

Thank you in advance for all your support.

Btw, if you are a wholesaler with great inventory, support datafeeds and dropship for free, please send us partnership inquiry through Contact Us page. Will consider any product.

Alex.

Wow! Lots of questions so I will tackle just a couple. First this website might help you with locating viable and reputable dropshippers. dropshipblueprint.com

Setting up an account with either a drop shipper or the manufacture is quite easy. Most will want to see a website at least in construction before handing over their wholesale prices and information. As for pictures all manufactures have different sizes so I use this website: shrinkpictures.com to resize all my pictures to a thumbnail, a medium size and a large size. It's fast and easy and free.

Feel free to look at my e-commerce store. It's simplistic but it might give you some ideas. playkitchensemporium.com
Good Luck!

For the best source of play kitchens