Putting Doba to the test – Part I

I am doing a real time case study on Doba and will report the progress on this blog. Thousands of entrepreneurs struggle everyday with a myriad of choices to make money on the Internet. I am guinea pigging myself for the greater good and will beta test Doba for the suspecting entrepreneur. For those of you unfamiliar, Doba is a unique drop shipping company that offers the entrepreneur a one-stop shop integration with thousands of wholesalers. For the sake of time I must move on, but for more information check out Doba.

Last week I signed up for the 7-day trial offered by Doba and began to explore the numerous wholesale items available. Doba’s website did a good job enticing me to complete education courses on drop shipping and general use of the Doba website. Like most entrepreneurs I wanted to get my hands dirty quickly so I began to look where I could get products to market the fastest. It was no surprise that Ebay seemed liked the best route especially because I had an existing Ebay account. Doba has a nice integrated feature called “push to marketplace” which places products on Ebay very quickly at whatever price you set above wholesale. Before I hastily push product I need to know the sale price especially for the deal-devils on ebay. So I pulled research websites teraspeak and mpire to find statistics on sell-through statistics and sale price. I immediately noticed two trends…people don’t pay squat on ebay and many of Doba products do not have enough profit margin to make the risk of placement worthwhile. The data was a good start, I quickly realzied to succeed with Doba products on ebay three rules must be followed:

1. product profit margin must be high,
2. high demand product,
3. sustainable sales price verses (what ebayers are willing to pay).

I honed in on two categories of wholesale products:

1. jewelery & watches
2. home décor

At this point I burned up several hours and decided to call it a night, after all I have six more days for free.