Saturday, June 13, 2009

A new business idea

The other day, I was sitting with a friend and we were thinking about how we mummies can afford not to work while still being able to enjoy the many pleasures of shopping and spoiling ourselves.

After 30 minutes of talking, she exclaimed "How about we drop ship through the net?!" I was like "Huh?! What is that??" We then spent the next 60 minutes discussing about this business idea. The whole thing will only work if we are able to find some great wholesale partners who we can get good deals from. This included anyone we can find on the net or through any of the business associates her husband has.

Some of the businesses included kids' clothes, maternity wear, bras, MLM products, toys or even health supplements. We figured if we are able to gain sufficient awareness and subsequently, orders for these products, we can strike a deal with the wholesalers and then ship the customers the goods without us having to store any physical products.

We were very nervous about having physical products around us - mainly for security reasons. What will happen if there is a theft or if there is an unfortunate fire arising? The risk is too much to bear.

We then debated on what the margins would be like. Obviously the difference between what we pay the wholesalers and what we charge should be pretty attractive for us to go through the hassles of setting up the site and then having to do all this manual tracking and matching of orders.

The other consideration point was that, what would make us stand out in the market place for people to approach us instead of linking up directly to the wholesalers? We should ideally be offering some sort of guarantees, after sales service, on-going loyalty redemption etc., else it will be very hard to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the people in the cyberworld.

In the end, we ended our afternoon tea with some satisfaction in mind. Whether or not we will eventually go through with this drop shipping idea is a separate matter. What mattered was that we shared the same dream and we are at least putting our minds into it.

Do you have any business idea for us mummies here? Can you share?

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