The most difficult part when starting a retail business on the internet is finding a wholesale supplier or drop shipper who would provide the products that you are going to sell. Your search for a wholesale supplier could take many months because the choices out there are too many and not all suppliers that you will encounter are legitimate wholesalers. A big percentage of them are just middle men who will claim that they carry a wide variety of products kept and stored in their virtual warehouses. The presence of these middle men makes it very difficult to spot a true wholesaler because the former will advertise themselves as capable of providing wholesale prices.Many first-time retailers are now turning to wholesale directories to aid them in their search for legitimate wholesale suppliers. Unfortunately, if you are a newbie and a bit inexperienced, you may not know it but you could be putting your money in the wrong wholesale directory. Just as there are middle men pretending to be legitimate wholesalers, there are also wholesale directories that may not provide good results for your search.In order to get your money’s worth, be sure to use a wholesale directory that can deliver on its promise of offering you legitimate wholesale suppliers and drop shippers. Fortunately, there are many ways to check whether a wholesale directory is worth your time and money. Firstly, before deciding to sign up for membership with a wholesale directory, see if it is explained in their website the search method used to find drop shippers. If the wholesale directory does not give you an idea of their search method, then this should give you reason not to join because you may be disappointed to find later that many middle men are on their directory. A good wholesale directory must not only use the internet to search for wholesale suppliers because many legitimate wholesalers do not advertise on the net. A lot of good wholesalers can be found in trade shows and foreign government agencies can also provide a listing of such wholesalers.Another way to tell if a wholesale directory is good is if there is a good balance of products available in their listing. Rather than the quantity of products, you should be after the variety of available products. This will ensure you that there will be a good probability that you will find the product that you are interested in using for your drop shipping business.Check also that a sample directory is provided which you can use as one of your basis for joining. A sample directory should give you an idea of the information that can be found from their directory as well as the format used.It is also good to check if a section that address customer concerns and inquiries is provided by the directory. At the very least it should provide an email or a postal mailing address to handle customer inquiries.When looking for a wholesale directory make sure that the features I have discussed earlier are offered by the directory that you are eyeing. Doing so should help you find a reliable and useful wholesale directory.

Debate rages about the need for another article directory, and if you are not familiar with this model of website I suggest that you go and search for same and look at what they offer.The basic concept behind having an article directory is to have a base where quality articles are kept online at a single website allowing access to this content by all. Both those writers that want their work read and publishers want to find good quality articles to publish will benefit from a good article directory.The history of article directories has unfortunately had a bit of a muddy patch where thousands of article directories were launched to earn money easily from the advertising programs. The good news is that the great article websites survived this period and still are very popular today.I am still a firm believer that there is still a massive hole currently in the internet where specialized article directories should be publishing for a specific niche. Naturally you would have to have a moderation policy and would therefore be very busy full time running your niche article website all day. If you chose a particular niche like the pet industry and only published articles that related to the pet industry I am convinced that you will become very popular very fast. The very nature of your targeted business will make you attractive to those niches marketers, publishers and all the guys in between.There are already directories that cover the how-to industry but I am betting that if you gave it a bit of thought you could come up with a variation of a DIY theme or any similar sideways slide on the original concept of an article directory.Let us look at an example.If you did a DIY article directory as an example you could add features that other directories do not have at present that would create interest and give everybody value. Without giving too much thought to the categories that you could add to your article directory I thought to list some ideas below that just pop into my head and see if you think that any of them could be viable if added to your website.Top hundred pagesIf you ran a constant top 100 of dozens of different categories like top articles read, top article submitters, top subject and a whole lot more. The more you think up the more your less prolific writers will have a chance to feature on your top lists and this will encourage them to do more and to keep going.Full personal page feature Anyone who joins your directory would have a full page added to your website which would allow them to add products and all sorts of descriptive features to gain them more exposure. If I was able to tell the world that I have 93 websites and that I do x and y and z I would be very pleased with that article directory and would probably support them. Naturally ezine publishers would get a section on their own and you would allow them to add things like a subscribe button that would allow them to capture subscribers from your directory.
It goes almost without saying that you had better have an eagle eye to look out for any funny business, but if you were careful you could survive that side of your business.A classified sectionYou could add a classified section to your directory which would give your members a second level of links and allow different ways to market their products.I could keep going by telling you to add forums, sister niche directories and a bunch of other ways to give your members reasons to use your website and that would gain you massive numbers of members in a very short space of time which should make your site a success.I believe that if you kept your branding clean and pure, did not allow widening away from your selected niche and used some viral marketing tactics you could be very successful with this website model. Good luck with it.