Guy Kawasaki – Doba Interest?
I just noticed that Guy Kawasaki has a link to Doba – a Utah dropship product aggregator on his blog. It’s on the bottom right under “Alignments of Interest”. It says, “Doba – Drop ship products for ecommerce sales.” Does that mean Guy is an investor? I did some reading and he’s actually an adviser for the company.
I’m impressed that CEO Jeremy Hanks has Google alerts on his company. He notices what is said about Doba and comments on blog posts. Now that is conscientious! (I’m a huge fan of Google alerts as a way to track your online reputation – put one on your name and your company and Google will email you every time you’re mentioned online. Or, for ideas on what to blog about.). I also noticed for the words, “Guy Kawasaki, Doba” I have two posts in the top 20 on Google. One for this version of my blog and one from the old version. Different stories.
While I was on Jeremy’s blog – I watched an interview with him. He says the strongest product category on the Doba is computers/laptops, home & garden, electronics, bed & bath, and clothing & apparel. Also, about half of their customers are selling on eBay and half are selling their products in their own store.
Here’s where I think Doba is best – to round out your product selection when you only have a few products for your online store, or to make things more simple (no dealing with suppliers directly which for some can be a good thing). eBay is a lead generation tool people to your ecommerce site. Another company I’m curious about is called Shopster. How is it similar to or different from Doba?
2 Responses to “Guy Kawasaki – Doba Interest?”
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August 21st, 2007 at 5:13 am
“Another company I’m curious about is called Shopster. How is it similar to or different from Doba?”
They both are types of middle man programs. They promote products and put themselves in front of the product source. In short you are selling products FOR doba or shopster…not FROM them.
They have markups on the prices. For example Moteng is a camping product source for Doba products (or it was a few months back when i used them). Doba had about a 6% markup on their prices and added a dropship fee. Each Doba “warehouse” is a separate supplier source. They do not stock products or inventory directly or buy in bulk. I found the real dropship program through another dropship data service provider and was a bit disappointed when I found out that if I sold a product with a 8% profit margin…..i could have had a 14% margin plus I would not have had to pay the fee if I had ordered directly from the supplier.
When I looked at Shopster I noticed the same thing. They had products from multiple suppliers like DH, DBL, BuyWellness, and a jewelry source which I don’t want to name (since I still sell from them).
The bigger difference is their approach. Shopster seems to make less money on the product price markups compared to doba. They have a membership fee which gives you access to see “their” products for sale. Then they promote a turnkey store which you pay more for to sell products for them. So they are selling access to products which they don’t stock and then they sell a turnkey site for a fee so you can sell these products.
Doba doesn’t really offer a turnkey store for their products. They are mostly making the money on the products that you sell for them and the monthly fees and large user turn over. They have some recomended cart programs which you can use to sell products. This would give them an affiliate payout or they would make money on keeping more customers active paying more monthly fees.
They both are pretty similar. They seem to know how to market wholesale dropship programs in bulk to get new users to pay them to have access to the product information. However, much of this information on these programs can be found for free and users can work with the supplier sources directly.
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Comparing Shopster to Doba is like comparing piece of diamond to a piece of coal because you use both as a paper weight.
Doba is a droppshipping middleman. They give you a list of products and an ordering tool which is valuable if that is what you want. The markup is fair considering the work it takes to actually set up the relationships with dropshippers and manage the order system. If your time isn’t worth the markup, then nothing stops you from doing it yourself.
Shopster is something totally different though. Yes you can use Shopster as a droppshipping middleman if you choose. If that’s all you do then you are missing the big picture.
Shopster is on the cutting edge of a whole new type of e-commerce – it is a “retail enablement platform” (per Sarath Samarasakera, ceo) He called it that in a podcast interview by Jeff Molander.
What is an REP? Why is it important. This technology is important because it is transformational at a fundamental socio-economic level. Consider that the corporation is the foundational building block of our current economic structures. Corporations are in essence a method of organizing resources such as capital and labor to create a product which is more valuable than its inputs.
A basic function of a business is relationship management. Employee relationships, vendor relationships, banking and finance relationships, and customer relationships. Relationships take time, expertise and expense to manage. A corporation is an ecosystem which manages these for a specific purpose.
So how does Shopster change that paradigm. Shopster provides a place for individuals to come and both leverage existing relationships and add new ones, and creates a space, rules, and system to manage those.
For example – the “store” What is that? Its a complex piece of software that displays information, manages inventory, manages sales, is a payment system, is secure, is customizable. As an individual who might want to get int retail how much would I expend to develop that technology and relationships? I get to leverage their relationships and technology and now can be a retailer.
How about inventory. Its pretty obvious that Shopster doesn’t carry a 1,000,000 products in a warehouse somewhere. So likely I could find out who their suppliers are. How much does it cost to set up a relationship with 1 supplier. To find them, to get the reselling agreement, to negotiate the terms and pricing, to negotiate credit or payment, to integrate their inventory into my database, to manage the after sales process… there is a cost to relationships that too many people overlook. Now do this 100′s of times.
With and REP you get access to all those relationships through a standardized system. This I think is the genious of Shopster. they provide all the backend support that only large companies have and provide it to the individual -thus enabling them to compete.
Shopster’s current REP also has some basic marketing tools, customization capacity and user generated content through a forum.
This is just the tip of the iceberg though. A true REP will allow its users to build, share and earn from adding to the platform. And that is the future of commerce. A system which let’s any user, whether they are an individual or business join and add their unique capabilities to the system and take from the system what they need.
If you are a manufacturer, adding products to an REP would gain you immediate access to an army of potential resellers. If you are a graphic designer how many stores need you customization services? If you are a reseller you can focus on selling instead of sourcing. And the list goes on…
Shopster is the most advance REP out there available as a grass roots platform. They however haven’t opened up their code to their user base which needs to happen in order for the REP to grow.
Really you can’t compare the two, Doba is Web 1.0 and Shopster is Web 3.0, but i guess you could use both as a paper weight if you wanted to.
\John