(1) Asking for a signup/monthly fee before showing wholesale prices.
These “dropshippers” are nothing more than middlemen - using other dropshippers on your behalf and charging you sometimes close to or above retail. If you’ve seen the “make £80,000 on eBay” adverts this is where they usually come from.

(2) High postage costs or “handling” fee.
Not always a scam (some companies just have high overhead) but sometimes a middleman, who is using another dropshipper and charging you the extra handling fee or higher postage and making their money that way.

Not as bad as the scam in (1) as the prices are still competitive, but it’s worth digging a little deeper to find a similar dropshipper with lower postage who may be the original supplier.

How can you avoid these scams?
Simple - do your homework. Ask the suppliers difficult questions before handing any money over. Check how long they have been in business (a “whois” on their domain name) and put their name into the search engines and see if any complaints show up.

Data sources now handles all the data from Googles news (to find out what rapidly updated content users read), images and even products searches (ideal if you’re looking to find trends in what people are buying).

Metro sources (US only - at the moment) can determine the trends down to geographic area - perfect for targeting Adwords campaigns to certain areas.

The article states that 6 in 10 national advertisers will be cutting spending on traditional media and increasing their online advertising budgets.

Although obvious to any seasoned Internet Marketeer, the scope of the shift is apparently unparalleled and will lead to a shake up of the flow of money around the internet that hasn’t been seem in recent years. this hould make make 2009 a potentially very profitable year not for just large ad publishers, but smaller “Adsense” type publishers too.