Affiliate Reviews Blog

Craigslist is an online classified ads page and community noticeboard started by Craig Newmark in 1995.  Originally intended as an email list for friends and coworkers on what was happening in the San Francisco Bay area, it has spread to be a worldwide phenomenon.  Users can find a relationship, a job or even a place to live. As with any online community forum though, Craigslist has its share of scammers, predators and trolls to be careful of.

Why Choose Craigslist for Online Searches

Craigslist.org is a popular site worldwide and collectively has over 10 million visitors viewing 4 billion pages each month.  Alexa ranks it as the 8th most popular site in the US and 31st around the world. The bulk of these visitors have no harmful intentions but there will always be some people, as on any online community, who may be seeking to harm others either physically or financially. There are, however, a number of very worthwhile reasons to use the Craigslist community for finding more information on what is happening in your town, meeting someone new or trading a paperclip for a house.

Many might wonder why Craigslist is so appealing. That answer is easy and is also why it can attract scammers.  It is almost free to use.  If you want to post an ad to sell your couch, it is free.  You will only get charged for some job postings, adult services and some apartment rentals.  Otherwise, you can reach out to thousands of local users at the click of a button and it won’t cost you a cent.

How to Protect Yourself on Craigslist

One of the best ways to protect yourself on Craigslist against identity thiefs, or any online community, is to safeguard your personal information. This means information such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers, social security numbers and other similar numbers should not be given out unless the individual is positive who will be receiving the information and that it is being transmitted over a secure server. This is important because this information can be used for identity theft or other fraudulent purposes.

Care should also be taken to avoid giving out personal information such as full name, address and phone number. This is especially important because such information could be used by someone with malicious intent to locate an individual.

Technorati Tags: craigslist, identity theft, online protection, protect yourself online

If you are fresh to the business of retailing and sourcing wholesale merchandise, you probably have come across a website named doba.com. Doba.com is a consolidated product sourcing solution which until recently was a unique blend of product sourcing, order fulfillment and drop shipping. Doba’s aim is to connect drop shipping wholesale suppliers with online retailers to provide a top to bottom supply chain management system for all kinds of items.

To understand where Doba type services fit in wholesale supply, you need to know a little about the other types of wholesale contact lists that are available.

First, there are sites that act simply as wholesale contact lists, or wholesale directories, limited to listing suppliers of wholesale source, closeouts, overstocks and drop shipping. This is known as the ‘no-middleman’ approach, however, due to the masses of information available, it may take considerable time to locate the appropriate supplier of the product that you are looking for. In addition to this, when you are dealing with a wholesale supplier, you will find that there is a wide price variation if you don’t already have a long standing relationship with them.

In addition to this, well known wholesale directories don’t filter their listings, which means there is no known difference between legitimate wholesale suppliers and middlemen. This means that you could end up paying over the odds for your wholesale products.

This is where systems like Doba come into play. What happens when you sign up to this service is that you are connected with many different suppliers of goods that you are looking for. But instead of digging for the wholesale source that you need, you search by the item that you are looking for.

That is a huge time saver when you consider that you can directly track down the exact product that you are looking for, many of which are respected names. In addition, it doesn’t matter if you are on the look out for two completely different products with different wholesale suppliers, as you are simply able to instantly find the wholesale merchandise that you are looking for.

Because systems like this drive a huge amount of business to the wholesale suppliers, when you buy wholesale items this way, you get the greatest possible markdown available.

On top of this, instead of dealing with orders from a number of different wholesale suppliers, you will instead simply be ordering using the Doba interface. Even if you were to purchase from ten different suppliers, you would only need to place one main order and Doba would do the rest.

The one criticism that people have with Doba.com is that it doesn’t act as a conventional wholesale source, but rather as a middleman by charging a fixed monthly membership fee and also raising wholesale prices, however, there are other models similar to Doba which do provide all the benefits without this one disadvantage. If you are serious that you want to buy wholesale products to resell – then using a service like Doba is the best way to go about it.

Technorati Tags: craigslist, doba, drop ship, eBay, overstocks, small business, source, supplier, wholesale