Dropship The Way of yours To Ebusiness Success
Q: I would like starting my own eBay business, however, I really do not want to invest in a ton of inventory until I can get a better deal with on what might or won’t sell. I read another column regarding dropshipping, Amazon Filtering however, I’m still a little fuzzy on the way the entire process works. Do you feel using dropshipping is a good way to start an eBay business and if so, how do I get started?
— Candace M.
A: Dropshipping is a subject that I 1st answered in my column way back in April, 2003, that is decades ago in Internet ages. But with the continuing development of eBay and it’s positioning of itself as a good method for anybody wanting to launch an ebusiness, the topic of dropshipping is now hotter than ever before. It’s also now more misunderstood than ever before.
Dropshipping has been around since Sears began selling goods from the mail order catalogs of its over a 100 years ago. Nevertheless, the idea of dropshipping still confuses many people who don’t understand just how the process works.
By definition, dropshipping is a technique of marketing as well as distributing goods whereby the distributor or provider of the product (the dropshipper) ships the item directly to the end user (your customer) on the retailer’s behalf (that’s you).
The procedure for dropshipping involves three parties who take a merchandise from manufacturing to market. They are a manufacturer, a distributor, in addition to a reseller.
Let us use an azure widget as being a sample merchandise to demonstrate the process: Blue Widget Manufacturing (manufacturer): This’s the company which manufactures bluish widgets. Blue Widget Manufacturing does not sell straight to everyone or supply the retailers who ultimately sell the blue widgets to the end user. They choose to use distributors to handle the process of taking their blue widgets to sell. Bluish Widgets carries blue widgets by the truckload to distributors that pay $5 per azure widget.
A1 Distributing (distributor/dropshipper): A1 Distributing will be the business which purchases blue widgets in large quantities from the manufacturer and also supplies them to resellers in a cost of $7 each. The distributor doesn’t deliver blue widgets to the reseller, but ships orders straight to the reseller’s clients as the widgets are sold.
Big Bob’s eBay Widget Store: Big Bob offers bluish widgets to everyone from the eBay shop of his. Bob orders the azure widgets from A1 Distributing as he offers them (usually one at a time) and also has A1 ship the blue widget straight to the customer of his. Bob carries blue widgets to everyone for ten dolars each, meaning that for every azure widget sold he nets three dolars.