eBay Drop Ship Business

Dropshipping is not a new way of doing business even though some traders and merchants still have yet to embrace it. However, let me say, if you are new to trading, whatever it is you are interested in trading, you should take a good look at dropshipping before you move on to other business models.

Dropshipping is a great way to start a business if you have very little money up front. With dropshipping there is no costly overhead of buying in stock, keeping it in an expensive warehouse where you have to make sure the stock is insured, correctly housed and securely locked away and or guarded and neither do you have to take take periodical stock takes. Dropshipping allows you to sell stock that you do not have to physically hold in a warehouse or anywhere else you may have to store it! Before I discovered dropshipping I had boxes and boxes of stock all over my house!

First you find yourself a supplier who offers a dropship service and these days that is not a difficult task since many suppliers now offer this service, so from electronics, to designer wholesale clothing, to sex toys, they are all offering a dropship service. Once you have your supplier you sign on with them. Choose what you want to sell from their stock and you advertise the item on Ebay or your website.

Once the item sells and your customer pays you, you immediately pay your dropshipper and give them your customer's name and address and the supplier ships the item. Done! All without you ever seeing the product or your customer ever knowing that you never even handled the product.

Dropshipping: your dropshipper has an item on sale to you at $30, you work out how much it will cost you to sell it on Ebay, let's say $5. That brings you to $35, onto that you add how much you can make, say $20 and so you advertise the item for sale on Ebay for $55. When the item sells you pay your dropshipper $30 and the $25 is yours!

When dropshipping works well, it is an amazingly profitable process and stress free for you the middleman. Beware though, that within this chain, is the scope for fraud, scams and simple dishonesty. If you have a dropshipper who takes your money and doesn't ship, you are the one who has to refund your buyer. If your dropshipper does not ship on time, that will cause problems for you when your buyer wants to know where their item is. Also if you have a dropshipper who deliberately or accidentally leaves their company details inside the product they ship to your customer, your customer could bypass you the next time they order and go straight to your supplier and get the item cheaper. These and more are all issues you need to be aware of!

If you decide to go the dropship route, it is a superb business model. However you need to make sure that your dropshipper is honest and can deliver what he says he can. Because when your customer comes calling you are their only port of call and you have to take responsibility for the transaction and not your dropshipper.