How to identify dropshippers

[Mark]

No offence, but I personally wouldn't buy from a dropshipper - just in case there was a supply problem. Am I being paranoid?

How do you identify dropshippers either on eBay or on the web in general. Are they legally obliged to reveal that they dropship and if not, should they be forced to?

[Emma James]

What exactly is a "dropshipper?"

[Mark]

Dropshipping

Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to wholesalers, who then ship the goods directly to the customer. The retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.

[S4ICT]

Eagle, Not sure I understand your issue. Where you are talking about ebay sellers I totally understand there are an enormous number of opportunist sellers out there who "hope" to trade something for "nothing" by using stock they dont own and failing to deliver on promises made to purchasers.

However in the real world of geniune 2008 buisness operations, virtual warehousing is a primary function of a growing number of industries. The pioneer of this operational function is the IT industry which has developed virtual warehousing to be a major competitive advantage to vendors, distribution, resellers and end users in the ability to provide lower prices and increased efficiency of delivery, through consolidation of stock and resources.

If you genuinely think the supplier who takes stock of a large volume of an item they "hope" they will sell is where the consumer finds the best deal in 2008, you are somewhere around 5 years behind the rest of the world in technology advancement.

Done correctly as many businesses do, virtual warehousing provides business and consumers, with the greatest competitive advantage to the best purchase price since the birth of the internet and the SQL database.

(Deep for a first post but relevant I feel)

[Mark]

Hi Phil

Thanks for your post which clarifies things a bit better for me. I guess it's all a question of economics which does make perfect sense. Still not sure I'd be confident buying from an eBay one though!

[Emma James]

I can see the economic logic in this method. Surely most businesses are run on this basis with the increasing infiltration of computerisation into company management.

I'm not in a position to place large orders in any capacity but if I were and was assigning a considerable tranch of my disposable business/personal income to a shipment, I'd certainly want to verify the authenticity of the provider. That's where a good old Google trawl is likely to come in handy.

Sometimes trolls create profiles which have imaginary businesses attached to them. You'd have to be as thick as.. to follow anything through with these jesters. Half the time, the sites don't even connect.

As for e bay, there was a post on Ecademy the other day about some joker who has been on-selling tickets and racking up a fortune but not delivering and the purchaser hasn't been able to get any recourse. Not sure why because I thought credit card providers provided automatic insurance against this sort of loss......

[xbp]

Holding large amounts of stock can cost serious money. Warehouses aren't cheap and neither is paying the VAT on goods just sitting there.

See the Wikipedia entry for the "Just In Time" (JIT) inventory strategy.

[MRattu]

Hi I am Muaz and new in this forums and I am going to suggest you guys some sites from which you can get the information about drop shippers are as follows:

[Label King]

Originally Posted by Eagle

No offence, but I personally wouldn't buy from a dropshipper - just in case there was a supply problem. Am I being paranoid?

Yes! Many online retailers, even some really big names, are dropshippers. Some are pure dropshippers, some carry stocks of small items and drop ship large items, and some stock a lot but use dropshipping as a backup for out of stock or slow moving lines. I would say the vast majority of stationary & ink/toner stores (to use a popular example) are dropshippers to some extent, and I could name one VERY big online stationer who don't touch any stock at all...

Originally Posted by Eagle

How do you identify dropshippers either on eBay or on the web in general. Are they legally obliged to reveal that they dropship and if not, should they be forced to?

You generally can't, no they're not, and no - in that order...

I don't think a dropshipping ebayer (or online retailer) is going to give you any more problems than one that keeps stock. In fact an e-tailer that stocks items themselves are more likely to be out of stock of a particular item than a dropshipper (as the dropshippers are often huge distributors with massive warehouses full of stock).

Just as an example, if I wanted to get a HP Q2612A toner cartridge dropshipped to you I could get my hands on over 8000 of them right now - that's well over £250,000 of just one single toner cartridge. How many small or even medium size businesses could afford to spend that amount of money on stocking one a single item? Especially given how many hundereds and hundereds of different cartridges there are (and the Q2612A is a cheap one!)

ps. just in case you're wondering we do stock our Dymo range ourselves, although occassionally when someone orders a lot of a slow moving item 'next day' we can get them dropshipped direct if we don't have enough. Having said that, on the Dymo side the distributors don't always hold vast amounts of stock, and frequently we have more stock than they do!

[Bullseye_Badges]

I would like to think that drop shipping gives small companies the chance to level the playing field with the bigger boys on the block.

It also makes huge economic sense as well as being your bit for the planet in not sending goods all over the world to sit somewhere else before despatch to the customer.

Paul

[Mark]

I'm slowly becoming a fan!

[NikkiPilkington]

I don't think there is anything wrong with drop shipping - in the dim and distant past when I had the time and inclination to run more than 1 business, I ran a tshirt company that dropshipped and it was a great way to be able to ofer lower prices by holding no stock.