The Drop Shipper: A Mysterious Masked Man?
The mysterious drop shipper has left tracks all over the nation. He may have even dropped by your house last Christmas. Perhaps you remember how you found the perfect gift for your spouse, but how you live in California and the company that you ordered from was in Massachusetts and you wondered if it would come in time. Then just a few days later, the package showed up at your house with a return address of Arizona and you wondered just a little what had happened.
After your first encounter with the masked drop shipper, you started looking more closely into online retail and wondering just what it would take for you to become a business owner. Along the way, you started to see behind the mask of the drop shipper. You realized that with him along for the ride, making some money through online retail could be a lot easier than you had ever imagined.
You quickly noticed that drop shippers really do the hard work and that they make running a business much more efficient. As you take in the orders for your products, you just pass them along to the drop shipper and then let him pack up and ship off each piece of merchandise to its new owner.
Wow, you thought, and wondered why everyone wasn’t jumping at the chance to use drop shipping to begin his or her own business. As far as you could tell, drop shipping had many advantages and only a few disadvantages.
First of all, drop shipping meant that you didn’t have to worry a bit about your inventory. This was a definite plus since the garage was already filled to capacity and you definitely didn’t have room to store boxes of bulk orders of merchandise for your store. Since the drop shipper would fill and ship each order, all you needed were a few samples of inventory and some photographs from the catalogs the drop shippers provided to design your own advertising and webpage.
The second huge plus to drop shipping had to do with the nitty-gritty of the financial side. Typically, a retail business requires you to have enough capital to buy your initial merchandise and begin marketing. With drop shipping, the initial start-up costs are minimal. You begin by advertising, a customer orders and pays for a product, you forward the order to the drop shipper along with the payment for the product and shipping. This leaves you with cash in your pocket, or in other words, positive cash flow!
You found even more pros and cons as you researched drop shipping. Pro: the product is shipped from the location closest to the customer. Con: you don’t have as much control over your inventory. Pro: you save time and money by not shipping products. Con: a product might back-order if you don’t keep track of the drop shipper’s current stock. Pro: you have endless options of products that you can try out, but you never have to buy any of them up front.
In time, the drop shipper really did become your loyal sidekick because despite his few weaknesses, he was there to make your business adventure possible.
Jake Sabey is an Education and Marketing Specialist at Doba where they strive to simplify access to hundreds of dropshippers offering millions of wholesale products ready to be drop shipped direct to the end customer.
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