Hi all

I am new here and new to dropshipping. I had to change my way of trading as my landlord decided my stockroom was too messy and caused a fire risk!!

I also needed to cut my working hours right back because I wanted to spend more quality time with my daughter who has special needs.

I was packed off to the dropship forum and have never looked back. I am really happy with my dropshippers and have had no complaints from customers.

I dont spend every evening packing and I dont need to spend hours a week in the post office queue.

The only down side for me will come when a customer asks me something about a product that isnt answered on the dropshipping sites.

Dropshipping is something I haven't tried before but I'm considering given it a go as it takes away a lot of the work, hassle and risk of buying the stock up front. It's a bit of a minefield, but if you can find yourself a good dropshipper then you can run a business with less effort than it takes to do the same with your own stock.

As long as your dropshipper is reliable and has a reasonable returns policy then the only problems I can see are, as you've already mentioned, your lack of knowledge of each product if someone asks you about it, and website content duplication issues due to the fact that possibly hundreds of other sites are using the same XML feed to populate there sites and therefore have exactly the same text on their sites as you do on yours. The first issue will be overcome in time with experience and you can either edit the product descriptions by hand or run a script on them to change certain words/phrases to something more unique to try to overcome the second issue.

I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone with experience in dropshipping, especially those who have used product feeds to populate their sites.

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Lawrence

Last 3 days, researching dropshipping for client..several sites gear
their csv files to only oscommerce, ebay or google.
Maybe because they are steering you to pay for their cart/hosting
which are extra cost to initial join fee outlay..
Have to say, not impressed with dropshipping concept so far, but
more research needed..

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates Available

Dropshipping is great when you are testing the market to see what sells, are restricted in space and time and costs of buying in stock of course!
However at the end of the day it is always much better if you can eventually buy stock in.Even if you just choose the best sellers.
I like control over postage etc. It also depends on what area you ar elooking at though.I don't hink people realise but all your big companies already do this like next, and your catalogues. How many times have you noticed it saying product will come direct from manufacturer/supplier? They don't hide the fact at all.
Yet some small sites still feel a bit of stigma to this and don't advertise the fact.if you can make your money this way good luck to you though.It will save you a lot of time

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Exactly..I would too, plus total control over domain, website
and hosting, which you don't get with certain dropship
companies/deals.
Totally agree with your suggestion...

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates Available

Dropshipping works for me because I dont want to hold stock.

I used to order stock from wholesalers then found I was left with a lot of unsold stock I had to sell at a loss or give away which somehow defeats one of the objects of running my own business - to make a profit.

I am living in rented accommodation and couldnt store stock here if I wanted to - so dropshipping is a great way of owning a retail business without giving up the spare room.

I work out my own shipping rates as I deal with 6 different dropshippers who each have their own way of working out the shipping costs and I would guess that customers who multi-purchase from me arent necessarily going to be buying products from me and from the same dropshipper.

So far as having control over my site - my site has nothing to do with the dropshippers as the host was someone I paid independently and I use my own domain.

Just wondering how, if there are around 6 different dropshippers, you keep track of out of stock items?

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates Available

I visit each site in turn and check the 'out of stock' list - I then go to all the sites I trade on - 8 stores in all and end the listings of out of stock items.

Just about all the work I do now is on-line - no rummaging through stock, no printing packing slips, no packing parcels and no post office queues.

I have also got my bedroom back as that was where my stock was kept - yay!

Just a thought, but if you had something drop shipped to yourself as a customer, you could measure it, see the quality, get an idea of how to decribe it slightly differently? Obviously you couldn't do that with everything, but it might well pay with certain things. And you could still sell it by posting it out yourself when someone bought one.

Hi Dippy - I have ordered items for myself or as gifts from some of the dropshippers - saved a small fortune.

I'm not allowed to sell on items from the dropshipper (from home) as that would be in breach of my tenancy agreement - that's why i have just had to give away thousands of pounds worth of unsold stock.

I am now totally allergic to posting out to customers - now I really dont want to go down that road again - too much like hard work.

I doubt if any companies with thousands of products queue in the post office to send items out and I want my business to be a lot bigger than the stock I can store.