Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Dropship Principles and Gains

By Amanda Tan


What is drop-shipping and how does it work? Is it actually a sound supply chain management model? Can any person milk this technique? The reality is that drop-shipping is really a very simple process and an inexpensive entry point to buying and selling on the web.

The dropshipping enterprize model works as follows: a retailer finds a product from an organization that is happy to drop ship, and then lists that product on an internet auction or an eCommerce website. The retailer, then, is in control of the marketing of that product and collecting the payment for it, but they're never essentially in possession of the item.

Here are the 1st 2 benefits of drop shipping. Doubtless the most important one is that you never have to stock the inventory yourself. What this means to you as the retailer is that you don't have a big capitol investment obligation when you start your business - you don't have to buy all your products up front. You simply list the item the supplier is happy to drop ship and then collect the payment. And this is the second advantage of drop shipping: a positive cash flow cycle - meaning you receive the money before paying the supplier for the product.

This brings us to the following step of the drop shipping business organization model - collecting the payment and transferring the order. Once a customer has selected your product and made their payment (including the shipping costs) you then send the wholesale price and the delivery fee to the supplier, together with the order for the product. The provider, then, is in charge of accomplishment and will deliver the item to the customer. As is obvious, the retailer is left with the difference in prices, without having to see, package, ship, or store the products.

The benefits from this step also should be clear. Not having any inventory on hand yourself means you do not have to worry as much about unexpected purchaser or market shifts. You can never get stuck with rooms full of outmoded hardware because you've never actually purchased any inventory. You've only handled the payment and the order. The provider is the person who handles the other bits of this supply chain equation.

And the part of the equation the drop shipper takes care of is no tiny thing. Drop shipping releases big amounts of your time that would usually be taken up with activities such as stocking inventory, packaging products, and standing in a queue after line after endless line at the post office.

These are the fundamentals of drop-shipping, but there are some other advantages that are a natural outgrowth from those already claimed.

Without the need of a warehouse or other location to store your products you'll cut back on your overhead costs, and without the requirement to buy stock in big quantities, you can minimize the hazards of overshooting projections and getting stuck with unwanted product.

When you use the drop-shipping model you can use all this freed-up time to investigate your market and discover all the products that can perform the best for your business. Markets and industries change all of the time, and a drop shipper will help you be flexible enough to stay abreast of those changes.

Drop shipping can give you an opportunity to look like one of the "big guys." You can offer as many or as few products as you like. Specialize in a single product or become an one stop destination for a big assortment of high-demand items.

The products you offer will, naturally, rely on the suppliers you will find. Some are bigger than others, but if you'd like to succeed at online selling, reliability is far more crucial that just size. As you start to reach the huge potential online, you've got to know you'll be able to quickly and reliably fill purchaser demand.




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