If you are fresh to the world of retailing, or have been around for a while, you should have heard of the words ‘drop shipping‘ or ‘direct fulfillment’ being whispered in wholesaling circles. Basically, drop shipping is the practice wherein the wholesale supplier will ship merchandise that you have sold straight to your customer, without you ever taking delivery of them. It’s a great system to use especially if you have time or money constraints, and especially if storage space for the items you are wishing to sell is limited.

The biggest question that people have is how do you find drop ship suppliers of the merchandise that you want to sell?

There is an increasingly popular trend for people to look into drop shipping from China, whereby the overseas supplier will fulfill the order that you have taken and deliver to your customer. But there are a few problems with drop shipping from China that you need to be aware of. Firstly, there is a much longer wait time than usual to have your merchandise shipped to your customers locally. This can lead to problems as your customers may not expect to be waiting long amounts of time for items they believe they are buying locally.

If you are prepared to do a little legwork, you can find domestic drop ship suppliers that will be willing and able to work with you and provide low prices for high quality merchandise. The advantages of working with a local supplier are enormous – in addition to better communications and increased reliability, the faster service will also be more pleasing to your customers than drop shipment from Asia can be.

Of course, domestic drop shippers are harder to find, as they don’t blatantly market their services like drop shipment from Asia. The whole process of dropshipping is ideal to retail businesses that don’t have any space to stock products or don’t want to get involved with the time consuming tasks of storing, picking and delivering the goods they sell. The most typical users of dropshipping services are people selling products online, via catalogues, leaflets and direct mail marketing and one of the biggest growing areas of people using drop shipping services is eBay sellers.

In fact, the best and most advantageous way to succeed with using a dropshipping service is to firstly contact regular wholesale distributors and suppliers and ask them whether they have a drop ship service available. Some companies that you speak to may not be familiar with term, so be prepared to explain what you are looking for so they can best advise if they have the ability to perform.

Also, you need to be aware of the fact that dropshipping has many more advantages to retailers than it does to wholesale suppliers, because they are taking a substantial risk selling only one item at a time. So you might find that unless a wholesale supplier is already involved in drop shipping, they will be reluctant to start this service unless there are real business benefits which will make the process worthwhile.

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