Apr
17
An Overview of Wholesale Drop Shipping
April 17, 2010 |
Maybe you are a small business owner looking to expand, or a business owner in the making who is investigating online stores. You may be very familiar with the concept of drop shipping, or this may be an exciting new discovery. No matter your circumstances, drop shipping can be a benefit as it brings convenience and flexibility into how your business runs.
So, What is Wholesale Drop Shipping?
In just a few words, wholesale drop shipping is a way for small businesses and online retailers to sell products to the general public without actually keeping them on hand. A situation that would lend itself to drop shipping would be when you sell very few of a certain item in a month, but continue to have demand for that item.
Rather than purchasing a large amount of the product wholesale and then slowly distributing it yourself, you simply take the orders as they come, and let the drop shipper do the work!
Advantages of Drop Shipping
Are the hours that you spend going through your inventory, preparing items to be sent, and shipping merchandise starting to add up? Wholesale drop shipping can save you those hours as well as the stress and hassle!
Drop shipping means you don’t have to stress about your inventory or worry that the two-year old might choke on a stray foam packing peanut. The hassle of packaging your products is removed, but you still maintain your cash flow.
In fact, overall man hours are saved with wholesale drop shipping. Rather than having warehouses pack and ship the products to you just to have you re-pack and ship them off, the merchandise is packed and shipped straight from the wholesaler.
Location also creates another distinct advantage of drop shipping While you live and operate your business from one location, wholesale suppliers operate all over the world. As you forward orders to the wholesaler, they ship the products from the warehouse closest to the customer, resulting in prompt, local shipments.
Despite the obvious advantages of drop shipping, there can also be disadvantages. Once in a while, back-ordering can occur as the result of a wholesale retailer simply exhausting their supply of a product.
This could lead to a long wait for the customer to receive their order and a chance for customer dissatisfaction. When researching to find the best dropshippers for your needs, ask about their in-stock rates (percent of time items are in stock). Doing so will help you minimize the inventory problems inherent to allowing another company to control your product supply.
An infrequent back order, however, is not much of a loss when compared with the time and effort saved by wholesale drop shipping!
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