iEntry 10th Anniversary RSS Newsletter Advertising
Join the WebProWorld Forum!

How Drop Shipping Works

One of the most frequently asked questions on the Net is: "What should I sell online?"

Many people know what products they want to sell. However, they don't know how to do this. Should they physically stock the products themselves or promote other companies through affiliate programs?

Drop shipping may be the answer for some website owners who want to become stockless retailers, whereby they keep no stock themselves. Instead they promote products on their website and get a drop shipping company to despatch these products for them.

Here are the steps involved in drop shipping:

1) You open an Internet Store with a shopping cart and accept credit cards on your site. You can also sell on Internet Auction sites.

2) You find a distributor who will "drop ship" the products you want to sell.

3) You open an account with the "drop ship" distributor(s) you choose.

4) You receive descriptions and images of the products you wish to sell from the distributor and put them on your Internet Store or Auction.

5) When a customer buys from your Store or Auction, they pay with their credit card. Your Store or Auction charges their credit card plus shipping.

6) You email the order to the drop ship distributor with the customer's name and address.

7) Then the drop shipper despatches the product to your customer from the warehouse with YOUR business name on the package.

8) The drop shipper charges you the wholesale price plus shipping. Remember you have already passed the shipping charge on to your customer, so the shipping costs you nothing.

So that's how drop shipping works. You don't have to buy products in bulk and store them, hoping to sell. You don't have to pay to have it shipped to you, and then pay again to ship it to your customer. All you had to do was send an email to your drop shipper.

(C) John Lynch

( Learn how to Make Money Online by subscribing to
Free 6-part 'Internet Marketing Explained' mini
course. Get 6 free Internet Marketing E-books;
free autoresponder; and free trial top-notch
website.
http://www.merchant-account-service.com/internet_marketing_explained.htm...)

News Tags: eBay, Works
About the author:
(C) John Lynch

( Learn how to Make Money Online by subscribing to Free 6-part 'Internet Marketing Explained' mini course. Get 6 free Internet Marketing E-books; free autoresponder; and free trial top-notch website. http://www.merchant-account-service.com/internet_marketing_explained.html)

2 Comments

be careful

I have run across a lot of different dropshipping companies and there are pluses and minuses with most of them. One company that provides a full service solution (including the storefront as mentioned in John's article) is www.shopster.com. The whole dropship process is fully integrated, so that once you make a sale through your online storefront, they take care of all the rest. Worth evaluating if you are looking to start a dropshipping business.

Ebay Drop Shipper

I came across a drop shipper that claims to be an "eBay certified service provider." What exactly does that mean?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
6 + 14 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
Featured Headline
GoDaddy Makes Twitter Part Of Domain Registration Process
Implies all site owners should have accounts
7 comments | 20 hours ago
 
Subscribe to WebProNews


Send me relevant info