“Drop Shipping”

[Ape]

General discussion thread. Thoughts on longevity and/or viability? Drop Shipping shot up in popularity recently with “tiktok billionaires” shilling so much it’s become a buzzword.

For those uninformed Drop Shipping is going to a manufacturer and buying their products at “dealer price”, reselling it on whatever shit website you run, then paying a “Drop Shipping” fee for them to ship it out for you and make a 3.02$ profit.

 

[(((Obar Lazcano Kamz)))]

its a low iq scam

 

[NigKid]

Its bullshit, youre never gonna be making money doing it now, there was a time were it was profiteable but that time is long gone.
Depending on the country youre in youre also responsible for all damage caused by the cheap chiense shit youre trying to flip, so its double dumb

Also if you look at that tumbnaiil or tiktok and genuinly consider what youre seeing youre a retard

 

[murdered meat bag]

when you drop ship, the manufuctor or their warehouse partners ship the item to the customer directly. saves you wareshouse space but also means you have no control over shipping. look at the 1 star reviews for CDW. their business is nothing but drop ship and pleb customers don't understand that. and with the current logistics nightmare, who knows if it will ever ship.

 

[Saint Alphonsus]

Arbitrage has been full of these grifts ever since Amazon launched its Fulfilled By Amazon program. It is almost like Amway but without the actual multi level marketing, in that the suckers who think they're going to get rich are the actual customers.

Why is this being pushed on TikTok? Because it's a Chinese app and all of this eCommerce is driven by business whose entire manufacturing, supply chain and logistics are dependent on China.

Globalism makes things easier and efficient but reliant on a single point of failure. Not even a joint US-Chinese bioweapon attack has knocked us out of this stupor.

 

[Thumb Butler]

Buy Chinese, buy ten times over and your house might even catch fire. I've learnt my lession.

 

[Analog Devolved]

when you drop ship, the manufuctor or their warehouse partners ship the item to the customer directly. saves you wareshouse space but also means you have no control over shipping. look at the 1 star reviews for CDW. their business is nothing but drop ship and pleb customers don't understand that. and with the current logistics nightmare, who knows if it will ever ship.

Oh man the reason I clicked on this thread was because I thought it was about the shipping fubar in China right now. Biggest logistical shit show in my lifetime.

You're trusting some 3rd party to ship these items and not get screwed by customs or VAT. I don't see how you save money with this.

 

[Long-Nosed Fish]

Drop-shipping is now a regular trend not only for cheap chinese shit, but is also rising in popularity with secondhand items.

There's a plague on clothes reselling sites where people pretend to live in another country and will list things from that country's flea market sites, and only buy it if someone on the US site wants it. They have "storefronts" with thousands of items just scraped from Mercari that half the time are sold by the time the guy goes to buy them and they just cancel the transaction and refund the buyer. And these are usually marked up 2-3x their original listing.

It's an absolutely disgusting practice that taints the entire market, especially for legitimate sellers whos items are immediately pushed off the "new listings" sections. But the site owners don't care because they skim 10% off the top.

 

[murdered meat bag]

Oh man the reason I clicked on this thread was because I thought it was about the shipping fubar in China right now. Biggest logistical shit show in my lifetime.

You're trusting some 3rd party to ship these items and not get screwed by customs or VAT. I don't see how you save money with this.

it's like those "earn 6 figures selling on ebay! buy my book to learn how!" ads from the 90's-2000's. and it you did was buy dollar store ceramic chintz and sell it on ebay.


For real logistics, SE Asia is still shut down right? i'll take at least 6-8 months to get the factories back to regular production levels. I still can't anyone with name brand car amps. it's all boss and knock off shit.

 

[themasterlurker]

If you go on Instagram there are thousands of pages run by Indians who just repost stuff from major accounts, with the second slide of the post being a product they try selling. The problem? There are thousands of other people selling the exact same product at the same exact price, meanwhile I can go on ebay and get the same dumb gimmick product for a quarter of the price, and shipped from an American warehouse.

 

[Jamal McGucci]

Yeah, I don't really get drop shipping. Just buy your stuff directly from Aliexpress.

 

[Kosher Dill]

This is hardly new. Drop shipping has been a plague online as long as marketplaces have been developed enough to support it. I saw it happening in the mid-'00s at least, and it probably goes back even earlier.

Part of the issue is the criminally low subsidized international shipping rates China gets courtesy of the UPU. (This is one of the many things Trump called out but then never did anything about) Once people realized that it's possible to get one individually-packaged chunk of chinesium drop-shipped to a customer for pennies, the rest was history.

 

[L50LasPak]

Please sign up for my brand new and revolutionary Yeet Shipping technique. We can afford free shipping on every item, as our delivery drivers save 30% more time throughout the day by catapulting your package right on to your doorstep without even having to get out of the truck. Like, subscribe, please donate some shillcoin and remember to turn off that pesky adblock.

 

[TheBeanz]

Please sign up for my brand new and revolutionary Yeet Shipping technique. We can afford free shipping on every item, as our delivery drivers save 30% more time throughout the day by catapulting your package right on to your doorstep without even having to get out of the truck. Like, subscribe, please donate some shillcoin and remember to turn off that pesky adblock.

I'm in. Please send me your copy-paste templates for my mandatory social media posts about 'building my business'

I'll send you the bitcoin next week, promise

 

[Red Hood]

I bought a drop shipped t shirt once. Took a month to get to me and tore the second time I washed it. Never again.

 

[Stoneheart]

Its a fools business. The only people who make money from it are experts in small fields full of people who dont wanna deal with the chinese directly.
there is stuff people want that cant be found on chinese websites without chinese language expertise.

If you know what stuff is wanted by your niche, can speak and read chinese and are willing to do the leg work, you can make a living off it.
but thats nothing new, this model has been around for centuries, the internet opened up dropshipping for millions of idiots who hope to become rich by selling a million fidgetspinner on their shopify page...

 

[Pissmaster]

Soula Boy's "Souljagame" console thing was basically an elaborate dropshipping scam. That's the kind of person that does dropshipping.

 

[Win98SE]

The only way to make real money in dropshipping is to sell the "courses"/e-books that teach people to dropship. These "gurus" get tens of thousands of YouTube/TikTok followers, then start advertising their mentorship programs and pay-to-access Facebook groups with $100+ price tags. I've read a few accounts of people who have taken these courses/paid for the mentorships and it's very basic fundamental knowledge of e-commerce with maybe a handful of product recommendations/etc. Big MLM vibes.

 

[A Gay Retard]

Drop-shipping on sites where it's against the ToS for sellers is a great way to get fucked by buyers. Whenever a seller drop-ships a product to me when I order from a site, like Amazon for example, that doesn't allow sellers to drop-ship, I could in theory just claim I never got the product and the marketplace forces the seller to refund me. If the seller wanted to prove it was shipped and I was lying they'd be forced to reveal the product shipped from a Wal-Mart warehouse or something. If you're drop-shipping on eBay and having packages sent from Amazon, as I've seen done by morons, a disgruntled customer can out you to both eBay and Amazon and get your seller accounts banned.

Don't drop-ship, all it takes is one customer who knows how the system works to fuck you over.

edit: it's also a great way to get screwed on returns when somebody claims there's something wrong with the product. Ask them to send it back to the third party you had it shipped from, if that third party would even accept it, and the buyer can still escalate to customer service for the marketplace where they bought from you and fuck you that way too. Then they might not even send it back and claim they did. How are you as a drop-shipper going to prove it either way? What recourse do you have? I mailed a box full of dirt and gravel to Target returns once because I was sick of a Pajeet drop-ship scammer's bullshit. Wonder what they said to him when they opened that package.

 

[kittyfucker]

Drop-shipping on sites where it's against the ToS for sellers is a great way to get fucked by buyers. Whenever a seller drop-ships a product to me when I order from a site, like Amazon for example, that doesn't allow sellers to drop-ship, I could in theory just claim I never got the product and the marketplace forces the seller to refund me. If the seller wanted to prove it was shipped and I was lying they'd be forced to reveal the product shipped from a Wal-Mart warehouse or something.

In theory, couldn't you buy a bunch of shit off Amazon and, if they were all drop-shipped, pull that card?
I know lying about whether your order came in or not is illegal (at least where I live it is) but would they focus more on the seller breaking ToS or the buyer?
I'm not going to do it by the way. It just interests me

IMHO I think the whole dropshipping thing is looking at it through the wrong lens when there's much easier ways to make money that won't get you in any trouble - relevant powerlevel, I love making jewelry and all these tiktok egirls are ordering charms from AliExpress, putting them on earrings and selling them for $15USD and they sell like fucking hot cakes. I know from experience that 1 pair of the earrings they make would cost about $2USD (and that's being liberal) , would take ~2 minutes to assemble and only a few minutes to print the label and ship. Everything you need to make it is dirt fucking cheap and in bulk on chinese websites - just say you're an "indie" business, say you're a black trans woman or some shit, and you'll have 12k followers on your business account in like 3 months. Seriously. Worst case scenario it doesn't work out - that's when you sell what you've made to other people wanting to do that shit, and sell it at a premium.

Check some examples (link is to etsy) and take a gander at the shit they use, run to AliExpress and see how much those same materials run for. I guarantee you it is less than $5USD, free shipping.

There's also a guy I know that buys random shit from thrift stores, claims it's "vintage" and sells it for like $70 for a pair of $3 jeans he found. They're not even vintage.