Many product categories are now dominated by dropshipped products. We've all seen the same product photos listed under different "brands" by diffrent sellers with different prices - essentially the same product. Trudging through page after page of dropshipped products can be a chore.
I don't begrudge anyone running a dropshipping business, but at the same time it does feel that many dropshipping sellers do not really care for the quality of the product they sell. If there is any product differentiation it rarely goes beyond sticking a logo on the product.
Is the picture of dropshipping above a fair one?
What are you thoughts on dropshipping as a customer? What are your thoughts if you are a dropshipper?
[1] Shopify explanation of dropshipping: Dropshipping is an order fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, the seller purchases inventory as needed from a third party—usually a wholesaler or manufacturer—to fulfill orders.
Dropshipping usually means the product is fulfilled (packed and shipped) from the manufacturer directly to the buyer. So dropshipping is also just in time because there’s no inventory maintained by the seller, but with the additional feature that the manufacturer does the fulfillment as well.
If you buy a case of widgets from a factory overseas and sell those on Shopify or eBay, ordering more when you run low, that’s just in time. If you take the orders and payments and then direct the overseas factory to ship directly to your customer, that’s dropshipping. If you let a third party such as Amazon maintain inventory and do fulfillment for you, that’s outsourcing logistics.
Dropshipping does have a bad name, I think because so many amateurs got into it hoping for a quick buck (thanks, Tim Ferriss!) and hordes of wannabe digital nomads thought they could get rich or at least support themselves dropshipping low-quality products. I have met plenty of those people and none of them were making money doing it. Big companies and reputable retailers dropship all the time but they have the support infrastructure in place to handle the problems that come up, and the scale to buy in quantity.
Dropshipping is not necessarily just B2C (business to consumer). It’s much more common in B2B. For example Foot Locker orders 20,000 pairs of shoes from Nike. Those get manufactured in Vietnam, put into a container, picked up at a port, and trucked directly to Foot Locker’s distribution center. Nike never held the shoes in their inventory. That’s bread and butter in B2B logistics. Scaling that down to B2C with individual orders means losing the advantages of bulk purchasing and shipping.
If anything, as a consumer, its created a considerable distrust in small retailers. I've started reverse image searching every online store to see if the same thing is available on AliExpress. The number of items represented fraudulently as 'made local' is staggering...
At the same time, the factories manufacturing these products all stick to pretty common prefabrication templates and techniques, so the same designs are becomign quite ubiquitous — which I suppose if you are a discerning customer – means you can really differentiate by finding things which truly are not mass commodities.
And I guess that's the advantage — these have to be mass produced goods or else the economics of drop-shipping would not be sustainable. But, considering how many goods are mass produced these days, both luxury and necessity, its hard to pick any product type and expect it to be locally made.
I don't think its immoral, but I'd avoid any retailer selling drop-shipped goods.
Also, they have huge warehouses in most of the major cities. They ship everything in bulk to the warehouse where it is then divvied up for last-mile shipping.
They also have a smaller number of local sellers in each city, but I noticed that they are getting their stock from... you guessed it... wish dot com. It does make shipping faster, but it's still very similar to the Amway model that way.