Forum Moderators: buckworks
I just bought a supscription to the drop ship source directory. Anybody in here used this before? Please share your experiences.
You pay with paypal I recall.
You can enter a a guest, and see the search results. When you buy a password you get to see the results.Do what the fraudsters do to get theim money back. At least in this case it sounds ligit.
they find it and give a price - you then have to take up the offer quickly or it lapses.
It stinks dont go there.
Buy the droppshippers directory from Amazon Im sure that much better value for money.
I have yet to find a decent droppshipper that isnt a 12 year old in Texas trying to fleece me.
Having said that I havent bought the above book.
At the time I thought the people selling lists and subsciptions would do my advertising for me, just send them a list and details, then the customes would come rolling in. Wrong. I sent out emails with lists to about 25 of these operations, some I found from searches, others from auctions (in the low life sections). Any way I only got 2 replies, both wanted loads of money to list me. After using other forms of advertising, I gave up all ads after a few months, now just serve a handful of very loyal customers (small time) for this service, that came from the latter system.
My point is this: As far as I can see there is no easy way to advertise a service of this sort, with out getting mixed up with the low life sites (that tend to rip people off wholesale, for information and/or goods). Most smaller operators, like myself have the stock, staff, warehousing and distrution networks to handle more output, but only have a small product line (ie. less than 500) and when working on low margins, don't want to spend excessive amounts on ads. The way around this would be to create a wonderful site that ranks highly, that I have been working on for about 10 months, but not set live. As my own retail and trade sites make more in the sort term, hence comand the time.
Please note I am UK based, so the same may not apply in the US.
To me it looks like a masive gap in the market for a web designer/SEO, to fill. Listing and rating dropshippers and not listing waisters. Although I could have missed some thing.
I could go on and explain the problems and drawbacks of dopshipping, that both partys can have if any one is interested. There are quite a few to over come on both sides (although mostly small).
Sorry if this post is out of line, please tell me if so.
so i'm all ears, if you feel like continuuing.
Lostin: please tell us more :)
I will try and putin all the pitfulls from both sides, which I hope will help any one getting involved in dropshipping (both sides).
I had a very rocky ride for several months.
Give me a few hours as I've been up all night and theres a lot to say.
I've started writing the whole story out, it going to take a while and be a big post...Sounds good; I'm eagerly waiting. I've been looking for some good info on drop shipping (though admittedly not very hard). I've been wanting to supliment my income by setting up a retail site. Since I don't want all the hassles of a full blown retail business, and all I want is to do it part time, drop shipping seemed the way to go.
Give me a few hours as I've been up all night and theres a lot to say.
So get some sleep and write your post; a few more hours shouldn't make a difference.
When I started, all I done was set up a simple set of pages with products on and prices, then and other area with the pictures on. Hoped that people would under stand the products and let the email the orders through. Billing them at the end of the week.
The early problems, within weeks.
When a product might have a few different variants (listed on product pages), they would often not say which variant. This was solved later with the shopping cart system, which I will explain later.
Although the pictures were named with the product ID, this also caused confusion, again solved with cart.
Often the emails with addresses, would not be complete, or would be shortened, this caused an other problem, as it could result in a delay.
Although we ship every day (weekdays), not all items sent first class (standard method then), arrive with in 3 days, so the phone would ring saying, when did you sent this or that. Far too much time was wasted, dealing with phone calls. The other problem was, people the other end were saying items (very few), had not turned up, so we just resent the items and covered the loss. Some traders picked up on this and took advantage. That was the start of the biggest problem, I will explain more later.
Returns came in thick and fast, not because of quality, but due to the fact that the products had been miss-described and the sellers were giving my address (warehouse). At that time my own returns were handled by an other smaller warehouse, we run 3 warehouses, please don’t ask why, its just how it is. Any way billing then became a major problem with several refusing to pay invoices (although we had there card details, if they tell you not to bill them you can’t), and three put charge backs through (I could go on for days about charge backs and credit card fraud, but that’s an other story, I joke with other traders, when at fairs, saying I live in charge back city). So all in all, the first 6 weeks showed a massive net loss.
People also said they got charge backs from there customers, so would not pay us, I won’t go into that.
Not put off by this, I culled the product range down from 480 products down about 150 ( the best sellers). Then set up a simple shopping cart system with options (colour/type etc.), within the cart a running invoice system and a data base of users. Culled all the bad payers and personally phoned all (those I had or could get numbers for) the other customers to explain the problems and told them there had to be a few conditions on returns, ie. Only if there is a problem with the product, with a 5%, allowed for no reason, as the distance selling act, allows people to return goods. This would force the sellers to have a returns policy of some sort and slow returns down, putting more realistic descriptions. Most agreed, those that didn’t or were rude (quite a few were very nasty), did not get the pass word or URL to the new site.
With a few of the holes filled in I carried on with the project, now taking up lots of time. The next step was to improve the cat cart system. After many changes this is what I got it down to:
Seller logs in all the products are easy to find with assigned stock levels showing, updated automatically from the main data base (giving approx a third of the warehouse stock, so trade and my retail customers, don’t loose there stock). Clicking into each product gives a very simple description of product with points of what the product will not do (took some weeks to complete) and at least one picture to use, the price they pay and a suggested price (top line and discounted). They could then design there sites around these products. For each customer, they had to put the products in the cart, fill in the customers details and push order, this would produce an invoice in the warehouse with the items mentioned and there business name and details (what ever they requested when the account was set-up). We would then ship the item/s out the same day, or next day if after the cut off time. This stage took a few months to get to but worked really well, we by then were totally transparent (not seen) to the end customers and any customer service was handled by the seller, who could call us when ever they needed to. We would allow faulty products and still do, to be sent direct for replacement (few and far between) and still do, but most tend to handle them selves. With the exception of those, and there are a few who don’t have/give address details on there paper work.
All these changes made it much harder for the sellers, because they would need to read a little about the products and deal more with there customers, but for our point of view and for us to continue it had to go this way. So in the long run it better for the service to continue than to stop altogether (I still can’t get over how some people were very rude, when this was explained to them).
The cart system solved many problems, but billing was still a big problem with the smaller users, the easiest way would have been to drop the smaller users, be me being me, its not my way, I was small time once. The problem was they tended to need to change from one card to an other and often would find there would be not enough funds for even small amounts, any that put charge backs through were dropped, as we could be called at any time to discuss any problem, only 2 done this after the first lot. The most common was no funds, when you call them they would say can you wait till the end of the month, or some thing near it (I’ll send a cheque), a waste of time being a problem with that.
We are now 6 months in….
So I change the cart to bill for each order this caused some major problems, as for each of the sellers orders the card would get billed. Too many hits from the same place on one card, in one day and the card stops clearing, a major headache. A week of pure chaos, but most people were very under standing, most were given large discounts as they would have to explain to there customers why items were late. The solution was to charge in advance for all customers that were new or had billing problems in the past, a card system (although it just a number) that they could top up, like pay as you go. This worked really well and is still in use today, even some of the bigger users like it.
Also looming in the back ground still was the problem of low value packages not showing up, not many but this was still causing a problem, as to keep costs down we were sending via standard mail. At this point we are still running at a loss (with time and running costs), this does not look at the set up costs. So one morning I woke and thought this is make o break, all sellers pay for recorded (shipping with tracking) at cost on low value items (it had been an option for a long time so was easy to implement) and my surprise most sellers really didn’t mind, most asked for time for the change to happen (we gave them 4 weeks, I have never herd of so many items getting lost in the post, with a few trying it on). After that change, missing items are down to less than 1%, most of those are returned to sender when looked up. But these go to a mail opening centre, because we do not put our name or address any where, those that don’t have an address on the invoice don’t tend to come back, but we can swallow that its so few. The local sorting office is very helpful when problems happen, but we do have a large account.
That happened in the summer last year, since then we added expected dispatch times on newer stock and items that are temp. out of stock which helps the sellers no end. Also a 8 week product delete warning. The system is working well, although I’m working on the new site (on going), which I’ve made to be searchable, with a help centre and loads more, with a thought to expanding the dropshipping later this year (although I said that last summer).
Without the cooperation of the sellers, it would not have got this far.
Quick points as about sellers problems (I spend a lot of time trying to solve most of them).
Customer service: For them to run the customer service they must have access to good information, specs, and know faults/problems or there job at that is made a lot harder.
Returns: This is a real problem area, to minimise they need clear conditions and must reply when a customer has a problem (I tend to find problems are very miner, easily solved with a reply). Every one gets a few returns under the distance selling act, that’s ecommerce.
Customer details: The way we run the seller must enter the details for each customer, this a pain, but can solve problems for both party’s.
Shipping: Done with out tacking cause problems. The seller must be able to see when the goods have been sent in case they are asked.
Payment from customer: The seller needs a good fraud free (or close to) or crazy loses can be made.
And the one they all like with us is the fact that we are invisable, although I know of an other who works the other way (shipper) and also has happy customers, different type of product though.
I’ve cut this a little short, and not proof read, as I must get some sleep, sorry if parts don’t make sense. I hope this gives an idear, I can go into more detail an other time. There is also the advertising problem, very hard to target the service with out direct selling and how I've met a few others doing the same sort of thing (also all in a small way).
I will happily help any one, even the competion, as I belive the market in dropshipping has not realy started fully in the UK, I would like love to see it get bigger (as a respected market, with the wasters and con artists). I now run the drop shipping, just about in profit, but its a volume thing, as with any distrubition.
For Mods: I have tried not to use too much detail, but please snip if you need to.
I think that was the book, sorry I get cofused at times!
You make some very valid points that some of
my associates will find useful, so I have
pointed these out to them.
Hope you had a nice nap!
+
jo the lion
This is the first forum I've been able to find where there is at a minimum some candid talk about dropshipping.
This is an interesting business proposal; I've been trying to find the negatives about DS'ing but the web is so clogged with fake drop shipping lists its impossible to discern between legitimate services and dealers and scams.
The big problem I have come to see in my research is that a great number of drop ship directories do not have drop shipper reviews, something which makes me hesitant to try out one of these services.
Not sure if this is answerable or not due to competition, but does anyone know of any directories that offer drop shipper reviews?
Thank you for your attention.
