One of the options we used from the very beginning, that you can make good use of that many product suppliers up the chain provide, is drop shipping.
What is drop shipping?
This is where you order the product from your supplier, that your customer has ordered, and the supplier ships it directly to the end customer so you don’t have to get involved really at all in the management of delivery.
I can certainly say for our own ecommerce businesses that drop shipping simplified things and provided a lower barrier to entry – rather than having to physically receive goods which we would then essentially be repackaging again in the same box and shipping out again, the double handling was gone and we were free to do other things.
Large tech businesses always do this kind of option these days. You can take advantage of a shipping management and logistics process which has the leverage of many thousands of deliveries per day, aside from yours. They often have dedicated staff who are only involved in the shipping process, and this gives you direct access to assistance as it’s needed.
Issues
The only issue we ever had with drop shipping was when the provider up the chain offered us the option of cheaper shipping versus courier, to pass on to our clients. Cheaper shipping methods just caused a lot of problems, and primarily around ability to track what happened to a package and then responsibility for solving it. We shifted to having all products couriered and this resolved that issue.
You can enquire when you are looking at a supplier as to whether or not they offer drop shipping, but just like anything some providers may be better at it than others. Some may in fact be offering the service for the first time, so in many ways you might be an experimental guinea pig of your provider which probably doesn’t sit well with most of us unless it’s working nice and smoothly!
Customer service
Remember you still need to do some heavy lifting time wise when the customer has an issue with delivery, deliveries never arrived or some other sort of problem. Know what fees your provider charges you for drop shipping issue resolution – such as picking up the parcel if it’s damaged or the wrong goods, and ask your provider what they do when there is a customer complaint as those are things you need to know in advance.
To summarise our experience
In general we have had a great experience with drop shipping. It’s important to ask those questions of your supplier – get comfortable with their process before engaging so there’s no surprises. This is especially important if you’ve never had experience in shipping things to customers before, as you must understand the process beforehand so that your expectations are set early and before any issues arise.
