Using a Drop Shipper is a great
way to sell products on the Internet. A legitimate Drop
Shipper is a manufacturer or a wholesale distributor who
will send products one at a time directly to your customers
for you, from the warehouse. You never have to buy inventory
up front, and you never have to pack and ship products yourself.
All you do is place images of those products
on your Auctions or Web Site, and you collect on every sale
without ever touching the product.
Here at Worldwide Brands, our entire
business is dedicated to making sure people have accurate,
up to date information about legitimate Drop Shippers and
Light Bulk Wholesalers.
As we warn throughout our site,
there is one constant thing in Internet Drop Shipping
that you need to watch out for. Over and over again,
you are going to see companies who do their best to make
you think they are real wholesale drop shippers, when
they are NOT. Companies who are NOT real drop shippers
are middlemen whose sole business is to dip into your
profits, by getting in between you and the real drop
ship supplier.
Drop Shipping 'Agents' are a
particularly interesting example of this. You see,
they DO provide access to one, two, or maybe a few REAL
drop shippers. However, they are STILL a MIDDLEMAN.
There are two problems with using
Drop Shipping 'Agents'.
They ARE middlemen. They charge
you recurring monthly and/or annual fees that you should
not have to pay in order to access the real drop shippers
they provide access to. You should never pay a recurring
fee for the 'privilege' of placing orders with a real
drop shipper!
You'll find the competition impossible
to deal with. Most of these 'Agents' only give you access
to one drop shipper. Even those 'Agents' who give you
access to several drop shippers (and charge you more for
it!) are doing something that can bury your business before
it gets started. They are causing intense competition!
They are going to advertise their service all over the
Internet. Thousands, or even tens of thousands of people
will pay for it. Guess what happens then? YOU, and all of
those thousands of others are all trying to use the SAME
small handful of Drop Shippers! The competition becomes
way too intense, and you'll never sell anything!
Let's take a step back and go over the whole issue.
A real wholesale drop shipper ALWAYS
owns their OWN warehouse. They have offices in, or attached
to that warehouse. It's a physical building, with walls,
windows, doors, maybe a few trees outside on the lawn.
There is a loading dock, where trucks back up and deliver
pallet loads of products. They have people working for them
in that warehouse. The people who run their web site peek
their heads out of the office doors and say, "Hi, Wanda!"
and, "Hey there, Mike!" to actual human beings who work there,
receiving inventory from manufacturing plants, packaging orders
for drop shipping, putting a new filter in the Coffeemaker, etc.
Drop Shipping "Agents" work very hard to
make you think they own their own warehouses. There are some
who are very good at that. They tell you that you can access
thousands, or even tens of thousands of products from their
'warehouse', or from many of their different 'warehouses'
in different locations.
Again, here's the first important part.
Drop Shipping "Agents" do NOT own their own warehouses.
They are MIDDLEMEN.
No matter how many products or
warehouses these people claim to have, they don't have
a single one. They're just sitting in a house or a rented
office somewhere, thinking up clever web site text and new
ways to make you think they are the real thing.
Some of them are even more clever.
There are 'Agents' out there who will actually TELL you
that they ARE 'Agents'. They'll tell you that even though
they ARE 'Agents', they don't really make any money by
acting as a middleman. Some of them want you to believe
the do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Others will
tell you that they make their money only from your 'Membership
Fees'. However they say it, they usually bury this information
in their sites, hoping you won't pay attention to it, and they
sugar-coat it in such a way that it sounds really good to you
if you DO realize what they are up to.
Here's how they operate:
1. They go out on the Internet and find
one, two, five, or maybe even ten real wholesale drop shippers.
2. They contact these real drop shippers,
and say, "Hey, send us a list of your products and a bunch of
pictures, and we'll help you sell them online through OUR order
system". Most real wholesalers know better than to deal with
something like that. However, there will always be some who
will go along.
3. They create a web site that makes it
look for all the world that they are the Universe's Answer
to Drop Ship Warehousing and Wholesaling.
4. The small ones simply have one group
of products you can order. When you place an order, they
will turn around and send that order to the real drop shipper,
who will send it to your customer.
5. The bigger ones will tell you that
they have a whole bunch of "warehouses" all over the place,
with clever names. North Warehouse. South Warehouse. East
and West Warehouses. Pink Warehouse. Blue Warehouse. Plaid
Warehouse. You get the idea, right? They'll tell you that you
can order from any one of those "warehouses", for a price.
Some of them give you one or two "warehouses" for your initial
'Membership Fee', and then jack up the 'Membership' cost if you
want to order from more of their "warehouses". Again, these
people don't have any warehouses! Their "warehouses" only exist
in cyberspace! Each “warehouse” is nothing more than a collection
of product images that these middlemen got from a wholesaler that
YOU should be working with DIRECTLY, instead of paying some 'Agent'
a FEE for the privilege. When you place your orders, those orders
will simply be turned around by the 'Agent' to the real drop shipper
for fulfillment.
Some of these "Agents' will tell you that
it's better to work with them, even though they ARE 'Agents'
because they are "centralizing" your ordering and shipping.
Believe me, we've been in this business a long time, and we've
never seen an ordering or shipping issue that was enough of a
problem to justify ordering through middlemen. Not ever.
Is this illegal? No. Is it a Scam? No, not
usually. It's just a very poor business idea, in our
experienced opinion.
Think about it the second part of the
problem again. These people are offering you an indirect
(middleman) route to a small handful of drop shippers.
They'll promote that same small handful of drop shippers
to tens of thousands of people like yourself. Do you really
think you'll be able to compete with thousands, or tens of
thousands of others, who are all trying to sell the same
products from the same small handful of drop shippers?
Not a very pleasant thought, is it!
Would you say it's a good business
decision to take a middleman route to a very small
number of drop shippers being used by a huge crowd
of others?
