In the past two weeks following the creation and launch of my first store, I have sorta went on a bit of a tangent exploring new ideas and variations to the ‘conventional’ or current method of dropshipping which I am aware of, which is to find a Chinese supplier, create a store and market your product to the US, then dropship to the US/worldwide.
Two different ‘variations’ of dropshipping which I explored are:
· Aussie Dropshipping
· Ebay Dropshipping
Aussie Dropshipping
When looking for wholesalers, I managed to stumble upon wholesalers in Australia which offered dropshipping. This made me think that there may be a potential opportunity here. Most dropshippers target the US, as suggested by most Youtubers and online tutorials because that is where the bulk of the market is. A lot of dropshippers also do offer worldwide shipping too, which in a way does include Australia as well.
The good
Shipping times for most dropshipping stores for US/Worldwide shipping are quite long since they’re coming from China. So when I found Aussie wholesalers I thought this may be a good opportunity because:
a) I will have access to quick 3-5 day shipping
b) I will be able to position my store to be Australian based which in my opinion will greatly influence the level of trust between my store and the customers.
I signed up to one called iDropship.com.au and had a look around. What makes it super convenient is that it can link to shopify which streamlines the whole process of dropshipping!
❌ The bad
I’ve only checked out one store for now, but the range of products are definitely a lot more limited compared to Aliexpress/CJDropshipping and the other Chinese suppliers.
Also, I feel as though I am not getting the best price for the product. If it’s a wholesaler I thought it would be the cheapest of the cheap for AU, however I found that with many similar products, Ebay managed to have it cheaper meaning someone was getting even better prices somewhere else! Or maybe they’re the wholesaler themselves, I dunno. But anyway this shouldn’t really matter if I am to dropship and market my product.
Ebay Dropshipping
As mentioned above, I managed to stumble upon wholesalers in Australia which offered a variety of products which has dropship potential. Another thought came to mind which was making an Ebay store. Whenever I search an item on ebay and look at the profiles of the top search results, they always seemed to be big stores with hundreds, if not thousands, of products for sale.
This got me thinking… perhaps I would be able to build an ebay store and fill it with all the products from the Aussie wholesaler which I found. This is more of a brute force approach to things, I was thinking maybe I would get sales and traction on my ebay store if I just go for sheer quantity and post everything, or better yet, hire a virtual assistant (VA) to post everything for me. (I had the idea of getting a VA for this because of the popularity of outsourcing work using VA’s to scale and create successful e-commerce businesses. I will go over VA’s in a future blog). My intention for this was to build this business up on the side and not spend so much time on it, in the hopes that it would grow in parallel to me working on my other dropshipping online businesses.
While this idea was good, I found was that this was unfeasible due to a variety of reasons:
a) Software > VA. While my VA idea was good, people have already created software which can automatically list items from a website to your ebay store. So there goes that idea lol.
b) Quality > Quantity. From some research I’ve done, it is the suggestion of successful Ebay dropshippers/sellers that you should focus on building up a few popular products as opposed to just mass listing a lot of products and hoping to get sales. While this isn’t a bad thing, it goes against my more ‘passive’ plan of automating/outsourcing this part. I am not willing to allocate my own time to this.
c) Account Limit – Ebay has a limit to how much you would be able to list when you first start your account. It may take a while to build a solid Ebay store. While I am aware that things like this should take a lot of time in the beginning, I feel like I would stray too far from my original plan (dropshipping and marketing) if I am to pursue this on the side.
d) Ebay can’t really be interlinked with shopify – so having listings and fulfilling orders may be a tad more tedious. For instance, the beauty of being able to link your supplier’s products to shopify is that the inventory and product price are monitored, and shopify allows for set systems in place if products are low in inventory/no inventory left – the purchase will not happen. However, with ebay dropshipping there is much more work as it can’t be linked with shopify, so if you have a truckload of products as per my original plan, it would be quite difficult and tedious to manually keep on top of your supplier’s inventory. This perhaps may be streamlined if you were to liaise and create a relationship with the wholesaler, but this is too tedious a task for me at this stage, so I will stick to conventional dropshipping.
This is actually a reason why ebay doesn’t like dropshipping that much – I read an article of how people would just use the software to automatically list a truckload of items. Additionally as mentioned, there was a difficulty in ensuring your price and stock levels posted are in congruence with that of the supplier’s and dropshippers were just being ruthless about getting sales rather than customer service, and so eBay wasn’t happy with that as there were a lot of angry customers not getting their orders due to shitty dropshippers.
e) It is quite a competitive marketplace. And while you shouldn’t shy away from competition, from what I’ve read it feels as though you would be a small fish swimming with the sharks. Large wholesalers will be running at minimal margins to undercut everyone else and they’ve already optimised their operations for this, so a newbie small time operator would have no chance. It’s just like a small farmer trying to compete with Woolworths. While I don’t like to say ‘no’ to things because of roadblocks and challenges and believe everything is possible, I think this is a time where I have to be smart about where my time and energy should be focussed at, and this would be to take the ‘conventional’ approach of dropshipping I was doing in the first place.
Conclusion - What did I learn from all this?
Hmm. I think it was quite interesting to see the dropshipping business model in a different light (eBay dropshipping). New perspectives are always helpful. However this will not be of any benefit to me right now and I will choose to not go down this avenue.
However, it was quite useful to learn that there are Aussie wholesalers who allow for dropshipping. I guess one way I can utilise this is if I find a good potential product for sale there – for e.g. I saw some fly repellent fans available, this may be a hit during the summer (I checked google trends and Australian search for results for ‘fly repellent’ are at a maximum during summer time.) So maybe when something trends in Australia I may be able to capitilise on it.
But for now, I will stick to the ‘conventional’ method of dropshipping and improve on my marketing and web design skills and see where it takes me in the future.
Thanks for reading and ’til next time!
