- Original Poster
- #1
Hi folks, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has experience with high-ticket ecommerce / dropshipping, particularly large / heavy products.
I’ve spent roughly two years developing a UK Shopify store selling gym equipment. I managed to open trade accounts with three UK suppliers, but the supplier side has turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
Some of the problems I encountered were:
• Poor or unreliable stock information.
• One supplier no longer providing useful stock updates.
• Another effectively expecting me to contact them manually whenever a customer wanted to order something, making it impossible to mark my products as 'in stock' let alone run Google PMax Ads.
• Missing trade prices / product information from feeds / spreadsheets.
• Slow or non-existent responses to enquiries.
• Relatively tiny margins on some products once VAT and delivery were taken into account.
• Particular brands being tied to individual suppliers, so losing an unreliable supplier also meant losing the ability to sell those brands.
One supplier eventually introduced a product feed that could integrate with Shopify, which was a big improvement, but due to missing info – even that hasn’t completely solved the underlying issues.
The website itself is fully developed and has now been accepted into Google Merchant Center, so technically I feel I took the site as far as it could be taken. The problem has really been making the supplier / dropshipping side commercially reliable.
I’ve now decided not to continue investing in this particular setup and am selling the website/digital assets (which include some decent promo videos), but this experience has made me very cautious about approaching high-ticket e-commerce from now on.
I’m particularly interested in other people’s experiences:
> How reliable do you expect UK wholesalers/distributors to be with live stock information?
> Would you completely avoid a supplier that couldn’t provide reliable stock data?
> For bulky/high-ticket products, have you found UK dropshipping workable, or is it much safer to buy selected stock in advance and fulfil it yourself / from a warehouse?
> And are there particular high-ticket niches where you’ve found suppliers to be much more ecommerce-friendly?
I'm very interested to hear how other people have dealt with UK dropshipping. Even if your story isn't about selling high ticket products, I'd still like to hear how you got on.
Many thanks for reading.
I’ve spent roughly two years developing a UK Shopify store selling gym equipment. I managed to open trade accounts with three UK suppliers, but the supplier side has turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
Some of the problems I encountered were:
• Poor or unreliable stock information.
• One supplier no longer providing useful stock updates.
• Another effectively expecting me to contact them manually whenever a customer wanted to order something, making it impossible to mark my products as 'in stock' let alone run Google PMax Ads.
• Missing trade prices / product information from feeds / spreadsheets.
• Slow or non-existent responses to enquiries.
• Relatively tiny margins on some products once VAT and delivery were taken into account.
• Particular brands being tied to individual suppliers, so losing an unreliable supplier also meant losing the ability to sell those brands.
One supplier eventually introduced a product feed that could integrate with Shopify, which was a big improvement, but due to missing info – even that hasn’t completely solved the underlying issues.
The website itself is fully developed and has now been accepted into Google Merchant Center, so technically I feel I took the site as far as it could be taken. The problem has really been making the supplier / dropshipping side commercially reliable.
I’ve now decided not to continue investing in this particular setup and am selling the website/digital assets (which include some decent promo videos), but this experience has made me very cautious about approaching high-ticket e-commerce from now on.
I’m particularly interested in other people’s experiences:
> How reliable do you expect UK wholesalers/distributors to be with live stock information?
> Would you completely avoid a supplier that couldn’t provide reliable stock data?
> For bulky/high-ticket products, have you found UK dropshipping workable, or is it much safer to buy selected stock in advance and fulfil it yourself / from a warehouse?
> And are there particular high-ticket niches where you’ve found suppliers to be much more ecommerce-friendly?
I'm very interested to hear how other people have dealt with UK dropshipping. Even if your story isn't about selling high ticket products, I'd still like to hear how you got on.
Many thanks for reading.
