amazon-ebay dropshipping guide

[boring-friday]

Had a few people pm me asking me how to dropship, I'm a long way off a expert and only done it as a sideline but there's definitely decent money to be made with zero startup cash (if your paypal isn't holding money anyway).
I've put mine on hold as I've hit the vat threshold and don't have the time to sort it out at the moment, can still be profitable after registering for vat or if you want to stay below you can easily hit 10k profit.

You can find the items yourself but I just search out dropshippers on ebay, they're easy to spot as the sale prices are always random like £8.77 as they're using repricer software and they have 1000s of items. Then I put their ID in teraspeak which is quite expensive but they have a 7 day trial so if you're tight you can just cancel and use another card.
I take any of their products selling more than £50 per month. You'll notice that most of them are just exporting the products from amazon with the exact same title. There's 2 reasons you don't want to do this:
1. it makes it even more obvious you're just selling from amazon- some customers get irate if they notice you doing this.
2. you want to make good use of the title, search for similar listings and mix the top few together so that you have as many keywords as possible that people are searching for.

Then once you have your items listed you need to find repricing software, loads of different options if you search for it. They just link between amazon and your account and keep it so that you're making a certain profit %. You can also get software that does the orders on amazon for you, I personally have a virtual assistant do all of that which works out cheaper.
When any buyers complain about me selling from amazon I just tell them that I use amazons fulfillment service and most are happy with that.
If anyone wants to return it then you can get amazon to pick it up and they'll refund you too.
Your amazon account will get banned at some point if you're using prime but you can just make a new one and use a new card or vcc and then you get a month for free anyway, they aren't hot on checking for duplicate accounts like they would be if you're a seller.

 

[Jayser100]

I don't mind supplying drop-shippers so long as they only sell from their own own website. As a supplier, if you start allowing loads of companies to stick your products up on Amazon and eBay, you just end up with a ridiculous price war for the same items. I've seen people selling at a slight loss just to get a sale, it's ridiculous. I now have a strict rule that I won't supply anyone who wants to sell on Amazon because it just ruins your products. It also devalues your products because over-discounting 'dumbs down' the perceived quality of your items.

I think for anyone starting their own website on a shoestring, supplying products that suppliers will drop-ship is a superb idea and I am sure there are hundreds of companies out there like mine that are perfectly happy to support such sellers. For us it's a no-brainer - we sell to the customer at a trade price, they pay a little on top for the shipping and we get it out to their customer pronto, along with any paperwork (sent to us by email) that the seller wants added. The seller agrees to pay by paypal or credit / debit immediately once we've sent over their invoice. Easy peasy. We allow the use of all images and product text from our website, so it's easy for sellers to add our lines.

I do have a fairly basic vetting process, just to make sure we don't sell product to anyone who is just trying to buy something at a trade price for themselves. Sellers need to be able to prove they have a bona fide website, even if it is still in the late stages of development, before we'll deal with them.

 

[Mr A P Davies]

Most interesting, Gentlemen.......

 

[silvermusic]

Using Amazon as a drop-shipping source is nothing new, it's been done to death for years. There's thousands of video's on YouTube about it. Setting up multiple accounts to abuse will only work for so long, mistakes, returns and back feedback will get you on ebay when you sell product you don't have too.

It's getting harder and harder to make any real money at this game, I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone to do it nowadays. Retail Arbitrage where you physically have the goods however isn't a bad way to start, but you need to be good at it and work hard, you also need a sum of money to start.

Conventional drop-shipping from a supplier isn't a bad method either, but you'll never make any great percentage and you're up against all the other fly-by-night ebay traders they supply to.

 

[AG Consult]

I used to do this about 5 years ago to make a little side income and I made some pretty decent money out of it.

More recently though the likes of DS Domination etc have totally sucked the life out of it. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is at it now from netmums members to students. Far too many people doing it now it's nigh on impossible to undercut someone without making a loss.