What is a Wholesale Drop Shipper?

Using a wholesale drop shipper helps small businesses with many of the tasks that can be expensive, difficult and time consuming. These companies can take over many of these tasks in order to allow the small business owner to concentrate on some of the more important aspects of the business.  

A drop shipper is a company that stores a large number of products and then ships those items directly to customers who buy them from someone else. A small business owner who wants to use a wholesale drop shipper will join with one of these companies. Sometimes there is a one-time fee to join, sometimes there is an ongoing membership fee.

Once the small business owner has joined, they have access to the complete catalog of wholesale products that the business owner can then market and sell to others. Most of these companies allow small businesses to use the photographs and descriptions of these products in order to market them online. The small business owner may market them on eBay, on their own website, on Amazon or anywhere else that online traffic will bring in sales.

Once the items are placed up for sale, the small business owner controls the sale. They control the price, pricing the items high enough so that they can make a profit over the wholesale price of the item. The communications regarding the sale and other aspects of sales and customer service are handled by the small business. However, once the sale is completed, the rest of the tasks are outsourced to the drop shipper.

After the sale, the small business owner goes to the website of the wholesale drop shipper and places the order for the item. The item is paid for, and the difference between the price that the small business owner got for the item and the wholesale price paid to the drop shipper is the profit that the business owner keeps.

The wholesale drop shipper is given the address of the original buyer of the item, and the wholesale drop shipper ships it directly to them. This eliminates the time and effort that would have gone into shipping the item to the small business and then repackaging the item for shipment to the original buyer. The process is fast and direct, resulting in faster shipping times and fewer shipping complications.

The benefit to the small business that uses a wholesale drop shipper is far less time spent on the manual tasks of wrapping items, printing labels and making trips to the post office. This saves a significant amount of time for a business owner who needs that time to spend on marketing the items and choosing items to sell. It also means a savings on storing inventory and it means that the small business doesn’t have to purchase large numbers of items in advance, taking a risk that the items won’t sell. By purchasing only the items that have already sold, there is no inventory left over and no liquidation of merchandise is necessary.