It seems as if nearly everything in the world can be done virtually! When you sit down in front of your computer you can create a whole other life for yourself complete with a house, relationships, and even pets.
If you’re looking for a virtual warehouse to store all the products you would like to sell, then wholesale drop shipping is the answer to your dreams. Luckily, this virtual warehouse isn’t just a world inside a computer, but a way to let your business grow without building a warehouse in your backyard!
Drop Shipping Defined
To begin, drop shipping, in its simplest definition, allows retailers to ship products to consumers directly from wholesalers. As in all retail business, you as the retailer make your profit from the difference between the retail and wholesale price. At this point, you may be asking yourself about how drop shipping may or may not help you.
What’s in Drop Shipping for Me?
Drop shipping saves you time, the inconvenience of storing bulky inventory, and lets your business grow to the size you want it. As you may already have encountered, running a retail business, online or otherwise, involves creating and maintaining inventory from which to take orders and sell products.
With drop shipping, you can say good-bye to the hassle of inventory. Instead of having your merchandise on hand, you can forward orders to the wholesaler and relax while they ship the product. This clearly streamlines the delivery process. Instead of you receiving a shipment from the retailer and reshipping the merchandise to customers, it goes directly from the wholesaler to the consumer.
Another plus to drop shipping involves the location of your customers. As much as we would like to be in multiple places at once, the truth of it is that you most likely run your business from one location! This means that you’re shipping from that one location as well.
Depending where your customers are, this can result in lots of shipping fees and long wait times for your customers. Drop shipping eliminates this problem both for you and your customer as products are shipped from conveniently close warehouses.
Possible disadvantages of drop shipping result from the same advantage of not having to maintain your own inventory. If a wholesale supplier has in fact run out of an item, back ordering can occur and a customer may have to wait for an extended period of time to receive their order. This problem, however, can be solved by simply keeping tabs on what the wholesale retailer has available.
Even considering possible events such as back ordering, drop shipping gives you a sky-is-the-limit inventory option. It can even create, if you will, a virtual warehouse for you!