A short time
ago I started to look for ways to earn some extra cash. I had sold a few things of my own on eBay so
that was my first idea but I did not really have any money to buy stock. I had previously heard about drop shipping so
I started to look for suppliers. I
quickly found lots of sites promising easy money with little effort and I was
soon lured in. This was the first
mistake I made thinking that I could run an online business without spending
any time or effort.
I signed up
for a company called dropshipland. It
looks like a genuine site but believe me it is a waste of your money don’t do
it. I really can’t stress this enough. However the site is really convincing so I
paid my money. My second mistake was not
researching them further before handing over my cash. It did not take long before the penny dropped
and I searched dropshipland scams and I soon found it is a scam I could have
taken seconds to do this earlier and saved myself some money, so please don’t
be like me avoid this site and any others like it.
Around the
same time I found a site called wholesaledeals.co.uk they are promising to give
you hundreds of contacts for suppliers for drop shipping so again I paid my
cash and signed up. Now this website is not
like dropshipland and I have read reports that they do provide a pretty good
service. However they did mislead me by
suggesting I would find lots of suppliers ready and waiting to drop ship for
me. I paid for one month’s membership and scoured the site but did not easily find
any suppliers who are genuine drop shippers and are not in it just for the high
membership fees they charge.
I then
looked on eBay itself for drop shippers and wholesale contacts. I found a seller who was advertising a
“Genuine business opportunity,” the seller was offering a service to drop ship
products at a 30% discount from the RRP There was a fee to pay but as there was
a face and a real person in the UK so it seemed a good option. so I paid the
joining fee and started listing my items.
After spending hours and hours I had around 300 live listings but each
month I had very little sales. I gave it
a few months and some sales started to pick up around Christmas but not enough
to make any profit and it was actually costing me money in listing fees. I was willing to swallow this because the few
sales I was getting were helping to add to my feedback ratings. At least I thought it would.
Very soon some
problems started to occur. The big problem with drop shipping is that you are
not in control of your business, and when the supplier runs out of stock or
despatch is delayed for any reason it can affect your DSRs which are very
important. I received a couple of low
scores due to dispatch time. During
October I had some sales come in and when I put the orders to my supplier the
items were out of stock, some items were delayed by a few days, but one item took
over four weeks to come in. I tried to
keep the customer informed and they were willing to wait for a while but after
a few weeks I refunded them the money when the buyer got annoyed and would no
longer wait, I would not have let it go on for so long but my supplier did
string me along a bit and I felt awful about it, unsurprisingly I got my first
negative feedback.
At the same time as
this I had been selling some of my own items and I was very close to being a
power seller but a few days before my evaluation I received another low score putting my
account below standard. Because of this my listings that were high up in best
match search were almost on the bottom page.
All my sales were affected and I went from around 40 sales a day to
nothing. Because I had been using a drop
shipper and I had given up control of my business I had suffered damaged to my DSR
rating and my account had become below standard making my listings almost
invisible.
I will not make this mistake
again and I hope anyone reading this realises the risks and does not make the
same mistake as me. I was lucky to have
saved some money I could invest in products and I have managed to find stock
that sells and I have lots of sales coming in, and I dispatch everything within
1 working day. I have regained control
of the business and my ratings are back up to above standard, and I hope they
stay there.