What is eBay dropshipping and why should you care? I really believe that eBay dropshipping is one of the simplest business models that you can start if you are interested in selling products online or e-commerce, because it doesn’t involve a lot of the logistics a lot of the hurdles a lot of the upfront investments that a lot of other ecommerce businesses require.
When it comes to eBay dropshipping, the first thing you’re going to do is to find an item on one of your suppliers’ websites and these suppliers are regular websites like Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Zoro.com, etc – any website that you can purchase an item from, it can usually be used as a supplier for your eBay dropshipping business – that’s the easiest way of finding the best dropshipping products. I’ll just use Walmart as an example. So let’s say you find an item on Walmart that you want to sell.
First thing you’re going to do is you’re going to list that item for sale on eBay, you’re just literally going to copy it from Walmart onto eBay, you don’t actually even purchase the item yet. So now it’s live eBay, here comes a customer they buy the item $100 from you and there you are, sitting in a cafe on your laptop, because you can do this from literally anywhere in the world that you have an internet connection.
Then only then do you buy the item, you take a portion of that $100, let’s say $80 and you buy it from Walmart. Here’s the best part: You enter in your billing information, but for the shipping address you use the customers shipping address, so now Walmart is shipping the item directly to the customer. That’s what it means to be a dropshipper that is how this business model works.
As you can see there’s not a lot of logistics, like there are with other ecommerce businesses: You don’t have to buy inventory upfront, you only buy it once someone buys it from you. You don’t have to worry about shipping labels, boxing up items, storing items, because your supplier Walmart is handling all of that for you.
History
Let’s do a little history lesson here, because when eBay dropshipping first started, when we first started doing this it involved a lot of manual work. Let’s say this was the item I wanted to sell:
In order to make this item available on eBay this is what I would have to do: I would copy the title, come over to eBay and paste the title in there
Then I would need to choose a category, let’s say tables looks good
I would have to select the condition to get the photos I would have to download all these photos to my desktop
and then come over here and upload them to eBay one by one
then I would have to copy and paste all the item specifics, such as the brand, paste it in there manufacturing part number, that’s a model number: There’s a lot of back and forth – copy and paste, copy and paste.
I would also have to do some math to figure out what price I should sell it at, so certainly doable it certainly worked, but it did take a lot of effort on our part. In addition once we listed it for sale we had to continually monitor this item on Walmart, what if the price went up on Walmart? What if the item went out of stock? If that happened we had to make changes on eBay, so everything we had to monitor ourselves took a lot of time and it meant that we could only scale our business up to a certain point.
Then people started to develop software to do that for you automatically, so whereas it would take us about five minutes to list an item, now we can list literally hundreds of items in a matter of minutes and that software would reprice the items on eBay every single hour, so if the price and Walmart went up the price on eBay would go up automatically for you.
this was a huge game-changer, because it allowed us to scale our eBay dropshipping businesses bigger and bigger, allowing you to sell more and more aliexpress best sellers. It worked, but there were serious flaws with it and the flaws were just in the size of the business. with so many items, even with software, weren’t keeping good track of all the items, all the price changes. things would go up in price, things would go out of stock, we wouldn’t catch them in time.
As a result, dropshippers were canceling orders, dropshippers weren’t providing as good of a customer service experience as we could if we had smaller more manageable stores.
Overall, I eBay dropshippers were doing a really good job in providing a great customer service and just providing a good experience for buyers, but there were some that were getting lazy that were letting the software do the work for them and not putting in a lot of work themselves and more importantly eBay themselves felt that eBay dropshippers were getting lazy and not providing their customers with good customer service or a good buying experience on eBay, so more and more eBay was starting to disfavor this model of scaling up really huge stores and just relying on software to make sure that everything was taken care for.
Increasingly, what we’re finding is that eBay wants us to be more involved with our business to look at every single item that we’re listing to make sure that each customer is taken care of well – this is the future of eBay dropshipping this basic model it’s not even that revolutionary, it’s basic customer service. Does that mean that we can’t use software at all? No of course not, there is still software that we can use that eBay doesn’t have a problem with and that allows us to automate a lot of our business while still being a lot more hands-on with it, to make sure that our customers are well taken care of.