| stevebills | 11-17-2014 08:08 AM |
Re: Fairly new to stealth - MC999 arrived!
Drop shipping is a no no!!!
It's so easy, in fact, that at least a thousand other people are probably doing exactly what you are doing. Your market is already saturated before you even think of it.
Without a large moat, anyone can replicate what you are trying to do, and they probably already have. That makes it harder to break through the noise to get customers, and automatically adds a premium on any of your marketing costs.
2. Hard to Come Up with a Unique Selling Proposition
Why should visitors buy from you, and not from the other 100 sites selling the same product?
Since you don't handle actual product fulfillment, and your own product selection is limited to what suppliers will let you dropship, it's hard to answer this question. It's hard to distinguish yourself via customer service and shipping speed, since you don't have the product and are not involved in shipping it. It's hard to distinguish yourself via your products because...well...others are selling those exact same products.
You can try to be the cheapest, but that is a losing game. There is always someone else willing to go cheaper, and margins on dropshipped items can be tiny to begin with. You don't have a whole lot of flexibility. On top of that, many suppliers will have a Minimum Advertised Retail Price anyway.
On the other hand, with a traditional ecommerce business, your suppliers and inventory can help set you apart from your competition, instead of keeping you down in the pit of mediocrity.
3. You Don't Actually Save Much on Time, Effort, or Cost
The promise of easy riches is what draws a lot of people into dropshipping, and the inflated expectations eventually pop like a weak balloon, dropping them down to earth with a crash. The internet is littered with abandoned hopes, the soil of dreams salted with hard reality. This isn't limited to just dropshipping of course, but running an online business in general as well. | 
