Ah, the joys of drop shipping as an online merchant. When I first plotted out how I was going to start up my little shop, I struggled with the overwhelming cost of buying merchandise. Even at wholesale, there were minimums that made it too cost prohibitive. Not to mention many of the vendors I came across do NOT like small, new and online only, but limiting what I offered to what I could afford would essentially mean an empty shop. Enter drop shipping.
I’d read the articles on how it worked, the success stories and how it enabled people to grow and build their business while saving the need for space at your place and hey, no need to track inventory they said. The fee seemed a decent trade-off, I could stock up on certain items that seemed to have more traction while doing drop ship orders on products with a slower purchase rate. The best part of all, I wouldn’t have to constantly check on inventory levels for more than a handful of “bestsellers”. It seemed a perfect plan of action for starting out. But we live in fickle times, with fickle markets, vendors and manufacturers.
What started as a way of balancing the need for variety and a very limited starting budget has since become a nightmare of balancing sudden changes in vendors and availability. Sometimes that’s just as simple as locating a new place to get the product from. Other times, and more frequently it feels, it’s a product that’s suddenly discontinued in the middle of an customer order. I’d enter the blushing emoji, but honestly I don’t know how to in WordPress, but that’s me, blushing in embarrassment when I have to email the customer back with a “hey, so…you’re waiting on me who’s waiting on them”. And even worse when it’s “whoops, but it looks like this isn’t a thing I can get you…even though I said I could”. Bad look, all the way around.
The solution is really simple enough. Don’t rely on drop shipping and instead rely on your own inventory stash…that yes, you track the inventory level on. It means a big difference in some things, but I want us to be able to provide you the things you’re asking for.