Drop Shipping in Australia – A General Guide

Any form of e-commerce business has a myriad of issues to take into account when being set up. These include delivery arrangement issues, where to store stocks or products, and the most cost effective and least time consuming ways to arrange for the products among other issues. Today, drop shipping is one of most preferred options for e-commerce sites since it takes out the process of getting deliveries from your suppliers and simply gets them delivered straight to your customers. In fact, many established online merchants in Australia are now turning to drop shipping model as a means of cutting their overall shipping costs, minimising their stocks at hand, and reducing the delivery time to their clients.

What Is Drop Shipping?

Generally, drop shipping allows you as seller or website owner to send a single or a low quantity unit gathered on your website to wholesalers or manufactures, who in turn ship items directly to your customers. In other words, your work is to do the promotion and collect the payment and the drop shipping supplier or company takes care of the order fulfillment.

What Are The Benefits Of Drop Shipping?

• You Can Always Offer/Sell Items Instantly: In most cases, when a seller or retailer wants to start selling a given product, they are forced to wait until their stocks are shipped. However, with drop shipping, you can always begin offering or advertising a product in your website immediately.
• Best Prices: Drop shipping companies often buy in huge volumes and will offer you the best prices on products and shipping arrangement, which will in turn leaves you with a lucrative profits.
• Opportunity Of Testing Products Without Incurring Risks: Adding a new item to your product range often come with an underlying risk of not selling the item. And having to guess what your clients may like to buy is a daunting feat for any trader. Being able to test the waters without the need to make true investment is usually a huge advantage.
• No Capital Investment: There is usually no capital investment in the drop shipping model and you will never be exposed to dangers of suddenly having a stock of outdated items/products in your inventory.
• Greater Flexibility: Using drop shipping model provides you with a greater flexibility with regards to product range—you can promote a dozen or a thousand items at go.
• No Need To Worry About The Inventories: The drop shipping model saves you from the worry about inventory and delivery and provides you with ample time to focus in discovering your market and products that your customers want.

Disadvantages Of Drop Shipping

• Processing Your Orders May Sometimes Be A Challenge: Many drop shipping suppliers work with hundreds of wholesalers with varying order processing, shipping and billing requirements. This may make things a bit complicated for the drop shipping supplier which may result into delays in delivering products.
• You May Not Have All Information About A Product: Since you will not always have the opportunity to handle the products you are selling, you may not have the realistic idea or details of the products and answering detailed customer enquiries may sometimes be a challenge.
• Customer Service Issues: Although drop shipping business model removes the responsibility of shipping, it also removes a larger section of the customer experience from the control of the seller. The process of resolving a client complain or enquiry about a product may be slowed since the seller may not have all the information about a product and the concern will have to go through the supplier before it is solved.

Factors To Consider End Up With A Good Drop Shipping Supplier

Many drop shipping suppliers will show interest of partnering with you as it is an easy way for them to generate extra profits. As such, you need to be careful about the suppliers you team up with. Here is an overview of factors to consider to ensure that you partner with a reputed drop shipping supplier:

• Pricing Point: Don’t assume that the first drop shipper that you come across in Australia will offer you the best deal—shop around for other offers in the market and choose the most appropriate.
• Drop Shipping Charges And Fees: Different drop shippers will have varying handling fees and freight costs and it is pertinent to understand all the costs involved so that you can calculate your profits accurately. Try to avoid suppliers who charge unnecessary fees such as participation fees.
• Accounts: Will the drop shipping supplier automatically debit your Australian bank account or credit card on each order that you submit or will they offer you a monthly payment terms? Although many companies may not be willing to offer you credit when you are just beginning to work with them, it is good to confirm if this will be possible in future.
• Credibility: How long has the drop shipping supplier been operating? Do they respond to your requests in time and professionally? There are companies that tend grow rapidly very fast and customer service may suffer. You should be wary of such companies.
• Support, Returns And Refunds: The last thing any seller would want to be caught up in is a situation where there are a number of returns and they have to foot the bills. Accordingly, you should always check the return policy of the drop shipping company, the support services that they offer, and the kind of guarantees associated with their products.

Finding The Drop Shipping Suppliers

There are myriad approaches that you can take to end with the most suitable drop ship suppliers. These include:

• Direct Contact: You can always contact manufacturers and suppliers who stock the products you are interested in and inquire about the possibilities of drop shipping partnerships. Nonetheless, you need to be cautious about the companies you partner wit, especially if they have never been involved in such kinds of partnerships.
• Drop Shipping Directories: Based on the product categories that you are interested in , you can also check from the many online directories, most of which are free. If youre one of these people who want to succeed quickly utilizing the dropshipping concept, please read our section on Premium Dropshippers.
• Search Engines: You can also hit a few search engines with a few drop shipping terms. For instance, you can input “drop ship+ product of your interest”, “dropship + product of your interest”, drop shipping + product of your interest”, and dropshipping + product of your interest” among other terms. Ensure that you include he quotes to get most relevant results.

As can be seen from the guideline, choosing drop shipping companies is an endeavour that should be handled with a lot of considerations. The problems that often arise in the process can be easily be minimised by careful planning and implementation of sound contact between the seller and drop shipping company.