Amazon has been incorporating drop shipping ever since its humble origins as an online bookshop. For those who may not have any idea at all as to what drop shipping is, it’s an order fulfillment method where an online retailer buys products from a distributor, and the distributor would then pack and ship those products to the online retailer’s customers. The retailer does not need to store the said products.
Given Amazon’s current status as an online retailing giant, it isn’t surprising that they’ve attracted more than five million merchants as of 2017, some of which are most likely using the company’s built-in drop shipping model of fulfilling customer orders. However, some Amazon drop shipping businesses have come and gone throughout the years after their owners had put them up for sale. Surely, you don’t want this to happen to your business if you plan on starting one. You would want to know first what the pros and cons are of such drop shipping service.
Advantages of the Amazon Drop Shipping Service
- You can spend more time managing aspects of your business that don’t involve fulfilling customer orders.
Running an online retail store in Amazon is already hard enough to pull off all by yourself. Would you also want to be in charge of buying raw materials for your products, building them on your own, personally delivering them to customers, and replenishing your stock? If not, you can avail of Amazon’s drop shipping service to help ease the burden of fulfilling customer orders and free you up to manage your business in a more hands-on way.
- You don’t need a dedicated space to store your
You may sell large products such as furniture or perhaps some gym equipment via Amazon. Unfortunately, you might not have enough space in your house to store, say, 50 pieces of bulky items. You may have thought of purchasing a storage unit where you can keep them, but your store’s current earnings might not allow for it at all.
With Amazon’s drop shipping service, you won’t need to worry anymore where to store large products as every Amazon warehouse is spacious enough to accommodate tons of large goods from different sellers like you.
- You don’t have to deal with excess stock.
You’ll know that your business isn’t doing well at all when the number of customers buying from you starts to dwindle. That could then lead into boxes upon boxes of unsold products that you wouldn’t want to carry with you should you decide to close shop for good and pursue some other endeavors.
If you aren’t doing well as a seller in Amazon and you’ve availed of their drop shipping service, you wouldn’t need to worry about taking your excess inventory with you. Just let Amazon decide what they should do with all of your unsold products, and then move on to whatever your next venture might be.
Disadvantages of the Amazon Drop Shipping Service
- You aren’t in control of how your products are packaged.
You might want each product that you sell in your online retail store to have one-of-a-kind packaging as it can help increase with your customers’ satisfaction. Perhaps you want to include hand-drawn art that you made yourself in the packaging or even just a simple handwritten note in stationery paper congratulating your customers for buying from you.
However, if you’ve established an online retail store in Amazon and availed of their drop shipping service at the same time, you can forget about sneaking in doodles and letters in the packaging of your products as Amazon would pack them in boxes that carry their brand and you aren’t allowed to tamper their product packaging process.
- It’s still your responsibility to deal with customer complaints due to Amazon’s shortcomings.
Imagine a glass table that a customer ordered from your Amazon retail store arrived at their doorstep in pieces. Your customer would most likely not think that it’s Amazon’s fault even though their name is on the shipment box and their warehouse personnel must’ve mishandled it. Instead, your customer would think that it’s your fault for letting it happen to your product.
Drop shipping has mostly made Amazon the online retailing behemoth that it is today. It may have been that very reason that led you to consider setting up an online store in Amazon and using their drop shipping service. However, before committing to the latter, you’ll want to know first the pros and cons of their service as discussed above so that you don’t have to put your business up for sale later on when things go south.
For more ideas on how to earn profit from your Amazon retail store, look up “make money journalreview.org” in your preferred search engine and read some moneymaking tips that can drive your online retail business towards success.
