Dropshipping

I don’t know how many times I have been asked “who is a good drop shipper”, with no other criteria. Are they good with reliability/availability, discounts, volume requirements, blanket orders, or even credit terms. Good has many definitions…. asking the wrong question, will often times get a wrong answer.

Another question I get asked, “where is a good website where I can buy lists of drop shippers”. Ok, 2 problems here… first of all, a good website that sells such info is a rare one indeed. Secondly a cheap guy from Iowa, I would never buy information thats readily available for free.

Most OEM’s will drop ship if pushed. Even during my corp days, we would drop ship if really pressed to do so, but never liked it. Our fullfillment systems were set up for shipping to other OEM’s, distributors, and a few VAR’s. In order to drop ship, data had to be manually entered, and much of the failsafe systems we had needed to be bypassed. I don’t think we ever got stung, but drop shipping was not a big money maker for us.