There are so many dropshippers on the Internet. Sometimes, it is really hard to tell which one is legitimate. One of the worst cases I heard is that some guy tried to order a laptop computer but instead received a brick in the package. It might sound funny to you but absolutely not a bit funny to that customer. Basically, there are few things you might want to consider before starting a business relationship with these dropshippers.
You might want to talk to the dropshipper on the phone, make sure you have all their contact details, and etc.
Do they only accept bank transfer and Western Union? Well, many scammers only take bank transfer and Western Union as payment methods.
Before you start offering goods on your web store, you might want to test order a few sample to see how things go.
Do they have a good online reputation? When you search using keywords like “dropshipper name” and “scam”, do search engines return lots of negative feedbacks? Sometimes, scammers would find a legitimate site and duplicate a fake one. Once I was checking a Chinese based dropshipper and all of a sudden I decided to copy and search some lines of text from their “About Us”, guess what, I found another site using the exact text, but without any contact info. Obviously, it is not safe to shop from the latter one.
Ok, you check everything and it turns out that this dropshipper is for real and legitimate. Now, the most important question – Is it profitable to deal with them? For example, I found this netbook, an Acer AOD270-1375 10.1″ Netbook (Intel Atom Processor N2600, 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, 320GB hard drive, Windows 7, Espresso Black), one of its Amazon prices is $241.99. But on this so and so dropshipper, for the exact same model number AOD270-1375, the price is $279.52. So, if you plan to mark up and resell from this dropshipper, will you be able to compete with your competitors on eBay or Amazon?
Many dropshippers are actually middlemen themselves, they make money from charging you a monthly membership fee for marketing their over-priced products. Or in other cases, some dropshipping online services might only be interested in setting up your web store, or selling a datafeed service, again they make money from charging you a monthly fee, they don’t care if you can make a dime or not. Don’t rush things subscribing this and that, do some math and research, try to deal with the dropshippers directly.
If you are looking for dropshippers, here is some free dropshipper info for you.