How To Spot a Dropshipping Website

What is Droppshipping?

Dropshipping is a method of online selling where the seller doesn’t actually carry any stock or inventory of goods. Instead they purchase from a supplier or wholesaler as needed. They use your money and order the goods once you have paid them. They add on a profit and the goods are shipped to you.

This often means that goods are marked-up with inflated prices and, as the seller doesn’t actually handle the goods, there may be complications if the products need to be returned or refunded.

Is Dropshipping Bad?

No. Not always. There are many trusted dropshipping sellers on the internet that have established trusted supply connections with wholesale suppliers, therefore can offer competitive prices and good customer support.

The Good

Major retailers such as supermarkets & recognised High Street retailers often use dropshipping. If you purchase certain items online from major supermarkets, these products are often shipped directly from wholesalers or manufacturers. They don’t come from the supermarket’s warehouse. So you could say that this is a form of dropshipping.

In fact, you could argue that the majority of products available to buy online use some form of dropshipping!

The Bad

There are plenty of opportunistic dropshipping sellers who use rogue practices for financial gain without any regard for customer support.

“On-the-fly” dropshipping is often listed as a popular choice within these dodgy “get-rich-quick” sites.

Describing dropshippers as the seagulls of ecommerce seems a little unfair on seagulls. They aren’t doing any real harm but nobody likes them. They circle around like scavengers looking to pick up scraps.

Some dropshipping operations don’t even use wholesale suppliers. They simply relist products from sites such as Amazon, Etsy & eBay and hike the prices up.

There are plenty of online sellers and ecommerce sites that simply duplicate products that are already listed online and relist them and sell them at inflated prices. In most cases the dropshipper does so without the permission of the original source seller.

This is considered bad practice. How can you possibly provide customer support for goods that you have never seen or handled. Furthermore, if the goods are faulty or go missing during shipping, the returns and refunding procedure gets very complicated.

The Ugly

Worse still, the scammers; There are online shops that will scam buyers by taking the payment for goods, estimating longer delivery times and then “ghost” the customer by shutting down the site and stealing your money.

Most scam ecommerce sites will just take your money without ever sending any goods out. However, dropshipping is a common method for such sites to startup in order to gain a few reviews and to establish a merchant payment gateway.

So to conclude whether dropshipping is a good or a bad thing… it all depends on the seller. Dropshipping is simply a term to describe the business plan of the ecommerce seller and their method of order fulfilment.

In this article, we’ll focus on the sellers who use poor practice of dropshipping. We’ll focus on “the bad & the ugly”!

What Kind of Products Are Dropshipped?

Everything. You name it, there will be a website operating a dropshipping duplicate business model. Everything from concert tickets to kitchen appliances to clothing.

It isn’t only the high-end expensive goods with large profit margins that are dropshipped. Cheaper, low-cost products and goods are also dropshipped.

Sites Like eBay Flooded With Dropshipping

In China, there is a government strategy to increase overseas exports at all levels. Therefore the Chinese government pay the shipping costs to have any item sent anywhere in the world, no matter how little the product value is.

Ever tried selling anything on eBay recently and wondered how your competitors are able to sell the item (with postage included) cheaper than the actual price of postage, never mind the cost of the item?

For example, you may want to sell a low cost item that would cost £4 to post as a small package. That same product is listed on eBay at £3 with postage included.

The reason is, these products are sold through a dropshipping scheme. When you make a purchase from a seller “in the UK”, the order is processed and shipped directly from China. Items that sell in higher volumes are shipped from a steady flow of arriving containers.

The “seller” in the UK (or any other country) has no stock. They have no store-room, no warehouse, no inventory. The dropshipper doesn’t actually handle any goods.

Meanwhile, China have picked up the cost of the postage which means nobody can compete.

5 Ways to Spot A Dropshipping eCommerce Website

If you suspect that as site or online product listing is a cloned product being sold by a droppshipper, run the following checks:

1. Image Search

Run a Google search on one of the product images. This is now easier than ever to do. If you are using the Chrome browser, simply right-click the image and select – “Search image with Google”.

(In the Edge browser in Windows, if you roll your cursor over an image, an icon will appear in the top-right corner of the image which allows you to run “Visual Search”. Only problem with this method – it’ll use Bing!!!)

Running an image search allows to you see other sites on the internet that are selling the exact same product.

2. Text Description Search

If there is a section of text within the product description that is quite niche or unique. Copy the sentence of text and paste into a Google search within “” inverted commas.

This will show you the same product listed elsewhere on the internet and if the text is exactly the same, then one of them is a clone.

3. Check Guaranteed Delivery Times

Dropshipping sellers will typically estimate a longer delivery time. Most online sellers offer a delivery option of within 48 hours of ordering. Dropshipping sellers are more inclined to estimate rather than guarantee delivery. If an item takes “up to 2 weeks” to arrive, you know you aren’t buying from a seller who has the product within the country.

4. Contact The Seller

Dropshipping sellers are unable to offer the type of support that genuine inventory-holding companies can. Contact the seller. Ask them a question about the product.

Reputable online sellers are easy to contact and are extremely knowledgeable about the products they sell. Whereas droppshipping sellers are more difficult to contact and would rather avoid contact with you, the end-customer.

5. Research The Seller

If it’s a website, run some checks on them. Paste their name into a Whois search. Are they registered in the country they claim to be? Have they been established as long as they claim?

Paste their company name into a search followed by the word… reviews.

Take a moment to read their Trustpilot reviews. (Trustpilot is incredibly good at filtering out fake reviews).

Is Dropshipping Illegal

No. There are many online retail platforms that forbid or discourage the practice, but there is nothing illegal about dropshipping.

Dropshipping operators must abide by consumer protection laws in the country of operation. Further information on these rules for the UK can be found in this article on Legal Vision.

Alternative Explanation Of Dropshipping

To conclude this article I am going to use a rather obscure description of how the process of dropshipping works. So here goes….

“You see a hamburger stall across the street advertising hamburgers at $5. There is a stranger standing next to you who tells you that if you give him $10 upfront, he will get you a hamburger by next week. Furthermore, if it’s cold or undercooked, there’s nothing that he can do and really wants nothing further to do with you”.

Yes, a rather bizarre explanation of dropshipping. However this is how the process works. Just go across the street and buy your own hamburger from the actual vendor. It’s half the price and if it’s not right, the vendor will happily refund you.

Why does the stranger do this?
He got the idea from a “get-rich-quick” channel on Tik Tok.
Is he breaking the law?
No.
Why on earth would you buy from a dropshipping seller instead of the original vendor?
Exactly!

End.