Dropshipping, one form of entrepreneurship that has made a lot of people rich, let me say the first-movers or maybe those who were able to get into the business of Dropshipping at the early stage. What is Dropshipping? I will explain simply what Dropshipping is; it is the business of creating a website usually to sell products which does not exist in the inventory of the drop shippers but rather, the drop shippers buy their products from a vendor or store, mostly Alibaba, Ali Express, Orberlo and so on, to the customer at a little more expensive price, leaving the vendor or supplier to supply the goods/product to the customers without having to send the goods through the drop shipper.
A lot of people have made money through this type of business but most of them were first movers but with the rise in ecommerce, a lot of Dropshipping businesses have closed. The business of Dropshipping is not as easy as it seems. First, drop shippers do not tell people how much they spend on advertisement to get their store to the public. Drop shippers also do not show their expenses and tax to the world in full, they only show their income and make it look like they are enjoying a business with no expenses at all.
A lot of businesses would last for a very long tie but not Dropshipping. Yes, Dropshipping might not see the next ten years if a few things are not corrected. First is the price of goods. Customers love to get goods at a cheap or customer friendly price and Dropshipping doesn’t give that price. Why will someone buy from a drop shipper when they can buy from the supplier? This is one reason why drop shipping might not be available in the next few years.
One thing that will be setback for Dropshipping is time of delivery. With ecommerce stores like Amazon with Prime services which delivers in the same day, then people would prefer an ecommerce site with fast delivery system. On a normal day, it takes goods from china 7 to 14 days to get goods to customers around the world, so will customers wait for 7 – 14 days to get their orders to them? The answer is going to be a no. Nobody will leave Amazon prime which delivers on the same day to a Dropshipping site where you may wait for almost half a month.
Dropshipping is still one business that a lot of people are going into and a very few people are making money from it so I am not in any way saying you should not go into Dropshipping or you should go into it, what I am saying is, will it be able to scale in the next ten or twenty years?