A common question that many people ask when getting into the e-commerce industry is, “Why should I bother?  Anything I can sell, someone can just buy at Walmart!”

It is a fair question; if big department stores can carry almost any conceivable product, why is it that anyone bothers to work online in the first place?  If we want to dropship, are we just doomed right from the start?

The answer, fortunately, is a resounding “NO!”.  What many people fail to realize is that the size of a department store is a great strength, but it is also a great weakness.  Your friendly neighborhood stores have to purchase each and every last individual item that they wish to sell to their customers.  Every decision is made off of painstaking research into what items have the broadest appeal, and bulk purchases are made accordingly.  As part of this model, there is not a lot of room for experimentation or error.  This isn’t the case with a dropshipping site.

With the freedom that the internet has afforded us as consumers, that model is becoming more and more antiquated.  Where it was once acceptable to simply purchase whatever was available at the store, as you had no real choice but a lengthy mail order process, if even that, we can now go online and look for our product, and see if anyone is selling anything a bit more tailored to our own preferences, not wherever the average consumer interest lies!

This affords us a great opportunity as dropship websites to hit these markets, at very little cost to ourselves.  We are not carrying any inventory, so any item that we place in our store from a supplier is simply an option on the table for our customers.  If the item sells poorly, we are not out any initial investment, or anything like that, we simply know that it is not popular, and we can replace it if we’d like to, but we’re under no obligation to do so. 

We are not losing any inventory space by having that item available, and in fact we are making ourselves more appealing to customers, who see the variety of items that we have to offer, rather then being shoehorned into purchasing whatever is most generically desirable.

We have to remember that working at the dropship level, we have the freedom to have a much more varied and interesting product line, and this freedom is something that the big stores cannot emulate.  Our inventory can be as vast and varied as we’d like, and at no cost to us, it is they who are unable to compete, not us!