Does Anyone Have Experience Dropshipping To Amazon? (6)
I'm currently selling product through the FBA program but want to try out different products without fully investing in them. Does anyone do this as a way to test ideas before jumping into a product?
Bumping this to get more eyeballs!
Amy
Hey @blakeg24, I'm an FBA Seller based in Shenzhen - previously ran a top 10 supplement brand on Amazon, a sex toy brand (top 10) and consulted on dozens of other Amazon brands.
Basically, very few of the larger sellers I know are using Amazon Dropship Central or trying to use the dropship capability on the platform. I do some know sellers like Will Tjernlund, that are experimenting with Wish Dropshipping, but they avoid Amazon Dropship. Quality Control is too important on Amazon to never see your product and it runs a risk to hurt your account metrics. Amazon customers also expect faster shipping, so if they're not aware it's dropshipped, it could impact other important metrics.
It's something worth trying out, but also keep in mind that dropshipping from Aliexpress or any other online retailer is against Amazon TOS, so the better approach is to go direct to the factory selling on Aliexpress/Alibaba/1688 and ask if they do dropshipping.
There are many ways to see demand for products and do the research without using dropshipping, but also keep in mind any product research done during Q4 can skew the results - everything will look like it's selling like crazy, but when your stock hits FBA in January or February it'll be a different story.
Feel free to send me a pm if you have Amazon related questions, hope this helped out
Originally Posted by Zack
blakeg24 - I would seize this opportunity to grill Zack with further questions!
Amy
Hi guys,
Just dropping my 2 cents in,
We never used the dropshipping portal, however about 85% of our business on Amazon is Dropshipped directly from our vendors (about 2.5K orders a day).
In fact unlike most of the people i have seen or talked to in the Amazon confernces, we do not use FBA at all. (we used to)
We sell branded goods, which gets hijacked and modified a lot. Amazon can not relink an ASIN to an FASIN and requires you to return the goods and relabel them.
One Christmas season we got stuck with ~$1M of goods all linked to Shadow ASINs (where there are multiple ASINs linked to the same size and color, Amazon only chooses one and deactivates the rest).
Since than we built a lot of software to combat all these issues and have been 99% MFN.
When considering Dropshipping, its really all about the vendor quality first.
All of our vendors are based in the US and they have quite amazing track record fulfilling orders.
Always try to get as much data from the vendor and answer some of the important questions.
1. How fast they can fulfill the order (what is considered on amazon as the leadtime)
2. Shipping rates & options - Amazon is all about how fast you can get an item to the customer. It is also a heavy part of their buybox algo.
3. Returns- How easy it is for them to accept returns, or supply you with some credit.
- For example, one of our vendors worked with us a 2% off CoOp credit and they don't accept returns
The above goes also for picking errors and order accuracy. Shipping can really stack up when needing to return an item to vendor. Most of our vendors cover return shipping or even supply us with a label.
4. Their technology - This doesn't seem important at the beginning, but when if you plan to build a serious business around it, you must ensure that you have a way to automate ordering, inventory and tracking data. Otherwise you will be an excel and email slave.
Last year we finished building a full system with a decision making algos (I like to call it The Brain) which can process 10,000K orders at a time and make routing decisions (Basically, what is the best way to get the item to the customer?)
It takes care of everything from importing the orders, building POs, updating tracking and managing inventory, on multiple marketplaces.
This changed our lives and resulted in a huge margin increase.
Technology is important, always consider it in your decisions.
5. Customer support - We like to work with emails as much as we can, but dammn, sometimes you just need to speak to someone. Make sure you inquire their customer support and even test it a little.
6. The product - We sell branded goods, and are very volume oriented. So we really don't care much about the items (i have seen only about 10% of our items in the form of returns and images). Its all about the numbers for us, so if an item receive a high return rate, it is set to 0 and forgotten about.
In the case of our brand, we really emphasized about the quality, which now after 3 years, i can vouch the quality does matter.
So if you want to introduce a new product to Amazon, or create your own brand, i suggest as part of your vendor screening, to get some samples and test the item.
I hope this helps!
Joe
What do you think about Amz Scraper? They offer all in one solution for Amazon dropshipping.
Tracking, inventory management, product finding, seller scraper, refilling orders and repricing. I am also checking all the software can solve and help with Amazon dropshipping. And what do you think FBM, instead of FBA for dropshipping? Which is safer?
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