What is eBay dropshipping and why should  you care? I really believe that  eBay dropshipping is one of the simplest  business models that you can start if you are interested in selling products  online or e-commerce, because it doesn’t involve a lot of the logistics a lot of the hurdles a lot of the upfront  investments that a lot of other  ecommerce businesses require.

When it comes to eBay dropshipping, the first thing you’re going to do is to find an item on one of your suppliers’ websites and these  suppliers are regular websites like Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Zoro.com, etc – any website that you can purchase an item from, it can usually be  used as a supplier for your eBay dropshipping business – that’s the easiest way of finding the best dropshipping products. I’ll  just use Walmart as an example. So let’s  say you find an item on Walmart that you  want to sell.

First thing you’re  going to do is you’re going to list that  item for sale on eBay, you’re just  literally going to copy it from Walmart  onto eBay, you don’t actually even  purchase the item yet. So now it’s live  eBay, here comes a customer they buy the  item $100 from you and there you are, sitting in a cafe  on your laptop, because you can do this  from literally anywhere in the world  that you have an internet connection.

Then only then do you buy the item, you take a portion of that $100, let’s say $80 and you buy it from  Walmart. Here’s the best part: You enter in your billing information, but  for the shipping address you use the  customers shipping address, so now Walmart is shipping the item directly to  the customer. That’s what it means to be a dropshipper that is how this business  model works.

As you can see there’s  not a lot of logistics, like there are  with other ecommerce businesses: You don’t have to buy inventory upfront, you only buy it once someone buys it from  you. You don’t have to worry about  shipping labels, boxing up items, storing  items, because your supplier Walmart is  handling all of that for you.

History

Let’s  do a little history lesson here, because  when eBay dropshipping first started, when we first started doing this it  involved a lot of manual work. Let’s say this was the item I wanted to  sell:

In order to make this item  available on eBay this is what I would  have to do: I would copy the title, come over to eBay and paste the title in  there

Then I would need to choose a  category, let’s say tables looks good

I would have to select the  condition to get the photos I would have  to download all these photos to my  desktop

and then come over here and  upload them to eBay one by one

then I  would have to copy and paste all the  item specifics, such as the brand, paste it in there manufacturing part number, that’s a model number: There’s a lot of back and forth – copy and paste, copy and paste.

I would also have to do some math to figure out what price I should sell it at, so certainly  doable it certainly worked, but it did  take a lot of effort on our part. In  addition once we listed it for sale we  had to continually monitor this item on  Walmart, what if the price went up on Walmart? What if the item went out of  stock? If that happened we had to make  changes on eBay, so everything we had to  monitor ourselves took a lot of time and  it meant that we could only scale our  business up to a certain point.

Then  people started to develop software to do  that for you automatically, so whereas it would take us about five  minutes to list an item, now we can list  literally hundreds of items in a matter  of minutes and that software would reprice the items on eBay every single  hour, so if the price and Walmart went up the price on eBay would go up  automatically for you.

this was a huge game-changer, because it allowed us to scale our eBay dropshipping businesses bigger and  bigger, allowing you to sell more and more aliexpress best sellers. It worked, but there were serious flaws  with it and the flaws were just in the  size of the business. with so many items, even with software, weren’t keeping  good track of all the items, all the price changes. things would go up in price, things would go out of stock, we wouldn’t catch them in time.

As a result, dropshippers were canceling orders, dropshippers weren’t providing as good of a  customer service experience as we could  if we had smaller more manageable stores.

Overall, I eBay dropshippers were doing a really good job in providing a great customer service and just  providing a good experience for buyers, but there were some that were getting  lazy that were letting the software do  the work for them and not putting in a  lot of work themselves and more  importantly eBay themselves felt that  eBay dropshippers were getting lazy  and not providing their customers with  good customer service or a good buying  experience on eBay, so more and more eBay was starting to disfavor this model of  scaling up really huge stores and just  relying on software to make sure that  everything was taken care for.

Increasingly, what we’re finding is that  eBay wants us to be more involved with  our business to look at every single  item that we’re listing to make sure  that each customer is taken care of well –  this is the future of eBay dropshipping  this basic model it’s not even that  revolutionary, it’s basic customer service. Does that mean that we can’t use  software at all? No of course not, there  is still software that we can use that  eBay doesn’t have a problem with and  that allows us to automate a lot of our  business while still being a lot more  hands-on with it, to make sure that our  customers are well taken care of.