Can You Dropship on eBay?

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eBay, one of the largest multinational e-commerce companies, allows dropshipping by letting you fulfill your orders directly from your distributor or manufacturer. 

However, as a retailer, you’re still in charge of ensuring that your clients receive their complete orders safely and on time. eBay isn’t responsible for your customer’s overall satisfaction with their orders–you are.

Before you begin the process of dropshipping on eBay, you need to familiarize yourself with the entire concept of dropshipping. This way, you’ll avoid the common pitfalls that many upcoming and even seasoned dropshippers experience every day. If you’re new to dropshipping, this article offers you essential information about this business model.

What Is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a relatively new business model in which a retailer doesn’t have to stock products in their store to be able to fulfill orders. Instead, they work with manufacturers and suppliers to fulfill the orders on their behalf. 

In short, you, as the retailer, will only forward orders to the supplier as they come. You don’t need to own any physical inventory. You basically act as a storefront for manufacturers.

As you prepare to create an eBay dropshipping business, you need to choose one of the best dropshipping niches to succeed. This will help you to create a focused clientele and influence your marketing efforts–with the right dropshipping niche, you won’t struggle to create the right products for your customers.

Currently, there are many profitable dropshipping niches that you can choose for your eBay store, including office products, gaming, camera, and smartphone accessories, home appliances, fashion, kitchen appliances, grocery, and personal care products. Aside from picking the right niche for your dropshipping business, you also need to be familiar with the various types of dropshipping business models available.    

Because the dropshipping concept is quite broad, it allows for numerous kinds of dropshipping businesses like product reselling, print-on-demand, product creation, and business extensions. 

Print-on-demand can be among the most profitable models as long as you know how to find your place in the market. 

Nevertheless, product reselling is the most common type of dropshipping in which a reseller obtains various products from different suppliers and resells them on their online store. This allows consumers to find their preferred products easily.

Product reselling is pretty well saturated as a business model, especially for low-cost products that don’t have a great unique selling point. High-ticket dropshipping, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to tap into products with clear differentiation. 

If you want to target the upmarket class with your products, you should create a big-ticket dropshipping business, as long as you fully understand how high-ticket sales work beforehand. Basically, high-ticket dropshipping is the type of dropshipping business that only sells expensive items; it’s quite different from traditional dropshipping.  

How to Dropship on eBay

Dropshipping on eBay is quite simple. All you need to do to get started is create an eBay account and list the products you want to sell. 

When customers place orders, you forward them to the supplier for order fulfillment; when you’re listing products on eBay, you add a markup to the actual prices provided by the supplier–this is how you make money from the business.

However, eBay doesn’t allow retailers to list items they’ve purchased from other retailers or marketplaces for direct shipping to customers. The distinction there is between wholesale suppliers and retailers. You can dropship from wholesalers on eBay but not from other retailers. 

The key point, though, is that you’re responsible for the safe and timely delivery of any products someone buys from you on the platform. And that’s true for any way you choose to sell on eBay.

Failure to follow eBay’s dropshipping guidelines can result in several stern actions, including listing cancellation, demotion of all your listings from search results, lowered seller ratings, restricted sales and purchases, account suspension, removal of seller and buyer protection, and more.

eBay doesn’t refund or credit to your account any fees paid for your listings or account on which it has taken any of the above disciplinary actions. You should also choose reliable and genuine suppliers or manufacturers for your business to avoid cases of unfulfilled orders.

In summary, it’s possible to dropship on eBay, but you must strictly follow the dropshipping guidelines provided to avoid getting penalized. Of course, you’re fully responsible for the satisfaction of your customers.