Many liquidators will sell you solid loads (specific loads, not mixed) Also, with clothing, you'll usually find that you can buy that by the box, you don't need pallet sized purchases. It does depend on the clothing of course and also on the supplier.
Margin and drop-shipping don't always work in the same sentence unfortunately, yes, it does depend on the supplier and on the product of course, but drop-shipping in general isn't known for delivering great margins on products. Combine that with the cost of selling on sites such as an eBay, plus the competitive pressures of a multi-seller platform like that and whatever margin is on offer from a drop-ship supplier can diminish rapidly to a very minor one.
If you are wanting to develop a business that offers you the freedoms as you mention, I'm not sure drop-shipping alone is going to be the best option. Drop-shipping has some great benefits, but in my opinion, one of the biggest benefits is using it to build on an already working wholesale style stock profile.
It's a cost effective way of test marketing products really cheaply and so on, but to build that sized business around purely drop-shipping, well you're talking about having a mass listing strategy I would think. Listing bulk products in an effort to convert at least some percentage of those listings into revenue.
Plenty of people use that strategy, it's been used for many years now and you'll find the really successful drop-shippers are usually employing that type of model, so it's more than possible to do, but you really need to know the products you are listing. The last thing you want to do is list blind without knowing the market because all that will happen is that you'll end up running up an expensive listing fee bill each month with low to no sales to off-set that cost.
I don't want to keep returning to liquidation if that's not the market you want to be in, but I can't help but think there might be some opportunities there for you that you can then build on with drop-shipping. We've got several good liquidators in the directory, but one I am always happy to suggest to members in Via Trading because of their customer service.
You can ask those guys anything at all and I've never known anyone not to get a straight answer from them.
I'm not being much help here, I know lol, but I'm not sure there is an easy answer for you unfortunately. If you have products in mind then you can easily just contact Link hidden: Login to view and the team there will do their best to chase up possible supplier leads for you.