Hi Wildmaer and welcome to the forum,
I can only share my own opinion with you here as i DON'T drop-ship myself. That said, anyone making that sort of money from drop-shipping alone in today's market would have put in a lot of hard work to get to that point. Early on,drop-shipping did make people some very good earnings, but you have to remember that was years ago now and the drop-ship market is a very heavily saturated market, especially on sites like eBay and Amazon.
These sites have people from all over the world drop-shopping on them!
Is there a place for drop-shipping in the market, absolutely is in my opinion, it's just not where almost everyone wants it to be. There is this garbage that gets spread around about how easy it is to make quick money drop-shipping hot selling items. That's about the furtherest thing from the truth there could possibly be.
Hot selling items in mass seller platforms like an eBay or an Amazon attract huge numbers of buyers. Now this is just basic business, but huge numbers of buyers attract huge numbers of sellers and I'm not talking about drop-shippers here. I'm talking about cashed up sellers, those that can drop 50K on a load of stock, which of course ensues them of a purchase price far, far less that any drop-shipper can possibly ever offer. They then dump it on eBay at a very tight margin to keep competition as tight as possible and dominate the market space.
Because it's a hot market and their products are cheap, their products sell much quicker than competitors and so they make their margin through turnover, not so much through margin on product itself.
Now when you look at that scenario, you can see how hard it would be for another wholesaler to compete, let alone a drop-shipper. Add into the mix that some wholesale suppliers themselves choose these sites to then sell direct and you might be starting to get a bit of a picture here of what that market is like.
Drop-shipping has its advantages, but non of them will allow you to go head to head with wholesaler suppliers and cashed up sellers using wholesale as their business model, it simply can't compete, that's a different ball game altogether.
So where does drop-shipping work?
My suggestion is if you want to use multi seller platforms, look for slower selling markets because cashed up sellers are interested on quick returns, that's their business model, not tying up cash in slow moving markets where it takes too long to get a return.
I suggest also looking at consumables, things that customers need to buy over and over again, that's how you build repeat business and gain loyal customers who can then become your bread and butter sales over a long period of time. Yes, it's not as glamours as selling iPhones, but it's effective and possible, where as drop-shipping iPhones and making cash is just a pipe dream.
Use drop-shipping in association with wholesale, this can be a great way to build a stock profile when developing your own site and you're not in the middle of the jungle fighting for tree space. This strategy relays on good effective marketing to drive traffic to you site to start with and continuing to bring them back again and again and not let them drift off to an eBay or similar.
I think being unique is also a strong advantage in a multi seller platform. I often wonder what the point is of everyone wanting to drop-ship the same exact products with such tight limitations on how you can possibly give yourself a strong point of difference. Yes, of course you have to be selling a product that has a market, but if you can find that wonderful balance between having a unique enough product that you can stand out from the crowd and have buyers for it, then that's kind of as good as it can get with drop-shipping for me .... drop-shipping nirvana!
So I would always suggest looking at smaller, more unique supplier. Ones that offer their own products I think are custom built from drop-shippers.
So there are my thoughts on the matter, for what they are worth lol. Some will no doubt disagree with my assessment, some will (hopefully) agree, but the one thing you won't get here in our community is a giant load of bull-puky about how easy it is to drop-ship and make great money, because that's just not the fact and I doubt you will find any community member who would tell you any different.
As I said, possible .... absolutely, but it's not something I would expect anyone knew to the business to be able to do because there are simply too many boxes that need to be ticked and experience involving many, many hours of effort is the only thing that gives someone the tools allowing them to get into a position to earn that sort of cash.
It's a business, but it's surprising how many people don't seem to understand that aspect of it. Treat it like a business, understand that business and you put yourself in a position of potential success, but just like any business, success doesn't always happen overnight.
Do it differently to that and expect quick success and all you do is increase your chances of guaranteed failure!
