I have been trying for about a year now to set up two webshops: www.great-deals-4-u.co.uk and www.bargain-deals-4-u.com. The first is an Online Shopping Mall and the second site is an American Onlune Shopping Mall. Let me start by explaining my experiences with E-bay.

There is a lot of hype from companies on the web offering to provide you with drop shipping stock, some very good, but many very bad. For those of you who don’t know what drop shipping is, put simply, it is when you market products that someone else is going to supply and ship for you. You don’t actually have the stock, but you rely on your dropship supplier to ship the goods to wherever you stipulate. You receive the retail price and cost of shipping from your customer, and you have an arrangement with your supplier, to pay him at a “discounted” rate. The difference between the retail and “discounted” prices is yours to keep.
I have put discounted in inverted commas because very often the discounted prices are not sufficiently competetive for you to gain sales at a profit.

Anyway, back to Ebay. When I first started dealing with drop shippers I decided that I would first sell items on Ebay. This was expected to show me whether I could make a profit or not, and it would also save me the expense of setting up a webshop unecessarily. Unbeknown to me, Ebay doesn’t like dropshippers, even though many suppliers claim you can make huge profits by selling their wares on Ebay.

At first everything went well. So well in fact, that I started up my own Ebay shop. I loaded my site with masses of items from dropship suppliers, such as plasma screens, TV’s, tools, etc. I should mention here that the suppliers I was dealing (and still am incidentaly), have proved to be very reliable. I invested in all the webtools to make my life easier and improve my sales, and I also spent a lot of time making my webpages on Ebay looking attractive for buyers. In all, I spent quite a lot of money and a considerable amount of time on my enterprise. I ended up completing nearly 300 transactions without a single complaint. Then suddenly Ebay shut my shop down. They requested all receipts for the items that I was selling, copies of utilities bills etc. etc. I packaged masses of pages together, downloaded from my dropship suppliers websites, including proof of my memberships etc. and sent the whole lot off to Ebay in Ireland, as requested, at great postal expense. I heard nothing from Ebay for some time so I contacted them again and promptly sent off all the required information again and again until eventually I gave up. They were always claiming that they hadn’t received anything or that they required more information and so on. The truth of the matter is they don’t like dropshipping, which I have since found out.

The moral of this story is that if you intend to dropship and sell on Ebay then I suggest you don’t, as it could end in tears. I found out the hard way and it cost me a lot of time and expense.