Updated
Dropshipping means selling products you never hold. The customer orders from your shop, you pass the order to a supplier, and the supplier ships it directly to the customer. You keep the difference between your selling price and the supplier cost.
01The one-sentence definition
Dropshipping is a retail fulfilment method in which the seller does not keep goods in stock and instead transfers customer orders to a third party that ships them.
Everything else — the store, the marketing, the pricing — is ordinary retail. Only the warehouse moves.
02A concrete example
You list a rechargeable fan at £35. A customer orders and pays online. You pay the supplier £18, the supplier ships it, and the courier delivers it. The difference, minus fees, is your margin.
You never touched the fan, and you never paid for it before it was sold.
03What dropshipping is not
Three things get confused with dropshipping constantly.
- Wholesale: you buy stock up front and store it yourself
- Affiliate marketing: you send traffic elsewhere and earn commission; you are not the seller
- Print on demand: a sub-type of dropshipping where the item is produced after the order
Questions
- Is dropshipping the same as reselling?
- Reselling is broader. Dropshipping is reselling where you never take physical possession of the product.
- Who is the seller of record?
- You are. The customer buys from your shop, so customer service, refunds and pricing are your responsibility.
Do this in Global DropShop
The walkthrough shows the exact flow: create a store, import a product, publish, take an order.