Hacker News Reader

I had to google what dropshipping was, but it seems to be when your company relists products from other websites and when a customer orders them from you, you place the order on the other website with their address. Basically, a shopping consultancy. You no longer need to maintain inventory.

View on HN

Not really. There's multiple kinds of dropshipping sources, be it ecomm, wholesalers, or manufacturers. Dropshipping is when a seller has their vendor send customers their orders directly. It can be JIT fulfillment but it depends on the vendors' ability to source product. No one really wants to hold inventory because it deprecates.

My company does dropshipping when we can’t fulfill things directly. This has an order of magnitude more shipment errors and our vendors have no incentive to improve their reliability because shipping things isn’t a core competency, but rather an annoying necessity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com