Is drop shipping on eBay a lost cause?

Hello!

I have been selling goods on eBay for a awhile now via garage sales and thrift stores and pulling in enough to put a second mortgage payment down every month (which we are excited about)! My wife and I decided to test the waters with drop shipping (since we don't have storage space for wholesale bulk purchasing). So my questions is this: is trying to use the drop shipping tactic on ebay a lost cause since drop ship pricing cannot compete with wholesale sellers? How is it possible to break into the market via drop shipping if there is always going to be a better priced wholesaler out there?

If ebay is not the best place for drop shipping, then outside of having an online storefront, is there a place for drop shipping sellers to break into a market or is the drop ship market strictly online storefront sales?

Thanks!

Hi Matt, welcome to the forum and really good question

Is it the best place?

Well I would personally say that marketing your own online storefront is the best option, but of course that comes with having to spend a lot of cash up front to crack the market to start with. So maybe the best, certainly not the cheapest. eBay delivers that traffic rich environment you can take advantage of, but that of course also brings in the big fish, so that turns eBay into a very difficult market.

You have to be smart, a lot of new members come wanting to dropship the hottest selling items on eBay and then run around screaming about the prices and competition. Of course that's where you're going to find the biggest fish of the lot selling, the big wholesale volume buyers. You just can't bring a stick to a gun fight like that and hope to have a chance.

I think there are dropship opportunities there and people make money from it every day. You just have to be smart, look at markets where turnover is much lower, the big fish will usually stay in deep water and not venture into this shallows because it;s just not worth their time and effort. So those areas for me make far more sense for dropshipping.

Cheers