How to solve different terms with multiple dropshippers

Hi, I'm a newbie in dropshipping business. Can I sell products from 2 different suppliers on one e-commerce website? For example I want to sell women's bags. Can I have bags from supplier A and bags from supplier B on my website? If yes, what if both suppliers have different shipping rate and return policy? How do I integrate the differences on my website? Or will it be better to have one supplier for each e-commerce website? Thank you!

Hi Margie and welcome to the forum,

Absolutely, is the short answer and I would imagine most drop-shippers would set their stores up like that exactly. It gives you the ability to create a large stock profile for your site, while also specializing in limited run items.

So it's really up to you as to what or how much stock you list and who you source it from. The two things I would stress as important for you, would be to ensure your navigation is clean, sits with a lot of stock can get messy and customers hate difficult navigation and will leave a site very quickly if faced with that issue.

The second point I would make is your shipping, it always helps if you have uniform shipping times, if not uniform rates as well. As you have correctly identified, when you are dealing with multiple suppliers, you can find they offer different shipping rates on the same items, as well as different shipping times, so that's something you need to be aware of.

If you do find suppliers offering big differences in those two fields, it doesn't mean you can't use one or the other, but you have to get creative with the marketing side to explain as to why the difference and you have to ensure you are stipulating those differences where they exist in your listings from your regular listed shipping information.

Returns policy could be a sleeper, this could be the biggest problem of them all. It would be hard to explain to a customer why you accept returns on some items and not on others, so I think out of the three issues you highlighted, i would make sure I had a uniform returns policy across the board.

Cheers

Hi,

How do you set up shipping fees when my dropship suppliers are based internationally?
When I sell items on a marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, how do I match their shipping fees?

Anyone with experience, please assist me with this.

Thank you.

When dealing with multiple drop-ship suppliers, you do have three basic problems you have to be aware of: Shipping costs, shipping times, and warranty returns.

On a multi seller platform like eBay, it's actually easier to deal with than dealing with the problem on your own site. The chances are with a customer on eBay, they are only interested in a particular product, so that's where their focus is, they aren't looking at your other products and comparing things like shipping times and so on.

So this isn't always a big issue on a site like eBay, it's really only an issue if you are cross marketing your products in an effort to increase sales. Then you do have to be careful because you are encouraging buyers to compere those things and having different shipping times, rates and so on, can cause a lot of customer confusion.

How to get around it?
Well you really only have very limited options available. You can either list each product as per the supplier's requirements, meaning that there may well be differences across your range depending on the suppliers you're dealing with. Alternatively, you can create a block tactic, which would be taking the longest shipping time, the most expensive shipping cost and develop your own uniform warranty policy so you have a uniform structure across the board.

That way, if you have suppliers that ship quicker than others, then those customers will get the items quicker than they expect.

I would probably suggest using a block method if you were talking about your own website because uniformity would be very important in that aspect. For a site like eBay, you need every possible advantage you can get, so using a block method can hurt you because you are using a worst case scenario to develop policy and while that will give you uniformity, it can also burn you with buyers.

So for me, you just have to work within the best limitations that each supplier can offer you. If that means one product ships quicker from one supplier, than another for a different supplier, then so be it.

Cheers

OK, I was very interested in your reply on this issue. I am just starting out with my own online site and I have concerns about the shipping costs I have to quote to would-be customers. For example: if I have a dropship supplier in the USA and a customer in UK ordering a product, Another customer in the USA could order the same product and the delivery price would be much cheaper. The rates would vary greatly for delivery to different countries.How can I quote a standard rate for any possibilities?

In regards to drop-shipping, you really need to be guided by what your supplier is actually charging. Of course it's up to you if you want to add anything extra on top of that, but you will need to at least cover what your supplier's shipping rates are.

So your supplier/s will have those details available.

Cheers