Dropshipping

In a dropshipping model, you list a supplier's products in your store or on a marketplace as if they were your own. You never buy the stock in advance. When a customer places an order, you forward it to the supplier and pay the wholesale price; the supplier then packs and ships the item directly to your customer. Your margin is the difference between your selling price and the wholesale cost plus fees.

The appeal is low risk and low capital. You do not pay for inventory until you have already made a sale, you hold no warehouse, and you can list a wide range of products without committing to stock. This makes dropshipping a popular entry point for new sellers and a way for established sellers to test products before committing to inventory.

The trade-off is loss of control. Because the supplier handles fulfilment, you depend on their stock accuracy, their shipping speed and their packaging quality — yet the customer holds you responsible for all of it. If the supplier runs out of stock or ships slowly, it is your marketplace metrics and reputation that suffer.

Dropshipping is permitted on most marketplaces, but with conditions designed to protect the buyer experience. Amazon, for example, allows it provided you are the seller of record — your details, not the supplier's, must appear on packing slips, invoices and packaging — and you are responsible for returns and customer service. Buying from another retailer (such as a different online store) and having them ship to your customer is generally prohibited.

These rules exist because the marketplace wants the customer to experience your brand, not a third party's. Breaching them, or letting supplier problems drive up late shipments and defects, can lead to account suspension. Sellers who dropship successfully treat supplier reliability and the seller-of-record requirement as non-negotiable.

For sellers listing across several EU marketplaces, the central challenge of dropshipping is data accuracy. You are selling products whose stock and price live in a supplier's system, not your own. If the supplier's stock figure is wrong, you risk overselling on multiple channels at once; if their cost changes, your margin can vanish silently.

That makes reliable, frequently updated supplier feeds and tight inventory sync essential. The same stock figure has to be reflected accurately across every marketplace you sell on, so that an item going out of stock at the supplier is promptly reflected everywhere — otherwise you accept orders you cannot fulfil, which damages metrics on each channel simultaneously.