Dropship is a method that is generally not encouraged by Amazon because it involves several risks. The main concern is the customer satisfaction.
Since you can’t know if the vendor going to ship the same item that you are advertising and going to make an internal mistake, there is a chance that you can get negative feedback or even punishment from Amazon.
Here are some key rules you need to follow in order to be a good performing dropship seller:
1) List small quantities on Amazon.com:
Lots if vendors offer integration and a lot of them doesn’t. That is why tracking your vendors inventory levels is challenging. You might end up having 50 orders but the vendor is out of stock for another 2 weeks. That is why, if you set your Amazon inventory to a low number, like 10 – 15, you will have a less impact. You can always increase the inventory levels automatically using a tool, or manually whenever you get out of stock or while you are tracking your daily inventory levels.
Cancelling orders because your vendor doesn’t have inventory is going to hit your seller rating cancellation ratio and you will have less buy boxes, thus less sales.
2) Make sure you are listing the right product on Amazon.com:
Pretty simple but we have seen this lots of time that with a temporary lack of focus you can miss a small model number is actually different on Amazon (or image). Customer is always right, if there is a discrepancy between the pictures and the model number, edit the page, make it correct. If your your product is not exactly the same, create a new page.
3) Adjust your handling days on Amazon.com:
If your vendor can’t ship within 2 days, don’t leave your handling days as empty or less than the real number. When you are dealing with a high number of drop-ship SKUs, managing this would be challenging but it is incredibly important. You will definitely get negative feedback if you delay on shipment. If because of some reason, you will have a delay, increase the handling days and call all the pending order customers and let them know about the situation. You can ask them if they want to wait additional days or not. If they cancel the order by themselves, you won’t get a negative feedback under your account.
To learn more about how to set handling days, check out this link:https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200955560?language=en_US
4) Get samples from your drop ship vendor:
It would be nice to see if the product actually matches with the listing first hand. Your vendor, if you have history, won’t charge you for an item or two. You can also order from the vendor and ship these manually in your first orders.
5) Consider selling on Amazon as FBA:
There are lots of good reasons to do FBA. Negative feedback won’t hit to your seller account and amazon is going to take care of your inventory. Check out these articles to learn more about FBA.
6) Set the returns address for the Amazon order:
Let the customer know via phone call or email, or ask to your supplier to show the return address as their warehouse location in the shipment. That’s how you can avoid some of the vendor’s return fee and let the customer return the product faster. Your customer will get reimbursed faster and be more happy.
7) Hire a software developer
Who can write code to integrate with your vendors for order fulfillment, quantity updates and order receipt. You can also hire a Amazon consultant or a freelancer who js expert on the subject. Contact us to let us help you with that.
8) Ship it yourself
If it is a lightweight product or your shipping vendor has a low fee for the shipments, you can considering shipping the product yourself. Some dropship vendors charge a lot for single shipment; you can avoid this cost and offer better customer service because you will know the product.
9) Use a repricer
If you are following all the steps above, use Repricer AI to boost your sales via giving you the buy box. Create your 14 day trial from here.