the.com/dropshipping
Selling things you don't own to people you'll never meet, shipped by strangers you've never met.
means A retail model where you sell a product on your own store but never stock it — the order gets forwarded to a manufacturer or wholesaler who ships it straight to the customer.
from Built from 'drop' (a point where goods are delivered) plus 'shipping,' the term grew out of mail-order and catalog retail in the 20th century, where sellers took orders and had suppliers ship directly to customers — cutting out the middle step of warehousing. The word stayed niche until e-commerce platforms in the 2000s–2010s made the practice trivially easy to automate, turning an old supply-chain shortcut into an internet-famous business model.
- actual role
- middleman who never touches the product
- margins
- often eaten alive by ads
- supplier
- usually a factory in china via aliexpress
- risk
- customer rage when shipping takes six weeks