by fast-pack.com » Tue Dec 30, 2003 3:49 pm
Hello All!
This is a topic I am very familiar with. At the start of Fast-Pack.com we used several different competitors as Drop Shippers, 3 or 4 different companies. We actually started out as a home based business about 4 years ago, with the limited space we were limited on the # of products and quanities we could store. So we contacted several competitors about drop shipping, some offered a small discount, some no discount at all, but they all agreed to use our return address on every package and never include any of their companies information.
As the business grew, we were able to cut ties to these companies. Now we currently have a 3000 sq ft location, full and ready to grow again. The drop shipping agreements allowed us to grow our business and capital so we could eventually break off on our own and stop helping our competition.
The biggest thing I can suggest is that you constantly "test" your drop shippers, as I learned that on one product line, we were getting very few repeat customers. It turns out that the drop shipper , after about a year with no problems, started using their return address on the packages and their URL in or on the packages.