What is eBay dropshipping?
eBay dropshipping involves selling items on eBay, then working with your supplier to ship them directly to customers. Instead of holding inventory or creating the product, sellers focus on eCommerce marketing, customer service, and finding new products to sell.
To start your own eBay dropshipping business, you’ll need to find products, source them from a supplier and list your items on eBay. Many sellers will use the exact images, product titles, and descriptions provided by their suppliers. When a shopper buys from your eBay listing, the details are passed along to the supplier, who is then responsible for shipping the product to the customer.
Your profit comes from purchasing products at a wholesale price and then reselling them at a higher price.
Is eBay dropshipping worth it?
The key to successful dropshipping is a healthy profit margin. In many cases dropshippers will only make a few dollars profit off of each purchase.
Obviously, this depends on the price of the product you’re selling but many dropshipping stores will start off with medium to low ticket items. This is a natural tendency for new sellers who want to minimize risk.
If you’re looking for lots of low ticket sales, eBay can deliver the volume of shoppers you need. In Q2 of 2019, they boasted 182 million users.
Be careful when choosing your eCommerce niche, however. High ticket items can be risky, but cheap products endanger your margins. If you lose your margin entirely, you’re in big trouble!
How to Dropship from Amazon to eBay Successfully
Dropshipping from Amazon to eBay generally follows the same formula you’d follow for sourcing products in general.
- Identify a niche market with low competition and high demand. Look for things like fewer-than-average sellers, good sales rank, and a medium amount of reviews.
- Target items that can have a higher value in other marketplaces, such as the markup of American products in Canada, or Chinese products in Europe/North America.
- Visualise how a product can be rebranded and marketed to appeal to buyers — look at how the product is currently branded, read the reviews of what buyers wish was different, and assess if it’s within your capabilities to make it happen.
Some things to keep in mind when looking at product listings that could be hidden gems include:
- Low quality, or a low number of, photos. If products look shot cheaply or there aren’t a lot of images showing it from different angles, this could be an easy thing for you to capitalise on.
- Poor or missing keywords. If a seller hasn’t done good research on keywords, again, this could be an opportunity for you to come in, dedicate a bit of time in sussing out strong keywords, and dropship it at a profit.
- Typos. Sometimes sellers abbreviate words to make them fit in the title or don’t adequately edit their copy, and you could be the sales-making beneficiary of it. If buyers are skipping over these listings because of misspellings, whether they’re turned off by it or simply can’t find the listings, you could find a seller very happy to move a product.
eBay Dropshipping Fees
You have a few different costs to deal with when dropshipping on eBay. eBay’s own fees for using their marketplace as well as your suppliers’ fees. The main eBay dropshipping fees are in the table below:
| Insertion fees | Also called listing fees, you get 50 free per month, and beyond that the fee for listing an item in most categories is just $0.35. |
| Final value fees | Also known as selling fees, these fees are a percentage of an item’s total sales price. For most sellers, it’s just 10% or even lower. |
| Listing upgrades | With optional upgrades like international site visibility, larger photos, and more, you’ve got the power to attract more buyers. |
| Fees in select categories | Fees are different in certain categories, including motor vehicles, real estate, and business and industrial items. |
The two essential fees to consider are the listing fees (the cost to post your item, regardless of whether it sells), and the final value fees (calculated on the item’s final sale price).
