2024 has proved to be a terrible year for the economy. The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has brought many businesses to the verge of bankruptcy and has even been able to completely dissolve several companies. However, the severity of the outbreak on a business financially differed depending on the type of service or product provided. For example, a hotel is possibly more likely to have suffered than an online store that offers goods from the comfort of a customer’s home. Drop-shipping is a strategy that has undergone several incremental developments over the last decade. However, its feasibility peaked before the coronavirus and then dropped significantly.
But, not all drop-shipping businesses suffer equally; this will make sense to individuals who know little about what drop-shipping is. Drop-shipping is a sales strategy where the salesman provides a product to a customer without having it in stock, meaning that they would take orders to know the demand for a particular product and then buy the same from another retailer for a lower price than what they sell it for. This process has gained a lot of traction over the years and has become a very effective strategy as of late.
Due to several developments in the field of drop-shipping, most methods of sale have moved from physical retail to online retail. This is an advantage during the lockdown, as the physical presence of a customer at a store is not actually required.
E-commerce industries such as Amazon™ do not always have all goods in stock. Especially during this epidemic, there has been a severe drop in the number of goods available. But this is not that big an issue for drop-shippers as they are only required to provide enough stock to exactly meet the customer's demand. This gives them a massive advantage over several e-commerce retailers around the world.
The most significant problem that most goods salesmen face is that they cannot cover that big an area to provide their products due to the restraints on travel that exist to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Drop shippers find a solution to this problem by being able to provide solely at areas that require a specific product at a particular time, meaning that they can strategically offer the product in a very efficient manner, as they know precisely the geography that must be covered to reach all their customers by covering the most minor area possible to increase efficiency.
What may seem attractive is that despite all these advantages, why did drop-shipping have such a big downfall? Well, there still exists a huge variable on which the business depends mainly on- human gratuitousness. This means that at times, when circumstances change, this can have an effect on an individual’s behavior despite the circumstance not having a direct relationship with the behavior, meaning that due to the severe epidemic and the stay-at-home order, individuals may refrain from making extravagant purchases to assure them protection financially. This is probably one reason the market has not been so great for drop-shippers.
