What is Drop Shipping?
Drop Shipping is where an item is sold through one store, then shipped directly from their distributor or vendor, or sometimes multiple different places. Ever wondered why sometimes you see the same stock levels at multiple websites, brand new websites seem to list multiple ‘warehouses’ with huge numbers of stock, or you ordered from one place and a bunch of boxes turned up with a different business name on them or at different times? That’s a pretty good indication your order was or will be drop-shipped. Many businesses operating on places like Amazon or eBay are heavy users of drop-shipping, and so are a lot of the large eCommerce sites.
Generally this allows smaller businesses, like us, to compete as we don’t have to keep everything in stock. The downside is that there are some significant challenges in using this shipping method in a way that maintains a high level of customer satisfaction, especially when products may sell out extremely quickly (such as ammunition).
Our goal is to gradually move most products away from drop-shipping, and into our warehouse, as we prefer to have full control over stock levels and order fulfillment. Drop-shipping for certain items where it allows us to offer them to you, cheaper, will likely always be part of our business.
By maintaining our own warehouse, we can also sell items to states with restrictions (such as ammunition in California, Illinois, New York etc..). Not all suppliers will ship direct to these states, which is one reason why not all stores will ship to them either. If we don't have stock in our own warehouses we'll ship from our supplier to us, repackage things, then ship them out to you. This can add processing time to your order, but means we can sell all products to wherever they are legal.