The Dangers Of Dropshipping Backorders

backorders are one of the biggest dangers of dropshipping. If you’ve ever experienced this, you know what I mean.
This happened to me way back early in my eBay selling career, I had a pretty hot-moving product from a dropshipper. It was actually a kind of rolling suitcase that women who do stamping or scrapbooking would use to carry all their supplies around.

My wife enjoys stamping as a hobby and she said, “This is a hot item. It’s hard to find.” So, I started selling it and was doing really good with it. Then what happened was one day, I learned the dangers of backorders. I sold one and my office manager went to place the order. The reply she got was, “Sorry, but those are backordered. We expect them in two to three weeks.”
I'm thinking, “Oh, no.. I’m in BIG trouble.” I've learned since then: if anybody ever tells you that something’s expected in two or three weeks, that means they have no idea if, when, or how they're ever going to get them in.
From eBay Zero To eBay Hero 22 of 50
So, don’t hold your breath for two or three weeks. That’s the lemonade that I made from this lemon of a situation.
But then I figured, “This is no biggie. I'll just tell the eBay buyer and just say, ‘Sorry. It’s such a hot item and so popular, we're out of stock and we expect more in two to three weeks.’”
I was sooo…. naive. I figured, “No problem. We'll take care of it.” That’s what I did and I e-mailed her. I get a reply back from her and I thought her e-mail was going to melt my computer.
It was like a flaming hot e-mail!
She was like, “Say what? I immediately paid for that item and I want immediate shipping. If you don’t, I'll report you to eBay and PayPal and the FBI and the CIA and NBC and the IRS.”
She was really, really mad. You know what? When I stopped and put my buyer’s shoes on, I realized that she was right.
She did pay immediately. I think she even used Buy-It-Now and she immediately sent the money. Who knows…. Maybe she had a get-together that she needed the item right away.
What happened next was that the office went into full code RED alert and my office manager and I spent the rest of the day trying to find somewhere in the country where we could find this hot item in stock.
We had to go all the way cross country to a distributor. I lost money on it, but at least I got the problem solved and the fire out. The most important things are that I got rid of those flames of wrath and I didn’t get my eBay account shut down!
Amazingly, the buyer ended up giving me a positive feedback for the transaction I was patting myself on the back that I survived that and got a positive feedback. Sweet!
What happened after that experience, and if you’ve been through that yourself, it was like falling off a horse. I was really scared to get back in there. In fact, I said, “It’s not worth it. I'm not going to put myself through this again. This was crazy.”
Actually, I stopped dropshipping those products because I didn’t want to have to deal with backorders and having the, “Two to three more weeks we'll have more stuff in.”
One day, I'm in the shower thinking. I don’t know about you, but that’s where I do my best thinking. “Okay, there's got to be a better way of doing this.” That’s when I thought about it and it hit me like a light bulb going off, a great way to take care of the problem.
From eBay Zero To eBay Hero 23 of 50
Since I've done this, I've never had a single backorder over 10,000 items later.