Reviews

Online Supplier

Drop Ship Design

Physical Location: Mill Creek, Washington

DropShipDesign.com (also operating DropshipOnAuction.com, Dropship-business.com) started out with a higher initial ranking than they ended up with. On the surface they look like a great company with many great features, but the deeper we dug, the lower their ranking dropped. Don’t misunderstand us. We still believe that they are a legitimate business with interest in providing a viable solution for their customers and, in some ways, delivering that value; but overall their rank suffered due mostly to limited support, poor usability, inconsistent shipping practices, and mediocre technology.

Unique Products - 200,000+

One of the very best things about DropShipDesign.com was their large product selection. As best we can ascertain, they are working with around 20 different dropship suppliers. Finding exactly what you’re looking for can be a challenge, but that is to be expected somewhat when searching through so many products.

Product Pricing

With our vast experience researching dropshippers and dropship service companies, we are familiar with several of DropShipDesign.com’s dropshippers and can verify the claim on their homepage that they "DO NOT markup the wholesale price." However, it does appear that in many cases, they may mark up the shipping costs; nevertheless, with diligent research, you should be able to find plenty of products you can sell for a profit.

See below for the Amazon price comparisons:

SKU #	Description	DropShipDesign.com Price	Amazon.com Price	Difference
SE233	Heart Rate Monitor Watch	$60.95	$65.95	$5.00
2350	Sunbeam Heritage Stand Mixer	$110.82	$138.95	$28.13
VE510B	Viewsonic 15" LCD Monitor	$239.38	$229.99	- $9.39

Fees / Trials Offered

DropshipDesign.com offers three main packages:

Dropship Auction Package - $99.99
Dropship Website Package - $149.99
Dropship Combo Package - $199.99

You can add on access to the data feed (tab delimited files) for an additional $149.95.

All fees are for an annual membership. According to the terms of service renewing your annual membership is $49.95.

They do not offer a free trial. Their terms also state that they don’t give refunds for membership fees.

Dedicated Support - No

This was one of the issues that lowered DropShipDesign.com’s original ranking. The offer no live support to get fast answers to questions. Instead, they offer support through an "online ticketing system."

They say they to respond to tickets in 24 hours or less, but our experience showed it took about a day longer than that.

They also had no helpful member FAQ or Help section to answer common questions or give information about shipping times or other concerns we had along the way.

Usability

There were several frustrating issues using the DropShipDesign.com service. The first issue was just logging in to the site… it was probably our fault for being overly eager and not thoroughly reading the welcome email, but we clicked around on DropShipDesign.com for nearly 10 minutes looking for a "log in" link before going back and re-reading the welcome email to discover that to login and use the service, we needed to go to DropShipOnAuction.com. Why the different domains? We still don’t know.

Another issue was that once we were logged in to the service, we still seemed to be subject to all the same promotional content as non-members. The ads in the left navigation never go away, and they even promote Drop Ship Design’s membership packages to your customers. (See Integrated eCommerce Website for more on this)

Browsing products was a huge headache until I switched browsers from Firefox to Internet Explorer. I know that users of Mozilla-based browsers are still a minority, but we’re over 12% of browser share now, and that percentage can’t be ignored. In my Firefox browser, the product category links in the left column didn’t work right. I had to position my mouse pointer in just the right spot to be able to click them. Having to change back to Internet Explorer and non-tabbed browsing was a big usability issue for me.

Another small annoyance was the account verification process. The first time you attempt to ship an order to an address other than your own (or rather the first time you attempt to dropship something) you’re are required to print an "activation form" which you must fill out and fax back along with a copy of your driver’s license and a utility bill matching your account address. Processing your verification can take up to two business days.

I understand that dropshipping puts the dropshipper at considerably higher fraud risks and that Drop Ship Design is trying to reduce their risk, but it would have been nice if they’d mentioned the verification up front. The first time you learn about the verification is when you try and place your first order. If you have a customer waiting for their order to ship out, the extra two days can make the shipping time a bit drawn out. Since you’re signing up for a dropshipping account, they should just make that a part of the sign-up process if you have to do it to dropship.

Online Ordering - Yes

Once your account is verified (see usability), online ordering is simple and easy. An order manager or better order tracking system would be beneficial. Make sure to save your order numbers somewhere as you’ll need them to track your order status.

eBay^® Certifications - No

None.

eBay Integrated Auction Tools - No

Drop Ship Design also doesn’t provide any "integrated" auction tools. In other words, they haven’t developed any applications or services that interface directly with the eBay platform.

However, they do provide a useful "eBay Wizard" as part of the Auction Package. Basically the wizard pulls an item’s title and image into a semi-attractive listing wrapper. Then you can copy and past the HTML for the listing layout into the HTML field of eBay’s Sell My Item description field.

The Wizard will allow you to choose between 26 different background images (few of which were appealing), and 5 different text colors for your listing.

It’s a great way to get started and get some listings up quickly, but in the long run it’s probably worth it to either learn some HTML and make more attractive listings, or to go with an established auction management provider.

BBB Member - No

DropShipDesign.com is not a member of the BBB.

Research Tools / Tutorials Offered - No

We couldn’t find anything on their site to help us know what to sell or where to sell it.

Instant Access - Yes/No

You get a username and password immediately after signing up. You can log in to your account, browse products, check out wholesale prices, and place orders to yourself. However, before you can start placing orders for drop shipment to your customers, you must complete their verifications process which takes an additional two business days.

Integrated eCommerce Website - Yes

Drop Ship Design will provide you with a website if you sign up for the Website Package that, despite their description, is very "cookie cutter." Nearly all of them look the same with the exception of the top banner. Your control over your website is very limited and includes things like changing banners, changing prices, switching between different templates.

Also, there are certain banners and ads that you can’t get rid of like the links that are always at the bottom of the category list in the left column and the ads for selling on eBay under the categories box.

Also, your customers won’t be able to enter you site if cookies are disabled which will make it very difficult to put together a good SEM (search engine marketing) campaign. And your site’s customers won’t be able to purchase anything without registering first.

With a Drop Ship Design website, the good news is you’ll get your store up and running quickly, and you won’t have to do much after that because they process all your orders for you and even run the credit card charges on their merchant account and then cut you a commission check. The bad news is you’ll also have a pretty hard time making very many sales, and your site will always be an advertisement for your customers to bypass you and do the exact same thing you’re doing.

In our opinion, you’d be better off signing up for the cheaper auction package membership and then adding the Dropship Feed Package and using the files to populate an e-commerce store that you have more control over.

The following is a small list of sites made using Drop Ship Design’s Website Package:

This list used to be much longer, but the sites don’t seem to stay up very long. On the last update of this page, six sites were no longer up. Could this be a sign that the sites weren’t very profitable?

3/27/2007 - New update, two more sites had to be removed, our list of 10 is now down to just 2.

Accepts PayPal - Yes

DropShipDesign.com accepts PayPal for both membership fees and product sales.

Public Opinion

There was definitely a lot out there about DropShipDesign; unfortunately, most of it wasn’t positive. As with most of the dropship companies in our review, there were many complaints about product pricing that were given less credence. However, there were also several complaints relating to their level of service, billing practices, delivery issues, and refund/exchange procedures.

Once any company gets big enough, you expect to see complaints as you can’t please everyone all the time, but what hurt Drop Ship Design’s ranking was the lack of devotees coming to their defense as well as the company’s apparent apathy—they didn’t come to their own defense or even bother to register with the BBB and get complaints resolved. If you give them the benefit of the doubt, you could say that they’re too busy trying to improve their service to bother with complaint forums.

In Business Since - 2004

We couldn’t find an "established" date on their site so we went off the date their site was registered: February 27, 2004.

Disclaimer: To the best of our knowledge, this information is deemed acurate as of 03/27/2007. We will try to update this information as necessary. If there is any inaccurate data in this review, please send an email to support@dropship-review.com with the correct information.

Helpful Info

DropShip Review Can Save You…

Over $500 in membership fees
Countless hours of time
The hassle of testing each individual service
From making a bad decision

"Your review is honest and straight to the point."
-Steve