Reviews

Online Supplier

Dropship Direct

Physical Location: Portland, Oregon

Dropship Direct offers a solid product selection, competitive product pricing, and a reliable overall service. It is our second place choice. Dropship Direct provides a valuable service worth looking into.

Unique Products - 25,000+

DropshipDirect.com has a wide selection, including some items that can be found in several other places, but also a wide variety of niche market items that are more difficult to find and make for great niche-focused marketing tactics. They work with a wide variety of supplier types including manufacturers, importers, wholesalers, artisans, and craftsmen. They stock some of their inventory in their own facility and partner with other dropship suppliers to expand their selection.

Product Pricing

Because Dropship Direct doesn’t charge a membership fee, we assume that they must make some margin off the product sales (as well as other services like their eCommerce Webstores, web hosting, product image sharing, and XML feeds). Nevertheless, their pricing is still competitive. It’s still within the dropship wholesale range which means that you will occasionally find items selling cheaper than your wholesale price, but there are definitely plenty of products that can make you money.

See below for the Amazon price comparisons:

SKU #	Description	DropshipDirect.com Price	Amazon.com Price	Difference
3041	Invicta Ladies Watch	$377.00	$403.47	$26.47
6634	Vacuum Insulated 2.5L Thermos	$41.00	$47.95	$6.95
8045D	Everest Backpack	$22.00	$49.99	$27.99
VIMTMS34PF	34 pc. Torx Socket Set	$55.00	$72.09	$17.09

Fees / Trials Offered

There are no membership fees associated with DropshipDirect. Membership is free, but you must apply and be accepted.

Dedicated Support - Yes

Dropship Direct has some unique support practices. For one, they employ moderated forums for their members to discuss problems, opportunities, marketing ideas, and more. The forums are a great idea but still not extremely useful. They are getting better than they have been, but still seem to lack participation, making the amount of content sparse. Perhaps over time they will become more robust and of better use.

They also provide live phone support for resellers as well as a type of email support that creates support tickets which are documented and always available through your account.

The support tickets are okay but nearly impossible to find if you ever delete the email notification that Dropship Direct sends when you have a ticket waiting. Also, it would be nice if they’d just include the response in the email rather than making you click the ticket url and log in to your account to see the answer.

Usability

With such a solid product offering, it’s a shame the service was so hard to use. The usability issues started with the process of opening an account. Perhaps we were an exception, but it took nearly three weeks just to get a login for the site. The first time we applied, everything looked right. We filled out the online application form (which requires a Tax ID number as well as two business references), clicked submit, and were taken to a “submission successful” page thanking us for applying and informing us that we should hear back from DSDI within two business days.

After waiting a week, we decided to dig through their site for some answers. No phone number is readily available before you become a member, but after much searching, we found an admin post in one of the forums stating that if you didn’t get an email immediately after applying, the application wasn’t successful and you should do it again. We checked past emails, and sure enough, nothing from Dropship Direct. So contrary to the page we saw after clicking submit, our application had not been successful.

We reapplied, got the confirmation email this time, and then waited another week to finally get a login for the site. During that week we submitted a support ticket questioning why we hadn’t received a login within the specified two business days. The response to the email came the next day telling us that the ticket had been answered and provided a link to see the answer; however, when we clicked on the link, we were informed that we needed to log in to see the response—that was extremely frustrating since a login was the exact thing we were trying to get.

Again, maybe others have had better experiences, or maybe it is just Dropship Direct’s method of weeding out resellers who aren’t serious. Whatever the case, we almost gave up on them before we could ever get started.

Once we got a login, things improved a little, but there were still several small frustrations: our member login ID didn’t work to log in to the member forums. That required yet another registration and then a forum request to be given access to the Member-Only section. Why couldn’t they just make all member logins also forum Member-Only logins?

Another issue was product browsing. Going through 20,000+ products is already time consuming, but it’s even worse when a large percentage of the category links you click turn out to be empty categories. It would also be nice if the product browsing were wider than 400 pixels. The small width limits the number of products shown on each page and therefore forces you to click though even more pages when browsing products.

To their credit, they do provide a tab-delimited file of all their products that was much easier to look through than browsing all the products on their site (though you do lose the ability to see the images and easily read details and descriptions in spreadsheet format).

Online Ordering - Yes

Online ordering seemed to be a simple and smooth process. A transaction history is available which shows transaction details, including tracking information on shipped orders.

eBay^® Certifications - No

None.

eBay Integrated Auction Tools - No

There are no available tools to help the process of selling items on eBay.

BBB Member - Yes

Dropship Direct has been a member of the BBB since March 9th, 2006. They have a satisfactory record with very few complaints.

Research Tools / Tutorials Offered - No

There are some support forums that talked about other subjects dealing with starting an online business, but we could find nothing to help us decide which products to sell or where to sell them. There are some links to articles written by 3rd parties that were interesting, but still not extremely instructive on helping us know what product were good to sell.

Instant Access - No

The site says that applications for new accounts are processed within two business days, but it took us nearly three weeks to get a login for the service. Most likely our experience was an exception to the normal account processing time; nevertheless, two days still isn’t instant access.

Integrated eCommerce Website - Yes

At the time this review was written, Dropship Direct offered two different eCommerce packages:

Dropship Approach Storefront - $1,497.00 + $9.95/month
eCopeia Storefront Solution - $2,497.00 + $9.95/month

The price for each solution was a little more than we wanted to pay for the purpose of this review (especially since our focus is on the dropshipping aspect and not the eCommerce store); however, the sample sites did have the appearance of a good solution (it better be for that price).

Accepts PayPal - No

PayPal is not accepted for product orders.

Public Opinion

It was harder to find as much buzz about Dropship Direct as some of the other dropshippers, but the little we could find was pretty positive.

It is very obvious that Dropship Direct takes public opinion seriously. Wherever we found comments about them, there were also posts from the company or one of its employees; however, it was interesting to see that in one post regarding website design, all of the links posted by the employee to examples of great sites they’d designed for their customers ended up being sites that were no longer active. If they were so great, how come they didn’t last?

They didn’t seem to have any devotees other than the employees, but admittedly, successful sellers are much less likely to post about their sources than disgruntled ones.

In Business Since - 2003

The copyrighted logo at the bottom of every Dropship Direct page says 2003-2005.

Disclaimer: To the best of our knowledge, this information is deemed acurate as of 10/5/2006. 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.

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"I wish I had read this before… you are providing an excellent service. Keep up the good work!"
-Dare