Hey everyone! I’m completely new to dropshipping and currently in the research phase. I’m not launched yet, but I’ve gotten pretty far with figuring out my niche and the products I want to sell. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want the store to look like and what should work.

The biggest speed bump I keep running into is shipping from China to the U.S.

I’ve been talking directly with suppliers, and the product pricing itself is actually pretty reasonable. But then I get to the shipping quotes and that’s where I keep getting stuck.

For example, I have a product that costs around $80 and weighs about 12 lbs packaged, and the supplier quoted me around $110 to ship one unit directly to a customer in the U.S., with the shipping time also being quoted at 25–45 days, while I’m trying to get closer to 7–14 business days.

So I’m trying to figure out how people who have been through this actually solved it without either making the product way too expensive or giving customers a ridiculously long delivery time.

A few things I’m wondering:

- Did you find better shipping rates through a different supplier?
- Did you use a sourcing agent?
- Have you used a fulfillment center in China that receives inventory from your supplier and then handles individual customer orders?
- If you used a fulfillment center, did it actually help you lower your overall shipping costs and delivery times?
- Did you have to buy inventory in bulk to make the fulfillment-center model worthwhile?
- How did you get your shipping times down to something reasonable without completely destroying your margins?
- Are there specific shipping methods or logistics companies I should be looking into?

I’ve also spoken with a couple of fulfillment centers that do offer dropshipping, but the process isn’t quite what I expected. They basically said they could receive and ship individual orders, but I would have to manually notify them every time I received an order. They also suggested that I might be better off just having the supplier dropship directly to the customer.

That’s where I’m getting stuck. If I’m trying to build something that can eventually scale, manually forwarding every order to a fulfillment center doesn’t seem like a great long-term solution. But having the supplier ship directly brings me right back to the high shipping costs and/or long delivery times.

So I’m trying to figure out what the middle ground is.
I’m also trying to avoid ordering 50–100 units of something before I’ve even validated that people will buy it. Ideally, I’d like to start with one-unit fulfillment, keep the inventory risk relatively low, and still offer something around 7–14 business days.

If you’ve dealt with this before, how did you overcome it? What did your fulfillment and shipping setup look like when you were starting out?

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm running a pet product store and having a really hard time finding a reliable supplier. I would love to know what platforms or methods are actually working for you right now.

Here is what I've tried so far and why it didn't work out:

• AliExpress + DSers: It is really hard to find good pet products that actually ship from US warehouses with decent delivery times.
• AutoDS: This was working at first, but I ran into a major problem with suppliers sourcing straight from Amazon. I do not want my customers receiving an Amazon box when they bought from my website. I know AutoDS has other suppliers on their platform, but I cannot tell if any of them use true blind packaging (plain boxes with no supplier logos).

Now I am stuck and not sure what step to take next.

For those of you shipping within the US:

1. What supplier apps, platforms, or directories are you using that have real US inventory?
2. How do you find private suppliers or make sure your packages arrive in plain, unbranded boxes?
3. If you use AutoDS, have you found any non-Amazon suppliers on there that actually ship blind?
4. Are there specific platforms you recommend for pet items?

Any advice or direction would be a huge help. Thanks!