Just wondering, as i am bored an curious because I’m in a position in life where i can get a job/cant travel to work. I remeber before I switched to lemmy and back when I used reddit, most people would promote their affiliate stuff or something, which really bothered me as it was quite common.
What legitimate ways are there to make money on the side from online without having a job? If you have questions, please leave a comment.
How unethical are you ok with being? Dropshipping is an easy way to make money with low effort but it’s a pretty shitty thing to do
I know people who have had good success with dropshipping but only within their hobby/interests niche. They freely admit that “This is the cheap chinese one but it gets the job done.” And word gets around that they are trustworthy and reliable.
I don’t have any problems with cheap chinese stuff, I have problems with the people who make storefronts that, when you order off of them, they go buy the thing from a cheap chinese site and put in your shipping address. They are relying on games SEO to direct people to them and make money by literally doing nothing.
Yeah thats what I meant about “within their niche” They try and buy the shit themselves for their hobby and have a storefront and only rep for products they reasonably stand behind.
Doing the “to the masses” type products dropshipping is usually a losing game because theres always someone more unscrupulous who will do more underhanded shit to be 10c per item cheaper.
What exactly is that a shitty thing to do? It’s simply running a business. It’s no different than going down to Walmart and purchasing anything.
Unless you have a sign saying “You’re paying me to buy this for you from alibaba”, I consider it very dishonest. Perfectly legal, but borderline scammy ethically imo.
This is the same thing your local department store does. It sells shit it buys in bulk, much of it manufactured in China.
Dropshipping gets scammy when you start implying you produce the stuff you’re selling IMO.
Your local department store has to have a physical location and stock, they’re physical goods in a physical location, adding value to you by way of letting not have to travel to a bunch of different people producing the things you need. Dropshippers literally just order something to your address for a marked up price. They are adding cost with literally no value to you.
Well a lot of these bulk sellers don’t sell B2C. I could start my own company to buy shit, or use a middle man.
Sellers in the EU also have to give their shit a 2 year warranty, including for dropshipped items. No such requirements for Aliexpress.
I guess I should have been more specific, I’m talking the places that literally just dropship from alibaba, aliexpress, etc. an actual middleman for manufacturer is fine to me. They’re actually doing something you can’t do yourself, you know, they’re actually providing a service. The ones I’m referring to are just setting up online “stores” hoping to grab people from SEO to make a profit doing actually nothing
Even with Alibaba and Aliexpress, there is some marginal value-add from a middle man. Like I said, in the EU, sellers are liable for 2 years of warranty for manufacturing defects.
But any dropshipper worth their salt has other sources for their shit too. Not necessarily direct from manufacturer, but companies that provide better prices than publicly available for B2C. I hear some of them are more or less invite-only. In any case, the Alis aren’t considered great dropshipping vendors at all, since goods can take very long to reach customers.
And then as a dropshipping business expands, you can have local stock for some items. Generally, a dropshipping business should fill a specific niche and not have a billion items on sale, but rather be curated. So if you’ve got like 4 or 5 alternatives in some specific product category and one or two clearly sell better than the rest, on a consistent basis, you can order those in bulk and ship to your customers faster. The downside here is that you have more work to do, but you’ll provide more value to your customers. And if your dropshipping business is honest, you can lead times visible on the website… And customers will love seeing “tomorrow” instead of “14-21 days”. Brings in more customers!
What do you think just about every person does on apps like Amazon walmart.com etc. Almost all of them are drop shippers or people other than direct manufacturers. Almost every single store you purchase from almost every single website you go to is a form of a drop shipper. If you don’t know this and you don’t understand how retail works there’s always a manufacturer then there is a warehousing then there is somebody that purchases it and then there is the end store that you purchase from whether it’s retail brick and mortar or it’s online. If you think you’re buying directly from the manufacturer and you’re buying from other places other than the manufacturer’s website you’re almost guaranteed to be purchasing from some sort of type of drop shipper.
I don’t want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.