Any place that can store inventory for you?

I've been dropshipping for several years now as a small-time seller on ebay.
I've had good success with the merchant site I use but the biggest problem I come across
is when items go out of stock.

I was wondering if there is a place that can store inventory for you so that when items go out of stock in the merchant store, I'd still have a few in my holding warehouse that I could overprice to make bigger margins and have them ship it out for me.

Whenever items go out of stock, if you check on Amazon, the price triples or more!

I think Printful have such a warehousing service

oatmeal said:

I've been dropshipping for several years now as a small-time seller on ebay.
I've had good success with the merchant site I use but the biggest problem I come across
is when items go out of stock.

I was wondering if there is a place that can store inventory for you so that when items go out of stock in the merchant store, I'd still have a few in my holding warehouse that I could overprice to make bigger margins and have them ship it out for me.

Whenever items go out of stock, if you check on Amazon, the price triples or more!

Click to expand...

Yes, there are many places. Just google and you will find them.

The reason sellers on Amazon are 3x their prices is to keep the ranking. If they go completely out of stuck Amazon will push their rankings to another site.

nakamura said:

Yes, there are many places. Just google and you will find them.

The reason sellers on Amazon are 3x their prices is to keep the ranking. If they go completely out of stuck Amazon will push their rankings to another site.

Click to expand...

Wow really? I didn't know that. I always thought they were just trying to overprice it because they know it's out of stock everywhere else and trying to take advantage of the whole "high demand low supply" situation. I've noticed that people would be willing to overpay if they knew it was out of stock worldwide or discontinued product but you still had a few left and they'd want to scoop them all up.

I guess it makes sense to deter Amazon sellers from having out of stock items, they would overprice it to make sure people won't buy it for regular price, and still have stock, and if they do sell it, to make sure they triple their profit for the trouble of selling out.

May I ask why you're not also selling it on Amazon if it's such a sought after product that goes out of stock everywhere anyways?

oatmeal said:

Wow really? I didn't know that. I always thought they were just trying to overprice it because they know it's out of stock everywhere else and trying to take advantage of the whole "high demand low supply" situation. I've noticed that people would be willing to overpay if they knew it was out of stock worldwide or discontinued product but you still had a few left and they'd want to scoop them all up.

I guess it makes sense to deter Amazon sellers from having out of stock items, they would overprice it to make sure people won't buy it for regular price, and still have stock, and if they do sell it, to make sure they triple their profit for the trouble of selling out.

Click to expand...

Mostly they increase the item to a price, which nobody would buy the item for in order to get no sale. Having no inventory anymore can be a real disaster in terms of product ranking. Some other seller will use this moment/sales to increase his own ranking. Sometimes the seller without inventory gets pushed to page 3 for some time. Some will come back to page 1 after they get inventory, but others had some trouble in the past. Therefore its the easiest to temporary increase the price until getting inventory, after that set the price back to normal.

Especially new seller are doing this, because they don't know the exact demand/sales in the beginning...and some get a problem with cashflow (you have to buy inventory a few weeks/months earlier than you actually receive the payouts) thats how they run low on inventory quickly.