How Drop Shipping Ruins Your Local Economy

avatar

Hey Jessintrepreneurs

The internet and eCommerce have, without a doubt, changed the way we conduct business and brought with it a host of opportunities. Creating your eCommerce store is an excellent adventure. I would highly recommend people persue. If you have your brick and mortar business and would like to get a few more sales online or if you want to keep costs low save on rent and have an online-only business.

If you're passionate about it, I'm sure you won't mind your products taking over your garage or lounge and shipping your orders from your home or if you are lucky enough to get affordable storage and shipping services in your area that can work well too.

Using eCommerce effectively

What I like to see from eCommerce stores are companies producing goods locally this could be anything from sauces and condiments to garments and shoes. What I want to see is people building sustainable businesses, creating jobs, securing local resources and building wealth from within their immediate area and using the internet to gain a larger footprint.

The whole point of these online stores was to move income quicker and more effectively to regions where it may not have got their otherwise.

Image source: - feedough.com

Why eCommerce when you can be an "eMiddleman."

Humans are inherently lazy and will always look for the quickest way to turn a profit. As eCommerce giants came into play, a few people figured out that they could shift traffic towards themselves take orders on behalf of others and turn a profit.

We've seen affiliate marketing become a significant revenue driver for online entrepreneurs, but that had its limitations since it was mostly digital goods or ticketing. Still, then the concept of Dropshipping and FBA came into play, and these online entrepreneurs took to it like wildfire.

Dropshipping and FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)

Dropshipping is an online business model based on an order fulfilment strategy where the merchant lists products on his website, markets it and takes the orders under his brand but doesn’t keep any stock. The business is only a front, and a third party does all the actual shipping and fulfilment.

The growth of Amazon, Alibaba and AliExpress have given these Dropshippers with the help of Shopify and WooCommerce the ability to create these skeleton stores online, attract customers and sell products with never even knowing a thing about the condition of the product or where it comes from or to whom it is going.

All these people are interested in is monetising the traffic they get and trying to skim off as much off the top of the sale as possible. They never build a loyal customer base; they never develop a relationship with their clientele, they have no control or vested interest in quality control or delivering a good product or service it's all about making money.

The dropshipping dilemma

The dropshipping dilemma also involves a whole lot of logistics as your shipping product from overseas or other regions and then individually shipping them back and hoping for a low return rate. Yes you expect people to return products in this business model but hope to make a profit overall or hope people feel its too much of a waste to return the item. I hate to sound like a Greta, but all this is bad for the environment and highly ineffective, but they do not realise it because the bill is subsidised by the wholesalers they buy from and shipping these products.

You're sending your local currency overseas then bringing in goods to sell at a profit and then continue sending money out of the country if it's successful. Yes, you may make it big, but all that money leaving your country could have been used to build a viable business in your local community. A company you can take pride in and profits from that is the real goal.

But people are getting rich from it

Well people also get rich from hacking dolphins and whales to death, and clubbing baby seals doesn't mean its good for the world, right? Money knows no morals and its up to us as a people to build sustainable businesses and reward those who do so over intermediaries, rent-seekers and price schemers.

If we are to build economies that work, we need to start supporting local businesses, shopping local, producing local and building communities with the help of the internet.

Let's connect

If you liked this post sprinkle it with an upvote or resteem and if you don't already, consider following me @chekohler
follow me


Buy & sell STEEMDonate LikeCoin For FreeEarn Interest On Crypto
blocktrades.jpgLikecoincryptocom.jpg


0
0
0.000
9 comments
avatar

Read. LIKED.
Back to to much work before christmas...
😀

0
0
0.000
avatar

Aren’t we all slaves to Santa! We work hard all year just to spend all of it at the end

0
0
0.000
avatar

Thats true.... This year I have already got my gift. Me and my wife decided to pay for "cleaning service of the house" once. So no gifts for me at christmas eve.
Do you know that gouverment pay 50% of the fee for thoose services. It is crazy....
So if the price is 400 USD we pay 200 usd.
They made so to "get rid of the black market". Thats true - but gouverment pay a lot - to get rid of a problem. Its feels like "I pay you so you dont do bad things"

0
0
0.000
avatar

I don't know if I'm just conditioned to never trust the government, perhaps because ours is so shockingly bad but even with all your Swedish Government benefits I'm not sold on it, I want to know how I'm being screwed over.

That's a lot of money for a cleaning service here you can get someone to clean your house for like $3 an hour and tell them to do whatever you want. It's by no means a livable wage but we have such a job crisis here people will take it on gladly

0
0
0.000
avatar

Hi, @chekohler!

You just got a 4.9% upvote from SteemPlus!
To get higher upvotes, earn more SteemPlus Points (SPP). On your Steemit wallet, check your SPP balance and click on "How to earn SPP?" to find out all the ways to earn.
If you're not using SteemPlus yet, please check our last posts in here to see the many ways in which SteemPlus can improve your Steem experience on Steemit and Busy.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Great thoughts and arguments to go local @chekohler, it really is important to support the local community, and eCommerce could help with that if we just got a bit less lazy, keep up your awesome work.


This is Awesome Content, and it has been manually curated with an upvote of 60% from @thisisawesome and it will be included in our Awesome Daily report in category Awesome CTP Curation for more visibility.

The goal of this project is to "highlight Awesome Content, and growing the Steem ecosystem by rewarding it".

0
0
0.000
avatar

Indeed we've gotten complacent and too focussed on the self on short term profits over the improvement of the group. Supporting your local vendor does far more for the economy than giving your money to large retailers, monopolies and franchises

Thank you so much for the support

0
0
0.000
avatar

Hi @chekohler!

Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.191 which ranks you at #3200 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.

In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 88 contributions, your post is ranked at #63.

Evaluation of your UA score:
  • Some people are already following you, keep going!
  • You have already convinced some users to vote for your post, keep trying!
  • Try to work on user engagement: the more people that interact with you via the comments, the higher your UA score!

Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server

0
0
0.000