[j-c-hewitt]

This is not actually mainstream dropshipping. Not all dropshipping is from China or international in general because of the unpredictability and latency. It makes more sense to dropship from stable and predictable suppliers for products that you don't have to spend a lot to create demand for. This article could have been written in 2005 and I think a lot of the reason why many of the people mentioned are expats selling to international markets is because ad rates in the US are generally too high to support this kind of business model in the US currently in 2020.

In the US the dropshippers I work with and am very familiar with use mainstream sources with predictable shipping times as do I when I dropship a selection of items very occasionally. The course sellers would generally not be selling courses if they could be scaling their business instead. Dropshipping is not generally a high margin business whereas course selling is. A scaled dropshipping business can make a lot of money but it is not a laid back type of operation really -- it's labor intensive and generally requires some in house automation to make sure that your offers for products match the offers you have from your suppliers.

GRQ dropshipping seems exciting and sexy because you never have to take possession of the inventory and you don't need to put a lot of cash up front if you get paid fast enough. Normal dropshipping is as boring as a wrench or a hammer. Also this article sort of conflates private label dropshipping with dropshipping more generally. They are really quite different things. The typical private labeler takes possession of products here in the US and probably does not dropship the bulk of their stuff just because customer expectations are pretty high for delivery speed and predictability. If you are sourcing from AliExpress or what have you, it's just a lot easier to suck up the unpredictability as the seller and then to sell it to the final buyer with more predictable fulfillment without dropshipping.

[RandallBrown]

Also, dropshipping is something that many brands offer to retailers.

Like if you buy a Patagonia jacket from Nordstrom, it might be sent directly from a Patagonia warehouse instead of a Nordstrom warehouse.

[theturtletalks]

Amazon did this for years. Brand products were listed on Amazon and pushed directly into the brands operations system when sales came through.