Droptec – The UK’s #1 Solution for Dropshipping?

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will already know that I am not a huge fan of the whole dropshipping business model (you can read my thoughts on it here if you haven’t already – Dropshipping – The Ideal Business Model?).

But despite its drawbacks, I still get COUNTLESS messages every week about dropshipping, mainly from people looking for that perfect dropshipping company.

And really that’s understandable; the whole idea of dropshipping is so tempting – particularly for newbie sellers and while it is NOT anywhere near as easy as people think, it can sometimes be profitable – IF you work directly with a manufacturer or find a terrific dropshipping company.

So with that in mind, today I want to review one company in particular as I’ve had a few questions come in asking me about them.

The company is called Droptec.net and they are an all-in-one stock management and dropshipping company.

Okay, so first things first, let’s find out exactly what Droptec is and what they do as from their site, droptec.net, it’s all a bit unclear.

Stock Manager

Droptec is not an actual supplier and doesn’t seem to hold any stock themselves. They only supply Inventory Software and Data Feeds and all orders have to go through the actual supplier.

So how it works is that you pay a one-off license fee to use the stock manager and then a monthly subscription based on how many suppliers you’re using within the software.

It’s not very easy to find on their site, but from contacting them I found the cost is £147 initially and then £5 per supplier per month after that BUT the first 12 months’ subscription is included in the initial £147 fee.

Basically that means – £149 for year 1 and then £60 per year per supplier after that for their Software Only package.

And here’s what features you get with the stock manager:

• Product Import – add thousands of new products with all details such as pricing, images etc. in just a few clicks.
• Real-Time Price Adjustments.
• Automatic Inventory Synchronisation.
• Support Multiple Suppliers.
• One Click Back Up.
• 10 Supported Shopping Carts.

While that all sounds good – really they are all features you’d expect from such a service; things like importing products to your site in bulk, supporting multiple suppliers and shopping carts, and real-time inventory synchronisation are all pretty much mandatory if you want to create an online store selling products via dropshipping.

So what else do they offer? What about their suppliers and pricing? After all, the whole idea is a non-starter if their pricing isn’t competitive!

Pricing and Supplier Comparison

As of this point, Droptec currently have 8 different suppliers, one from each of the following categories:

• Adult Toys
• Cuff Links / Wedding
• Mixed Industries
• Home Electrical
• Giftware
• Fancy Dress
• Electrical
• Electrical (China)
• Fashion Bags and Scarves

Looking over their supplier list, I am immediately quite worried as they use the exact same description for 4 of their 9 suppliers!

Clearly it’s meant for the mixed supplier (no. 3) but for some reason it’s also used for the electrical supplier (no. 7), the giftware supplier (no. 5) and the adult toys supplier (no. 1)!

I’m not too sure what’s going on there but I’ll ignore it for the moment and delve into one of the categories so we can take a look at what sort of profit margins are achievable.

I’ve chosen the Cufflinks/Wedding supplier for this as they describe this dropshipper as offering “over 3000 cuff links that have 100% markup”.

Let’s take a look!

Unfortunately the confusion doesn’t end there though – as the first page of products from the cufflinks and wedding supplier is nearly completely full of smoking pipes. And to add to that – they’re all for sets of 12 or 24…not exactly the usual dropshipping quantity.

I’ll have to just assume that the suppliers are all pretty much a mix of products rather than specific niches and persevere with my research.

I’ve selected cufflinks from the category menu on the left and found this product:

So £0.82 with an RRP of £1.50, which is actually fairly accurate as I found the exact same product on eBay, selling for £1.50 including shipping:

Initially this seems really good and gives a profit margin of about 45% (before fees)!

But digging a little deeper shows that this isn’t the case at all, as one hugely important cost hasn’t been mentioned…SHIPPING!

Doing some more research, I finally find it on the supplier profile page, which shows that there is a shipping cost charged – £3.50+VAT per order.

And while that is fairly reasonable for larger orders, it of course also means that selling single cufflinks is completely out of the question!

Next let’s check one or two products from the mixed supplier; and for this comparison I randomly choose this product – a Bestway Inflatable Pool:

It’s advertised with a dropship price of £14.98 so let’s see how that compares to eBay.

From a quick search it seems the cheapest on eBay is at about £20 + shipping (£5).

According to the supplier profile page on Droptec, the mixed supplier charges shipping based on weight, with it costing between £3.18 and £4.97 for the RM tracked option. I’m going to assume £4.97 for this as it’s a large item.

That means a total cost to you of £14.98 + £4.97 = £19.95 which would give you about £1 or so of profit selling at £25 including shipping.

So while that’s not terrible (usually with dropshipping I expect to see a loss on eBay), it’s still only a 4% gross margin…

Let’s look at one final product from this mixed supplier as it seems like there might be some more potential here.

This time, to give Droptec the best chance possible, I’ve sorted the products from the mixed industry supplier by profit level. Obviously the claimed profit potential is always wildly inaccurate, but testing the product which they say will give the most profit seems like a good way to judge their overall product line.

Alright, so sorted by profit, this is the no.1 product from the mixed supplier:

A Roadster Pet Stroller by Pet Gear, with a dropship price of £98.98 + shipping.

As the listing prices vary quite a bit for this item on eBay, I’m only going to look at sold listings to give the most accurate answer possible.

And here’s what I got:

So as you can see, there have actually been a number of sales, ranging from just over £100 to £175+.

Ignoring the auction format listings, which you wouldn’t use when dropshipping, then the average sale price is at about £155+ including shipping.

If we assume that it costs £4.97 to post this from the supplier, then that leaves you with about £30 of profit from each sale, which is excellent!

As to be expected with such a huge variation of products, the profit level differs a lot depending on the supplier and category.

Final Thoughts/Conclusion

Overall, my conclusion is that I don’t really see a lot that makes me want to give Droptec the thumbs up and to recommend it to others.

There seems to be a number of small bugs with their own site and it just gives off a very new and unpolished feel in general. They also describe themselves as the “The UK’s #1 Dropshipping Solution” which I found hard to believe, considering I’d never heard of them before until very recently.

And after a little research, I found out that they’ve only actually launched very recently.

In terms of the suppliers they use, there are only 8 and I imagine it would be very easy to find them for yourself (I did in about 5 minutes on Google).

That just leaves the software, which is really their main selling focus anyway.

In conclusion to all those who have emailed me asking about Droptec, unfortunately I haven’t seen anything that makes me change my stance towards dropshipping as a whole.

While I believe it can work, that’s only in specific niches or if you can create an individual agreement with manufacturers who you’ve worked with and get them to ship directly to your customers for you.

If only it was so easy as signing up to a dropshipper and listing thousands upon thousands of products in every category!

Sorry to disappoint, but that’s just not the way to make money selling on eBay. Droptec and dropshipping in general may be more suitable for Online Shop owners where you have 100% control on pricing, delivery times, customer support but on eBay, I really think it’s too risky as just one mistake can get your TRS badge removed or account banned in worst case scenario.

Until next time!

All the best,
Andrew