Recently, there was a post on the Merch by Amazon subreddit about someone’s designs being stolen. The designs were appearing on some generic t-shirt selling website, and the original poster was understandably upset. Their precious designs were being jacked!
Only, the shirts they saw stolen weren’t. In fact, they weren’t even a victim in the slightest.
What was going on was someone was importing their listings from Amazon, listing them on their website at a slightly higher price, and drop shipping them from Amazon. The drop shipper is selling the shirt for $20, buying it for $15, and shipping it directly to “their” customer. The “thief” is paid from the retail arbitrage, and the original uploader gets’s their royalty.
Ultimately, if anyone gets hurt by this, it’s the customer who didn’t do their due diligence.
Why you shouldn’t be upset by this
The drop shipper is primarily driving traffic to your shirts for you, for free. Every time someone places an order from them, your listings get a sale. If they’re getting a lot of sales at once, you could potentially rise through the ranks and get organic sales.
In fact, this could be an excellent way to get sales. Reach out to drop shippers or other shirt selling websites with your high selling designs, explain to them the volume they’re doing every month, and how they could list it for more and take the difference in price. Low effort, low risk, high potential for both parties involved.
Or you can continue frumping around upset that someone’s doing something “scummy” by doing what nearly every business does anyways. Your product always costs more than what you pay for it. Congrats, you just moved up from mom & pop shop to wholesaler, so to speak.
Let someone else sell for you.
Big dawgs gotta understand