Magic 8 Ball
What Does 2009 Hold?
I’ve been in the UK dropship industry since 2004, it has changed quite a bit during the last 5 years. There are some really good dropship companies around at the moment so now is a much better time to be dropshipping than in 2004. The number of dropship companies may be small but the quality is high, excluding a few companies of course!

The End of 2008
Things did feel like they had gone a bit cold towards the end of 2008. Despite online sales still rising which I would expect to encourage sellers. The general activity from sellers does seem to have slowed – on this website, DropshipHelp.co.uk, other forums and from what I hear from dropship companies.

Hopefully the Christmas 2008 period was a good one for you and other sellers. This should help the dropship industry keep growing. Remember to reinvest your Christmas profits!

Dropshipping in 2009?
I hope existing strong dropship companies continue to grow and bring in more products. I also hope the companies providing poor services falter and disappear! Whether these will happen relies on sellers continuing to sell and avoiding the poor companies.

Number Of Sellers
To be honest I’m not overly bothered about the volume of sellers in the dropship industry, it is the quality that matters. There IS a problem with those people who just come in and sell products for literally a few pennies profit on eBay. They forever undercut other sellers and never even build themselves up a business in the process. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

Long-term I want to see people setting up genuine businesses selling from their own ecommerce website. With a real customer base and operating properly. This will make the dropship industry stronger as a whole encouraging dropship companies to grow themselves, benefitting all of us!

Credit Crunch
No doubt the global economic situation will effect the dropship industry. Significantly more people are wary of setting up their own business at the moment. And even those already established will probably see growth slower than they would like.

My Predictions For 2009
I believe that a lot of the types of sellers I mentioned above (constantly undercutting, not running a real business) will go away because they will give up and realise what they were doing was just pathetic and pointless in the first place. I also think those established will start moving onto their own ecommerce websites and building them up. These are both very positive points.

However, I don’t see many new dropship companies opening up (we will get a few, but not many), and I can’t see any existing ones going for explosive growth.

I hope my thoughts in this blog post haven’t put you off dropshipping in 2009. It is still a great way to run a business – and remember if you can survive and build up a business in a recession, then it will flourish when we go back into an economic boom!

Image credit: mulad