dropshipping

Dropshipping is supplier-direct fulfillment: you sell the product, but you never hold or ship it. When an order comes in you forward it to the supplier, they ship it straight to your customer, and you keep the spread. Ownership is not the point (you often do take title to the goods, and you are the merchant of record either way); the point is that no unit ever passes through your hands. No warehouse, no pallets, no cash tied up in stock. The AliExpress-to-Shopify version made it famous; print-on-demand (Printful, Printify) is the same mechanic with your artwork on top.

Reach for it to test demand before committing money to inventory, to extend a catalog with long-tail items you would never stock, or to launch a brand with a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. The technical shape is simple: supplier feed in, order routing out, tracking numbers back.

Gotcha: you outsource the shipping but you keep every complaint. Three-week delivery, a supplier who quietly goes out of stock, packaging with someone else's invoice inside, and margins thin enough that one return erases three sales. Multi-supplier orders split into separate parcels and confuse people. Anything you can dropship, ten other stores can dropship too, so the moat is your brand and your ad creative, never the product.