More About Drop Shippers

One of my customers sent me the URL for a website that drop shipped designer handbags. Now it's fair to say that whatever is the newest scam someone is running on the internet, I don't know about. I don't do research of this type on the internet anymore and the minute you start doing offline research, you will be better off too.

Anyhow, there was this site with all these bags, Gucci, Fendi, Prada, Vuitton whatever. Fake as I don't know what. You want to know how I know it was fake, there are so many clues. One, all these websites have the same bags. There's not that much of a supply of authentic designer bags to go around. But anyhow, the pictures are unusually professional for a company of such image. You see a crappy looking, do it yourself with Front Page website with professional slick photographs and you know they stole them. And lots of people that steal pictures do so because they don't have the stock. This isn't always the case, but is more so the case with a "wholesaler" than with a retailer. And then the company name is some huge company with a huge warehouse but when you look up the domain, it's registered to some guy in an apartment in the middle of nowhere.

Anyhow, this site had these bags and they had some drop ship program with a drop ship fee and a ridiculously high drop ship price. I mean it started at 10% off their retail price and was volume driven with a sliding scale.

No contact information anywhere on the website. Now, you may say, but clothingbroker, you don't have contact information on your website either. Yes, but I am only selling a guide that costs a fraction of what you pay for these bags. And when I did have the number up, I'd get call after call from someone wanting free consulting and advice, wanting me to give up the info of where they could get this or that, these people were in the market for trailers of merchandise (or so they said) but will always say they don't have enough money for the guide. Uh, you can speak to the dial tone.

Anyhow, any reputable company will give you some kind of contact information. Now some buyers work from their homes and they aren't going to give you their home address because, well, it's a stupid thing to do. But when a company says they have a "warehouse" yet will give no address or telephone number, you know they are lying.

Let me repeat this:
When a company says they have a "warehouse" yet will give no address or telephone number, you know they are lying.

I had this one lady, she was so smug because she just knew she had a drop shipper sending out authentic bags and she wanted to prove me wrong. Thing was, she never had a bag sent to her. See, just because someone hasn't made a ruckus doesn't mean the bags are not counterfeit. If you take a bag into a boutique to have it authenticated, and it is fake, they will confiscate it. It's illegal merchandise. So many people who have suspect bags will never have them authenticated because they feel a fake Fendi is better than no Fendi at all, especially when they paid a couple hundred for it. They don't want to be embarrassed.

A friend of mine once got a Fendi Baguette from the Salvation Army. It was so unlikely that it was real. I mean, come on, this was a Salvation Army in the middle of nothing and nothing in farmtown, California. But she didn't want to run the risk, she never had it authenticated.

Anyhow, the point is you could have a seller who's moving a lot of counterfeit bags and no one complains. Even on eBay, you see sellers selling the fakest crap on earth, yet they will have very few negative feedback comments.

Anyhow, getting back to the point, there was no way this company was legit. Oh pay us with PayPal and stuff like that so you can't chargeback unless you want your account locked, we'd never accept real credit cards through a real merchant account because we are not a legitimate business and cannot get one.

Drop shipping is not easy. When you can't even pinpoint your supplier's real location, the last thing you want to do is put your behind on the line for their merchandise. Unless you are out to make a quick buck, and many of you are. So out to make a quick buck and you do not care. Well, get this, you are risking your freedom because people go to jail for selling counterfeit merchandise and they pay fines (heavy fines because it's part of that whole racketeering act, I can't remember the name). So if that's what you want to do to make a quick buck, it's your business.