OnBuy dropshipping

Dropshipping on OnBuy means listing a product you do not hold, buying it from
your supplier when the order comes in, and having it sent to the customer. On a
marketplace with fewer sellers per listing than Amazon, it is a reasonable way
to test what sells before committing money to stock.

It is also the fastest way to get your account restricted if you treat "I can
buy this somewhere" as the same thing as "I can supply this reliably".

Is dropshipping allowed on OnBuy?

Yes, provided you are the seller of record and you meet the dispatch times you
advertised. OnBuy cares about the customer experience, not your warehouse. What
causes suspensions is the consequence of dropshipping done carelessly: late
dispatch, missing tracking, cancelled orders because the supplier ran out, and
parcels arriving branded by somebody else.

Read OnBuy's seller terms yourself rather than taking a tool vendor's word for
it, including ours. They change.

What actually goes wrong

Three things, in order of how often they end a seller's account:

1. Selling stock that is not there. Your supplier sells out, your listing does not, and you cancel on the customer. Cancellations are the metric that gets accounts restricted fastest.
2. Dispatch times you cannot hit. A supplier's next-day is not your next-day once you add the hours before you notice the order.
3. Margin that quietly disappears. You set a price against a supplier price from six weeks ago. The supplier has raised it twice since.

All three are tracking problems rather than sourcing problems, which is why
they are worth automating rather than watching.

How much does it cost to sell on OnBuy?

OnBuy charges a category commission on each sale plus a monthly seller
subscription. Commission varies by category, so the same £20 sale nets
differently depending on what it was.

That matters for dropshipping more than for other models, because your margin
is thin by definition. If you price from your current selling price rather than
from supplier cost plus commission plus VAT plus postage, you can win every
Buy Box and still lose money on the order.

Where a repricer fits

Two jobs, and only one of them is the obvious one.

The obvious one: competing. Prices on a shared listing move constantly, and a
catalogue of any size cannot be checked by hand often enough to keep up.

The one that matters more for dropshipping: not competing below your cost.
Your floor should be built from what the item costs you today, not from what it
cost when you listed it. If you source from Amazon, we can keep that floor tied
to Amazon's live price automatically - see
Amazon to OnBuy. Everyone else can upload costs by CSV or
sync them from Shopify.

Is dropshipping on OnBuy worth it?

It is worth it if you have a supplier advantage - trade pricing, an account
somewhere with real margin, or a category you know well enough to spot
mispricing. It is not worth it if your plan is to list popular products at a
small markup and hope, because that is a race to the bottom against sellers who
hold stock and have lower costs than you.

Start with a small number of products you can actually watch, get the floors
right, and add more once the maths holds.