Have you ever clicked on an ad and ended up at a website you’d never heard of? Did the website look well put together, with multiple products listed and quality photos and descriptions?
It’s possible you clicked on a drop-shipping site. Drop-shipping site creators offer you products and fulfill your order without ever touching or stocking the products they ship.
After you click “buy” on their site, they don’t grab the product from their warehouse, put it in a box and send it to your house. They order it off another site and sometimes charge you a lot extra for a process you didn’t even know about.
Shopify.com, a site that helps drop-shippers get started, defines the process as “a retail fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock.”
And drop-shipping is legal. While most consumers are only beginning to learn of them, the websites aren’t mislabeling themselves.
“We have not really addressed the either legal or ethical considerations of creating advertising for or about drop shippers or drop shipping,” Vincent said.
VERIFY found a self-professed drop-shipping site and searched for some products. One of the items, a holiday-themed cookie rolling pin, cost $30 on their site.
But we found the same rolling pin on Amazon.com and Ebay for less than $10.
While the drop-shipping site didn't do anything wrong and would deliver the real product to you, they’d also charge you roughly $20 extra in the process.
So what can you do about it? Downloading price comparison apps and ad-blockers can help.
Honey and PriceScout are two of the most popular apps that you can automatically install on your browser. When you search for a new product, the apps will automatically search other sites for cheaper prices.
When it comes to blocking ads, AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are two of the most popular add-ons. They can be configured to block ads that appear on websites. If you add one of these blockers to your browser, it’s worth setting up preferences to allow ads on some sites you want to support. Many outlets make their money off advertisements, and you don’t want to block them on sites you want to support.
