Drop-shipping: What should be done to protect the Consumer?
Image from Oberlo, A dropshipping website. When my mother retired from her teaching job in 2016, she requested her children to suggest to her some businesses that she could engage in. As a novice entrepreneur, my siblings and I were determined to steer her toward a low-risk, low-capital-intensive business idea. Incidentally, the talk in town at this time was about individuals, most of whom have full-time jobs, importing products from China for resale locally. As a family, we settled on a children’s clothing shop. These are popular and fast-moving items. In addition, we decided to ship the products through a third-party platform where you place and pay for your order, as opposed to traveling to China. The retailer, in this case, pays and passes the order on to suppliers: the wholesalers. The suppliers process the order and ship it to the customer, my mother, in this instance. This process is called drop-shipping, where the e-commerce platform owner receives the order and forwards i