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But before going into why it is a horrible idea to dropship used products, let us see understand what the used products are. Let us take Amazon, for example.
If we go to google and search Amazon warehouse, this page will come up:
Amazon warehouse is a way that Amazon uses to sell used products that buyers returned.
On the Amazon warehouse section, you will find a range of used products available from different sellers, like this product, for example:
As you can see, the difference between used product prices and regular prices looks promising. It is what makes some sellers move to sell these types of products.
And from what we saw at AutoDS, most of the dropshippers succeed at making some sales in the first month or two, but then negative consequences start to come up.
These products were sold originally on Amazon as new. And when buyers return the products, Amazon sends them to its warehouses.
In these warehouses, Amazon robots check these products and decide their conditions.
In some cases, the sellers lie about the actual state of the products. And the robots may sometimes perform errors due to glitches, which leads to inaccuracy in the product conditions that appear on Amazon.
In addition to that, our perceptions and expectations of the terms “Used”, “Used – Very Good”, “Used – Like New.” are different.
Some buyers are fine with the product as long is it does its job. Still, some others won’t tolerate a scratch on the product surface or minor damages. These things create issues between buyers and sellers, which eventually leads to major negative consequences on sellers’ accounts.
When you are selling used products on eBay, you can get flagged. Which will lead to traffic reduction, and the worst-case scenarios your account will get suspended.
All of this is because of the high return rates and cases opened by buyers due to the different expectations that don’t meet the reality of the condition of the product.
Also, when you are dropshipping used products, you are not sure of their actual conditions. Also what you write on the product description isn’t always precise. Which opens the door for returns, and ‘Item Not as Described’ cases.
When eBay detects the high rates of claims and returns, it starts taking its precautions, and these include limits on accounts and restrictions like the MC011 restriction.
And as the AutoDS team, we once thought about releasing a feature that helps find used products. As of every feature that we release, we tried this feature on some of our accounts, and the results were catastrophic, which stopped us from releasing the feature. We saw that it would only hurt our AutoDS members, who are our priority.
By now, you know exactly why you shouldn’t follow this strategy of selling used products. So you can keep your stores safe for the long term. On another note, there are many more dropshipping tricks and tips we should follow to attain business success. So, check out these articles to discover winning strategies:
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