Business Models
Dropshipping
Also Known As Drop Shipping
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Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment model in which the seller markets products and accepts customer orders without holding inventory, transferring each order to a manufacturer, wholesaler or fulfillment house that ships the product directly to the customer.
Facts
Core MechanismThe retailer accepts a customer order and payment, then forwards it to a third-party supplier who ships the product directly to the customer, so the retailer never holds physical inventory or handles fulfillment. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Amazon found early success applying the drop shipping model to book sales, listing over a million titles while physically stocking about two thousand.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
In what year, or decade, did dropshipping emerge as a named retail practice distinct from ordinary mail-order drop-shipping arrangements?
The source article defines dropshipping and discusses its modern online-retail context, including early platform-era examples, but names no year or decade for when the practice began or when the term itself entered use.
What would resolve this A retail-history source giving a specific year for the first documented drop-shipping arrangement, or explicitly stating that mail-order drop-shipping has no single citable origin because it grew gradually out of ordinary wholesale distribution.
Business HistoryWikipedia, Drop Shipping
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