The Amazon Arbitrage Question

Sundays are quiet here, which mostly means the questions that come in are the odd, slightly delightful ones that don't get asked on a busy Tuesday.

Today's favorite: a dropshipping client asked, only half-joking, whether he should just start buying stock of his own bestselling product from Amazon and shipping it out of a US warehouse himself, because he'd noticed it selling there for less than what it costs him through us. It's a fair question, and one we get in different forms more than you'd think — at a certain order volume, people start doing the math on every part of the chain. We had to explain, gently, that overseas warehouse logistics don't work quite that simply on our end, and that blending sourcing channels that way usually causes more headaches than it saves. He took it well. I don't think we've heard the last of that idea, though.

On the new-client front, we picked up someone who told us flat out that we were his top choice after going through a long list of fulfillment agents — but that our pricing was higher than a few of the other quotes he'd gotten. That's always an interesting opening message. He was upfront that the relationship and the way we work with people mattered more to him long-term than shaving a few percent off day one, which is exactly the kind of client you want to hear that from. We spent the afternoon working out where we could actually move on price without cutting corners anywhere that would come back to bite either of us.

Otherwise, a fair bit of today was spent untangling a fabric mix-up from earlier in the week — a labeling error on our supplier's end had a client convinced we'd swapped materials on her sample, when really someone had just mislabeled two rolls of fabric that looked similar. Sundays are for cleaning that kind of thing up quietly before the new week starts.