Dropshipping Furniture UK

My Advice

Before starting a dropship furniture business first look at your premises. Can delivery trucks get up your road and how would this affect your neighbours if pallets of returns were being dropped off at the kerb. How will this affect traffic and passers-by, will it create a danger hazard? Do you have somewhere to store furniture whilst processing it back to the supplier. Would you be willing to list it on Facebook at a discounted price so potential customers can collect it to save you the hassle of storing and processing it.

If you have a van, you stand a good chance of making it work as you can offer a delivery service for returns or take the furniture back to the supplier yourself.

Have your own website if you don’t want to pay extortionate seller fees. If you build it yourself through WordPress you can do it for a £5 a month. I will be doing a blog on this soon and tell you how and what Plugins to use so keep an eye on us. It pains me to see the silly prices that some people pay for a website. My advice will cost nothing but save you an absolute fortune.

Ensure that you have a presence on some platform to be accepted by suppliers such as a furniture website, furniture social media or Amazon, eBay etc even if you have no products to list yet. Create an ‘About Us’ page saying how great your online shop will be and make yourself sound familiar with the different styles of furniture. One or two sentences will suffice. Use a couple of pictures of furniture and make your home page look like a furniture shop. There are many apps now and AI to add a nice background onto a furniture that someone else is selling to make it your own. You can use AI to draft all your wording to save you time. 

Always check the buyer’s postcode and clearly state that you don’t accept deliveries to buildings such as flats or other building that are not on ground floor level as most couriers of heavy furniture will not carry it up flights of stairs and will leave it on the ground floor even if you have charged the customer the extra charge to unwrap, set up and take away all the packaging as part of the white glove service. Some will deliver to premium postcodes, some will not. Those that do will charge on average treble the normal cost so bear this in mind. The last thing you need to do is tell a customer who has just paid for something is that you made a mistake as they will probably be annoyed and leave you negative feedback on your seller site. The higher your seller rating, the more you will sell as you are pushed closer to the top of keyword searches. When your feedback drops so will your keywords through various algorithms.

There is a vast amount of dropshippers now and many don’t last for all the reasons stated above. If you want to stand a great chance then you must first research suppliers, preferably close to where you run your business from. There are numerous suppliers who just want to offload their damaged goods and who strictly say ‘no returns’. Avoid these at all costs as they don’t accept returns for a good reason.

You can make £3,000-£5,000 a month as a beginner but you will hard for that money as you the time spent listing can take over your life. Then processing all sales and returns.

If you decide that you want to dropship something lighter and more manageable in case of returns then look at the packaging and the object first. If it comes in a box say for instance ‘toys’ the supplier will most likely send out the damaged boxed toys and as these are usually purchased as a gift, the buyer is likely to ask a refund just because the box is damaged and it’s a gift even though the toy inside may not be.

Always avoid any supplier that asks you to subscribe and pay a monthly fee whether they are a legitimate business offering lovely products. You don’t need to pay any subscription fees to dropship so avoid them completely.

Also, be careful that you are not dropshipping products that can be purchased cheaper than what you are buying them for. With social media many people know about Temu and AliEpress and the likes and people will be off. Also, many people use AI to Google a product and get the average cost so you do the same to see how much profit you will make from the products. Always check your percentage discount on the price sheet once you are accepted by a supplier. The more that you sell with them the bigger the discounts. Widen your choice by doing Home & Garden to widen your suppliers. If you just choose garden supplies these tend to only sell in spring and summer so your sales will see a sharp drop in autumn and winter. the same if you dropship toys, you will struggle with sales after the run up to Christmas. Use the free version of ChatGPT to get a value of a product whether new or second-hand. When you run out of your free results open a private page on your phone and get more free answers. Avoid paying for things you don’t need to. I you can download a free eBook on dropshipping do it but use the books as a tool to give you ideas rather than as a list of suppliers who may end up being of no use to you. Get an idea of what you want to sell and then find your own suppliers avoid the word dropship, all the good ones tend not to use these words to avoid of thousands of enquiries from people who never place orders or who have no online or actual shop presence. ‘Trade Only’ suppliers are what you need to search for. I cannot stress the importance of this. There are many scammers out there so don’t be pulled in by them.

I would suggest reading at least one book on dropshipping as you get a feel for the products that you can sell and which one would be better for you depending on your home, your street, your space etc. Although I would avoid the word dropshipping when looking for supplier, flicking through dropshipping books give you a good idea of what to expect with the various products. I have given you the pros and cons of furniture dropshipping, books can cover a wide range of products and their pros and cons and where to find suppliers in your country.

Best of luck with your new business venture. You can do this if you are aware of the pitfalls and work very hard.