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This study investigated the effects and advantages of drop shipping as a business model for university students. A qualitative research approach was utilised, featuring semi-structured interviews with 20 students from a large university. The findings revealed that education in drop shipping empowers students through “Empowerment through Knowledge,” aids them in overcoming business challenges as seen in “Overcoming Challenges,” offers pathways to financial independence, illustrated in “Financial Independence,” cultivates entrepreneurial skills as emphasised in “Building Entrepreneurial Skills,” encourages networking and collaboration as highlighted in “Networking and Collaboration,” and broadens their global business reach, as stated in “Global Reach.” The results bear practical significance for university administrators, career counsellors, and entrepreneurship educators, indicating that institutions could integrate drop shipping-related courses, workshops, and mentorship programmes to better prepare students for success in e-commerce. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the potential of dropshipping as a viable entrepreneurial path for students.

•We investigate multichannel assortment planning decisions across retailers.•Retailer’s inventory policy and distribution strategy through an analytical model.•Test relationship between product attributes & retailers’ channel choice.•Retailers are less likely to drop-ship colored/irregularly-sized products.•Detect nonlinearities and thresholds in the effects or product value. [Display omitted] Retailers that sell seasonal products face significant challenges when planning inventory assortment. The incorporation of drop-shipping into their operations, wherein suppliers own and ship products directly to consumers at retailers’ requests, has only complicated these challenges. This study investigates multichannel assortment planning of retailers that sell seasonal products. We first capture structural properties of multichannel retailing of seasonal products through a simple and parsimonious analytical model. The analytical model uncovers key seasonal product attributes that make it more attractive for retailers to allocate a product for sale in the drop-shipping channel than in the store channel. We then empirically assess the findings of the analytical model. Using a rich and unique dataset from the fashion retail industry, we test relationships between product attributes and retailers’ channel choice. The application of a generalized linear latent and mixed model controls for selection bias by jointly estimating retailers’ likelihood of allocating a product’s inventory to the drop-shipping channel and the allocated volume in each channel according to the product’s characteristics. The empirical findings suggest that retailers are less likely to drop-ship products that are colored, irregularly sized, and offered in more style variants. They also unveil cross-channel effects in terms of inventory amounts allocated for sale in each channel according to those characteristics. Our analytical and empirical assessments jointly demonstrate the complementary roles played by drop-shipping and store channels for seasonal products and offer important academic and practical implications.

Practical and anecdotal evidence indicates that the drop-shipping policy has been extensively adopted in electronic commerce (E-commerce) practice. However, how the different structures of dual channels affect the drop-shipping strategy of a retailer and supply chain efficiency has not been adequately investigated. To fill this research gap, this study performs a game-theoretic analysis of the drop-shipping strategy of a retailer under two practical dual-channel supply chain structures, namely, manufacturer-owned and retailer-owned online channel structures (MOS and ROS). Under each structure, the optimal pricing and the variations in profits are analytically presented with reselling or drop shipping in the corresponding channel. We show that under MOS, drop shipping can lower both wholesale and retail prices. By contrast, under ROS, drop shipping can decrease the offline retail price and the wholesale price but lower the online retail price only when the ratio of the unit fulfillment fee to overstock inventory is relatively low. The retailer prefers to adopt the drop-shipping policy under both MOS and ROS. Counterintuitively, the profits of both retailer and manufacturer are independent of the unit order fulfillment fee under MOS; however, under ROS, the profit of the manufacturer indicates a decreasing trend, whereas that of the retailer continuously increases with the unit order fulfillment fee. In terms of the performance of the entire supply chain, ROS dominates MOS when the proportion of brick-and-mortar (BM) shoppers is sufficiently high. In specific, beyond a certain service level, drop shipping in the retailer-owned online channel is preferred; otherwise, reselling in such channel is dominant. When the proportion of BM shoppers is moderate, MOS with drop shipping in the BM channel is the best choice for the entire supply chain. When the proportion of BM shoppers is low, MOS with reselling in the BM channel becomes the dominant option.

As customer demand for green products increases in the digital economic era, this study analyses the green innovation of the e-tailer and supplier in drop shipping models. Moreover, drop shipping e-tailers and suppliers with a drop shipping option need to make choices regarding whether to provide green or normal products to the market. When a supplier with a drop shipping option produces green products, more fees may be invested in the production of green products than on normal products. The drop shipping e-tailers and suppliers with a drop shipping option can also choose to sell normal products at a low cost, as before. This study designs four models of drop shipping e-tailers and suppliers with a drop shipping option under different choices, analyzes their operational process in drop shipping models, and investigates five theorems. The optimal pricing decisions and green degree of drop shipping e-tailers and suppliers with a drop shipping option were evaluated in this study. The impacts of the green innovation factor, green elasticity coefficient, manufacturing and distribution costs on the drop shipping e-tailers and suppliers with a drop shipping option, and the effect of other environmental parameters on the green degree of green products are also analyzed through computer simulation. The findings of the simulation analysis provide valuable guidance for e-tailers and suppliers with green innovation in drop shipping models and offer important academic and practical implications for e-commerce and the digital economy.

During the recent years, e-commerce has been constantly growing in various industrial sectors. E-commerce has also changed the buying pattern of customers. E-commerce is a concept that has gained enormous popularity in recent decades. There are a multitude of variants and strategies of e-commerce such as drop shipping, which is renowned for its low cost and high efficiency. However, e-commerce is a new technology that is growing rapidly. It has the ability to create a truly global digital economy. In this research paper, the authors study the state of the drop shipping market for e-commerce in Algeria and the possibility to introduce new models by analyzing different aspects that can have a huge impact on the evolution of drop shipping in e-commerce in order to promote economic development in Algeria. To develop a better understanding, an exploratory study via a structured questionnaire intended for the general Algerian public drop shipper market was carried out.

Internet companies extensively use the practice of drop-shipping, where the wholesaler stocks and owns the inventory and ships products directly to customers at retailers' request. Under the drop-shipping arrangement, the supply chain benefits from risk pooling because the inventory for multiple retailers is stocked at the same location, the wholesaler's. Another more traditional channel alternative on the Internet is one in which retailers stock and own the inventory. These two supply chain structures, which predominate on the Internet, result in different inventory risk allocation, stocking decisions, and profits for channel members. Moreover, the two channel alternatives can be combined into a dual strategy whereby the retailer uses local inventory as a primary source and relies on drop-shipping as a backup. We model the dual strategy as a noncooperative game among the retailers and the wholesaler, analyze it, and obtain insights into the structural properties of the equilibrium solution to facilitate development of recommendations for practicing managers. Finally, we characterize situations in which each of three channels is preferable by specifying appropriate ranges of critical parameters, including demand variability, the number of retailers in the channel, wholesale prices, and transportation costs.

This study considers a supply chain consisting of a supplier and an e-tailer on the internet. The e-tailer replenishes products from the supplier for private inventory and sends drop shipping requests to him for delivering orders to customers when private inventory is insufficient or stock out, whereas the supplier provides drop shipping service with a limited ability for the e-tailer. This paper proposes an algorithm to simulate the scheduling sequences of the e-tailer with the optimal threshold policy and mixture strategy in every scheduling unit and obtains the optimal threshold of private inventory for the e-tailer to achieve average profit maximization. The impacts of mixture of demand and lead time uncertainty are examined. The influence of high priority demand variability on the optimal threshold policy in two complex scenarios are also considered in this study. These results have an important guiding significance for the e-tailer who adopts the mixture strategy in e-fulfillment under complex operating environments.

It is a general trend for retailers to develop dual channel to serve different customers. Engaging in internet and drop shipping has raised serious awareness and attention in the retailing field. Retailers are competing for dominance from suppliers using terminal position in many industries like appliance and fast moving consumer goods. In this paper, the authors examine such supply chain context and propose the commitment contracts for the drop shipping supply chain. In a drop-shipping model, the retailer focuses on marketing and customer acquisition, so it has more customer demand information than the supplier. To optimize profit, the retailer usually sends over-estimated demand information to the supplier. On the contrary, the supplier has to design a contract to control such a behavior of the retailer. Their study is to optimize the profit of the supplier and the whole supply chain using the commitment contract that can coordinate the retailer and the supplier in dual-channel and drop-shipping supply chain. If the retailer’s order quantity achieves centralized level, the profit of the supply chain can be maximized.

Inventory management is among the most complex of inventory functions, involving thousands of products and the very real possibility of never converting some items into cash. This chapter describes a plethora of options for more tightly managing inventory and the company policies that can affect the investment in inventory. The result can be better order fulfillment accompanied by a reduced inventory investment.