Just wondering, as i am bored an curious because I’m in a position in life where i can get a job/cant travel to work. I remeber before I switched to lemmy and back when I used reddit, most people would promote their affiliate stuff or something, which really bothered me as it was quite common.
What legitimate ways are there to make money on the side from online without having a job? If you have questions, please leave a comment.
How unethical are you ok with being? Dropshipping is an easy way to make money with low effort but it’s a pretty shitty thing to do
What exactly is that a shitty thing to do? It’s simply running a business. It’s no different than going down to Walmart and purchasing anything.
Unless you have a sign saying “You’re paying me to buy this for you from alibaba”, I consider it very dishonest. Perfectly legal, but borderline scammy ethically imo.
This is the same thing your local department store does. It sells shit it buys in bulk, much of it manufactured in China.
Dropshipping gets scammy when you start implying you produce the stuff you’re selling IMO.
Your local department store has to have a physical location and stock, they’re physical goods in a physical location, adding value to you by way of letting not have to travel to a bunch of different people producing the things you need. Dropshippers literally just order something to your address for a marked up price. They are adding cost with literally no value to you.
Well a lot of these bulk sellers don’t sell B2C. I could start my own company to buy shit, or use a middle man.
Sellers in the EU also have to give their shit a 2 year warranty, including for dropshipped items. No such requirements for Aliexpress.
I guess I should have been more specific, I’m talking the places that literally just dropship from alibaba, aliexpress, etc. an actual middleman for manufacturer is fine to me. They’re actually doing something you can’t do yourself, you know, they’re actually providing a service. The ones I’m referring to are just setting up online “stores” hoping to grab people from SEO to make a profit doing actually nothing
What do you think just about every person does on apps like Amazon walmart.com etc. Almost all of them are drop shippers or people other than direct manufacturers. Almost every single store you purchase from almost every single website you go to is a form of a drop shipper. If you don’t know this and you don’t understand how retail works there’s always a manufacturer then there is a warehousing then there is somebody that purchases it and then there is the end store that you purchase from whether it’s retail brick and mortar or it’s online. If you think you’re buying directly from the manufacturer and you’re buying from other places other than the manufacturer’s website you’re almost guaranteed to be purchasing from some sort of type of drop shipper.
I don’t want to make accounts on lots of sites and search all of them every time I buy something, so I think of it like a convenience fee if the way an ebay package is wrapped implies the seller arbitraged it from elsewhere.