Doba Review (Drop Shipping Service)

I was excited to learn about a new service called Doba the other day. Doba is a drop shipping company that anyone can sign up with and use to start their own business. It sounded very promising, so we decided to check it out.

As my wife runs a drop shipping business, I was pretty excited to see that Doba offers a huge array of products - more than 250,000 of them - including a number of products that complement items we are currently selling.

Doba offers a 7 day free trial, but the reason we signed up for it was because their web site said they carry one specific product that we needed ASAP. One of our good international customers asked us if he could order that particular item in quantity, but the manufacturer has not been responsive or easy to work with. So Doba seemed like a good option.

Here are some comments based on our experience trying the service:

1. There is no way to sign up for the cheap membership option as advertised. The web site says there are two monthly membership options, either $29.95 or $39.90. But when you sign up for the free trial the fine print says you will be billed $39 per month and does not offer any other option. Even after you sign up there is no way to choose the $29 monthly option (aside from maybe calling them on the phone), but you can upgrade to an annual membership. It seems like false advertising to me - is as if they intentionally omitted that option from the web site even though it is listed on their membership options page.

2. Doba’s prices are often more expensive than you can find elsewhere. Since Doba buys in bulk, we expected that they would have good pricing. But in many cases, we could get a better price if we just took Doba out of the equation and bought the items elsewhere. Some of the items are actually cheaper if you buy them from Amazon.com - and Amazon includes free shipping and does not charge a drop shipping fee. For example, one product we were interested in is being sold for $39.95 on Amazon with free shipping whereas Doba charges $55.52 when you add in their drop shipping fees and the cost of shipping. In another case, the manufacturer was selling the product directly to the public for $29.95, but Doba’s pricing was $38 plus shipping and delivery fees.

There are some products we found that have potential. It will probably take a week or more for anyone to sift through all of the products they are interested in and find the few gems that they can actually work with.

3. Many of the products in Doba’s inventory are either out of stock or only available in limited quantity. Virtually every item we were interested in had less than 10 units in stock. This is no good for any eBay seller that wants to avoid getting negative feedback when someone buys a product that suddenly becomes out of stock.

Doba even carries iPods, but when I checked every single iPod was out of stock! (Check out this screen shot.)

The whole purpose of a drop shipping company is for them to maintain the merchandise inventory so you don’t have to. If they can’t keep the items in stock, you can’t fulfill orders when you get them. So what’s the point?

For the record, this is a common problem when working with companies that do drop shipping and so Doba is not unique in this regard. But they are the only drop shipping company we have worked with that charges a monthly fee and drop shipping fees.

I would like to point out that this is another thing that is kind of hit or miss with Doba. The smaller the item, size wise, the more units they seem to have in inventory. Some items literally had more than 3,000 units in inventory, whereas some of the items we were looking at had less than ten. It seems like they bought their inventory based on dividing up warehouse space instead of anticipating demand and planning accordingly.

4. Some items are listed on their web site more than once, with different SKU numbers, prices, and MSRPs. I suspect this is because since Doba uses different suppliers they have included all of the merchandise from each even though the data is different. In one case, a particular product was available at two different prices (about 5% price difference), but the suggested retail price for one was $299 whereas the other was $411.

5. Doba carries popular items like iPods, but in addition to being completely out of stock, it costs more to buy it from Doba than from Apple directly. For example, Doba charges $304.59 as a wholesale price for the 30 Gb iPod and claims the retail price is $746, but Apple is selling it on their web site for $249 right now! Apple sells the 4 GB iPod Nano for $199, whereas Doba’s “wholesale” price is $287 and they claim the MSRP is $451.25. Ridiculous.

The bottom line: Doba is a great idea in theory, but its not so hot in practice - yet. With the monthly subscription fee and additional drop shipping fees, we’re not sure if it would really pay for itself unless you find some real gems amongst the hundreds of thousands of products that they do carry. Especially since many of their prices are not competitive. What they need to do is go to manufacturers directly and negotiate lower prices since they will be buying in bulk.

If you think Doba will let you open up shop and buy popular electronics at wholesale I’m afraid you are mistaken. That kind of market is very price competitive and Doba just can’t compete.

All in all we have decided to not use Doba, at least for now. If they had the one product we wanted to buy ASAP - the one our overseas customer is asking us for - then we definitely would have. That product was advertised on their web site before we signed up, but once registered we learned that it was out of stock!

Doba might work for you. But we are going to pass.

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