At first sight, the Dropship model and the Marketplace model have a lot of similarities.
Both models operate over a Marketplace platform meaning there are three main parties involved:
- The marketplace platform operator who is responsible for driving traffic to the site and owns the relationship towards the end-customer
- The supplier who is selling products or providing services towards end customers over the platform
- The end customer who purchases products, or consumes services
None of the models require the marketplace operator to handle any physical products. Even though the marketplace operator owns the platform, they never handle any physical goods.
This means that the operator neither needs a warehouse for storing products or a carrier to fulfil the customer order.