Well now that you say you carried their shipping charges, that makes more sense - honestly I have never seen a dropshipper do that, so that is a highly value added service, though I can see how it could run you out like it did.

In terms of importing, trust me when I say I understand completely. I work for a very well known company that imports 95% of our merchandise from over seas manufacturers - we have wait times, missed shipment times and all of that. That is the price of saving money by importing. In that aspect, I work closely with purchasing and directors in our company to ensure proper ship dates, backorder dates, and inventory is displayed upon the web site correctly (in other words I may have to change a piece of custom coding to display a special message for an item that is delayed, or has something else happen on it). At the end of the day, I know what goods are in the warehouse, what goods are on the water and what goods are delayed or still in manufacturing process - as the web product manager, web developer, and server admin I have to know this, and keep it updated in my systems, which tie directly to our ERP system. The really fun part is we are actually two companies, and one is strictly wholesale distribution, the other is wholesale distribution with the online retail only component.