Dropshipping
What if I tell you that you can get involved in selling products without worrying over inventory or fulfilling orders?
That method of e-commerce is called dropshipping.
Here’s how dropshipping works:
- You (the retailer) launch an ecommerce store and advertise a manufacturer’s product.
- A customer completes an order on your website.
- You then forward the customer and order information to the manufacturer, and they handle the shipping.
Here’s how the whole process works compliments of Visual.ly:
The process is simple and only requires a website to become an online retailer of thousands of potential products online.
However, like any business models, it has a few downsides:
- Lower profit margins than selling your own products. When it comes to dropshipping, overhead is low — but so are the profit margins. A large chunk of what you will earn is going to be skimmed off by the supplier.
- High competition. If you’re selling commodity products, there are likely many others doing the same. Therefore, it’s a given that the competition is pretty high.
- Less control over branding. Since you’re selling a manufacturer’s products, your brand image can suffer. One way to mitigate this is by having your manufacturer place custom branded inserts into the boxes.
- Less control over customer service. As you’re not shipping the product yourself, you could get bad reviews from things completely out of your control.
Overall, around 27% of online retailers have adopted dropshipping.
The competition is pretty high. However, if you go about it the right way, there’s a lot of potential with dropshipping.
If you need help to get started with dropshipping, you can rely on an expert freelancer from a site like Fiverr. Fiverr’s dropshipping section includes freelancers that can help with anything from setting up and designing your store to syncing your products and marketing your business.
Overall, here’s a quick guide for you to get started with dropshipping:
- Choose a niche market and research which products are best suited for your audience.
- Conduct competitor research to see their products and pricing.
- Choose an e-commerce platform and design your online store.
- Carefully find a reputable drop shipping supplier.
- Sync your product inventory with a supplier like Inventory Source.
- Launch your ecommerce website.
- Start marketing your online store.
To get started, I recommend Wix as your eCommerce platform since they’re super easy to use and integrate with lots of dropshipping tools.
Ultimately, to succeed as a drop shipper, you have to build a real brand behind your products. It’s more challenging to do this when you’re selling other wholesalers’ products. But by only selling 5-10 highly unique products, you stand the best chance at real success.
You can get started for free with Wix and upgrade to a business plan.
