Imagine a business model where all you have to do is create an eCommerce brand and focus on selling stuff while a third party handles the inventory, shipping, and fulfillment.
What’s more?
You don’t pay for the product until the customer places an order for it.
Dropshipping is an online business model with probably the least barriers to entry which attracts novices and professionals alike to select a niche, create a brand, market, and make money.
If you’re new to this arena of online business and want to know more about what is dropshipping, how dropshipping works, and how you can start a dropshipping business in 2019, you’re at the right place. Here’s a complete guide explaining everything about the dropshipping business model.
What Is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is an online business model based on an order fulfillment strategy where the merchant sells a product under his own brand but doesn’t keep an inventory or handle the shipping and fulfillment of the product. Rather, he purchases the product from the third party as soon as a customer makes a purchase and makes them ship directly to the customer.
An example of a drop shipping website could be an eCommerce store dealing in drones and drone accessories. The store takes the orders under its own brand but the actual shipping is carried by Aliexpress.
Benefits Of Dropshipping
A dropshipping store looks exactly like any other traditional eCommerce store but doesn’t bear all the risks involved in running an e-commerce store.
Dropshipping Is Easy To Start, Manage, & Grow
To start a profitable dropshipping business, all you need to do is to find a profitable and not-so-competitive niche, a good supplier, a website, and some marketing skills. You don’t require a warehouse to store the items or partnerships with the delivery companies to handle the fulfillment. All that is done by the supplier you’ll order from.
Dropshipping Involves Very Less Investment
Most of the investment a dropshipping store requires is in the form of marketing and branding. This investment is just a proportion of what a full-fledged eCommerce store that also handles fulfillment requires.
Location Of The Merchant Doesn’t Affect The Business
You could be sitting in your apartment in India while your customers from the US order the products which will be fulfilled from China. Your location doesn’t really matter as you don’t handle the delivery.
Merchant Doesn’t Have To Deal With The Unsold Inventory
As you don’t have to deal with the actual product, there’s no stress on how to deal with the unsold inventory.
Dropshipping Involves Very Fewer Losses
Even if your dropshipping business fails to get traction and more sales, you won’t suffer much loss as there was not much investment in the first place.
How Dropshipping Works?
The dropshipping process is very easy to understand. You’ve already gotten an overview of how dropshipping works, but here’s a detailed explanation for you to get a better understanding and launch your own dropshipping store.
Dropshipping Business Model
The dropshipping business model can be divided into two segments –
The front-end: the front-end is how things look to the customer. He sees your store like any other niche eCommerce store and orders the products he likes at a price set by you. After a few hours or days, he receives a notification that his order has been shipped. The notification also includes the tracking information which lets him track the order just like with any other eCommerce website.
The back-end: As soon as the customer orders the product, you purchase the same from the supplier and ask him to ship directly to the customer. The customer never gets to know about the fulfillment process as he gets the same experience like that with a traditional eCommerce store.
How to Start A Dropshipping Business In 2022?
Even though drop shipping isn’t a new business model, there are ways to profit from it in 2022. Here’s a guide to help you pave your way in this new online ecosystem.
Create A Website
Your website is how you’ll interact with your buyers. Yes, social media pages do help with the same. But a website will increase the buyers’ trust which eventually will lead to more sales. We suggest you create a website using Shopify as it’ll come with Oberlo which is a tool designed especially for drop shipping and will minimize the efforts required from your end.
Find A Profitable Niche & Products
This is one of the hardest parts of starting a dropshipping business but if planned right, this could result in unbelievable profits. Start by looking out what’s trending on –
- Google Trends
- Amazon
- Etsy
- Aliexpress
- Instagram (check the ads)
Some niches you can look for are –
- Accessory-heavy niches like laptops, phones, drones, etc. so you can target the accessory micro-niche and pave your way through.
- Accessory-heavy hobbies like golf, biking, etc. where you can target their passion and or problem.
- Products that are innovative and hard to find locally.
Once you’ve found a trending niche, start searching for the products that are within the $100-$200 range. It’s the eCommerce “sweet spot” as it’s large enough for good profits and small enough that customers won’t require to personally speak with someone before making the purchase.
Find A Trustable Supplier
If you’ve created your dropshipping website with Shopify and Oberlo, you don’t need to do much but search Oberlo for the product you’ve just found and the tool will take care of the rest.
But if you’ve chosen WordPress or any other CMS to create your website or any other CMS, here’s a list of best dropshippers to choose from –
- Aliexpress
- SaleHoo
- Doba
- Wholesale2B
- Dropshipper.com
- Sunrise Wholesale
Add Your Products
Once you’ve selected your products and the supplier, list the products on your website at around a 30% profit margin. Write your own description and avoid copying from the seller’s website. Draft it in a way that complements your marketing strategy.
Market Your Store
Dropshipping business requires aggressive marketing strategies. You need to target your audience on Google (choose the appropriate keywords for the advertisements), Facebook (use Facebook Pixel for remarketing too), and other social media networks properly and develop a personalized advertisement for better conversions.
We suggest creating a video showcasing the product benefits for your advertisements as video ads get better results. You can also use social validation strategies like comments, reviews, ratings, and testimonials to gain the trust of your prospective customers.
The 9 Best Dropshipping Companies, Suppliers, Databases, and Tools
- Oberlo — Best Shopify plugin and directory
- SaleHoo — Members-only database of 8,000+ suppliers
- Spocket — Best for international dropshipping
- Wholesale2B — Versatile supplier and dropshipping hub
- Inventory Source — Time-saving dropshipping automation tool
- Worldwide Brands — Best budget-friendly database
- Dropified — Popular Shopify app for AliExpress
- Modalyst — Best Wix plugin and directory
- Importify — Best dropshipping tool for WooCommerce
Once you have your Shopify account and your store set up, you’re ready to link up with a dropshipping partner and get selling.
But, it can be hard to break into dropshipping because most dropshipping businesses don’t like to share their items or their suppliers. The thinking is: you’ll just replicate their shop and eat into their market.
I’m here to help with this list of 15 dropshippers, databases and suppliers — along with their pros and cons.
Oberlo — Best Shopify Plugin & Directory
Oberlo offers an excellent plugin service that works with Shopify stores.
The Oberlo directory offers you all the products you need. The dashboard also shows you how many page views, sales, and star-rankings each item and seller has.
Once you make a sale, you’ll use Oberlo to order the item to be shipped to your customer.
The product selection and fulfillment are handled for you. That frees up your time to focus on driving traffic to your store.
Oberlo has a forever-free Starter plan. However, to unlock shipment tracking and order fulfillment monitoring (which I recommend) you’ll need to upgrade to the Basic plan at $30 per month.
It’ll also raise your sales limit from 50 to 500. Once you crest 500, you’ll be in Pro territory, which is $80 per month and allows for multiple users as well.
Oberlo has 4.2 out of 5 stars from 2,000 reviews in the Shopify app store.
SaleHoo — Members-Only Database of 8,000+ Suppliers
SaleHoo is a great dropshipper that offers a massive supplier database to draw on.
A $67 yearly membership with SaleHoo grants you access to this database of 8,000+ wholesalers and dropshippers. They’re all screened by SaleHoo before they’re added to the directory. There’s a 60-day free trial period, and the customer service gets high marks in public reviews.
The best part is that you don’t have to worry about something being too good to be true if it’s on SaleHoo. If it made it onto the site, it has been vetted and confirmed.
You can make back the yearly membership fee with a single sale.
Along with access to fully vetted suppliers, you also get SaleHoo’s Market Research Lab. Look at the trends and play with the data to find out what really matters to your market right now.
Within the Market Research Lab, you can see competition for the product among other dropshippers, compare profit potential between items, and spot emerging trends. Data like this allows you to strike while the iron is hot (or before other sellers are hip to the trend).
With SaleHoo, access to the wholesaler database is just half of it. The other half is the unprecedented agility you’ll gain compared to other dropshippers.
Spocket — Best for International Dropshipping TOOL
Spocket gives you a great database app for dropshipping items that works especially well for people shipping in the US and beyond. They allow you to sort by country and simply upload the products into your Shopify store.
They make it easy to find US and EU items that’ll ship within your country rather than from China, cutting down on slow ship speeds. This also keeps costs lower–for you and your customers.
Lower costs and faster shipping times? Spocket is the answer for people who want to dropship around the world.
MORE DETAILS ABOUT OTHER TOOLS,
Top 9 Best Dropshipping Companies – 2022 Review (quicksprout.com)