Best Jobs Online: Dropshipping Part-3

 

 

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:

1. You (the retailer) launch an ecommerce store and advertise a manufacturer’s product.
2. A customer completes an order on your website.
3. 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. 

Sell Online with Wix