What is Dropshipping Business, and How to Start & Conquer it?

If you’ve been dreaming over the years about entrepreneurship, but cannot find the right solution, then probably you might give your wings a start after going through this post. Today we are going to discuss Dropshipping, a unique business model that most people dream to acquire. Drop shipping is the business practice where a customer orders a product from you and then you send the order to the supplier for dispatching the item to the customer. As simple as it sounds, it is also easy to get started with the drop shipping business because of its low start-up cost and low risk. So in this post, we will discuss dropshipping in detail, along with its benefits and the process to get started with it.

 

What is Drop shipping?

Before explaining about Dropshipping in detail, let’s make it simpler for you to get the idea right away:

1. Your customer orders a product from your online store.
2. You send the order to the supplier.
3. The supplier ships the order to the customer with your name.

Drop shipping is a business implementation where the store won’t keep the products in stock. Instead, when any of its order is sold, it purchases the item from the supplier and gets it directly shipped to the customer. Eventually, the merchant never handles or sees the product. And one of the major differences between dropshipping and normal trading is that the merchant doesn’t stock or own any inventory. Instead, the merchant purchases the inventory from the supplier to complete an order.

 

Benefits of dropshipping

Dropshipping encloses a number of benefits as stated below:

Low capital investment: The biggest benefit of getting into a dropshipping business is you won’t need to invest lakhs of money in storing inventory. Normally, the traditional retailers require spending a huge money to purchase thousands of inventories, but in a dropshipping business, the amount would be fairly low. The key investments in drop shipping would be for creating and managing an e-commerce website and applying for tax ID.

No physical space required: Like a traditional retailer, a dropshipping business doesn’t require any physical warehouse to store inventory. As you don’t need to store, pack or ship the products, and handle the inbound shipments, you don’t require a warehouse even. Since all these functions are handled by the supplier, your job is just to purchase the product from him. Hence, you don’t need to pay for a warehouse or take care of the entire supply chain workflow like packaging or delivering the items.

Low risks: Since you don’t have to deal with the inventories and supply chain workflow, your overhead expenses and risks will be lower. Precisely, many dropshipping businesses are operated from home or personal spaces for less than $100 per month. As your business will mature, the overheads will likely increase but will be lower compared to the traditional businesses.

Offer a wide range of products: You can sell a wide range of products in this business even when you don’t own them. Whether it be clothing, furniture, electronics, books, footwear or anything, you can display them in your store from as many drop shipping wholesalers you want. You don’t even need to pre-purchase the products you sell. If the supplier stocks the items, you can list them on your store with no extra cost.

Flexible location and communication: A dropshipping business can be operated from any location you want. The only thing you need is a good medium of communication with your suppliers. Most a phone and email is a preferable medium to stay in touch with the suppliers. Secondly, you’ll also require a working laptop/ computer and an active internet connection. Since customers will place their orders online, your internet connection requires constantly working so that you can process their orders quickly. Make sure your supplier also shares an active email and phone number with you.

Easy to scale: Unlike the traditional businesses, most of the work processes and operations are handled by the supplier. This lets your business grow with the fewer expenses and pains which are easily scalable. The growth in sales will always increase the effort, especially associated with customer service.

 

How to start a dropshipping business?

Initiating a dropshipping business is pretty easy if you are using the Oberlo app for Shopify. Oberlo is a free app that lets you import a plenty of products from AliExpress directly to your Shopify store. Whether the product is of any category, you can choose multiple products from different categories and sell them on Shopify. Shopify offers you a 14-days free trial to get started with your dropshipping business which is a great feature for first-time users.

 

To start a dropshipping business, please follow the step by step procedure below:

• Go to Shopify.com and enter your email address to get started. This will offer you 14-days free trial.
• Enter your store name and establish your online store. Get the product ideas
• Now install the Oberlo app and start adding products. Since Oberlo is a leading dropping app on Shopify, it will allow wholesale dropshippers to import products directly from AliExpress to your Shopify store. Don’t forget to place your affiliate link on Oberlo. Check out the small video of Oberlo
• Once Oberlo is installed, now you can browse and add products from AliExpress by selecting any product category.

 

Features of Oberlo dropshipping app

The Oberlo app for Shopify offers you the following benefits:

• Directly import products to your store from AliExpress.
• Complete orders automatically by shipping them directly to your customers.
• Auto-update your inventory and prices.
• Customize your products by changing their titles, descriptions, images, and other details.
• Add price to your products in bulk and create pricing rules.
• Track your shipment.
• Use multiple user accounts.
• Track your store earnings in an easy sales and costs dashboard.
• Import the products with the fastest delivery time with the ePacket filter.

Check out Oberlo success stories

 

The comprehensive thought about starting a traditional dropship business

1. The first step to start off with a dropshipping business is to find the right suppliers. You can try out the Aliexpress dropshipping and Oberlo Shopify drop shipping to find a wide range of suppliers and products ranging from apparels to electronics.
2. Now it’s time to choose the products and sell the best-selling ones. You can research on the web about which products have the highest selling rates.
3. Alternatively, you can go through eBay’s completed listings by going to Ebay.com > Advanced search > check the ‘completed listings’ box. Then enter your keywords and category and click the search button. Scroll through around 5 pages of listings and count the successful ones those are listed in green. If you can find an item selling 60% or more, then you can be ensured that you will be pretty successful in selling it.
4. Next, choose the selling platform which can be easily found online. Most people prefer selling on Shopify drop shipping, using the Oberlo app for free. It offers a 14-days free trial and also allows you to start your own e-commerce store with plenty of customization options and features.
5. The succeeding step is to manage your listings. Generally, you’re going to list the products if you got their stock on hand, but sites like eBay got their own policies for selling an item. You’ll have to disclose the location of your item to all potential buyers. For instance, if your supplier is operating from China, then you must display this to your customers so that they remain aware of extended shipping time that may take longer as expected.

 

A typical dropship order will look like this,

• Once you have dealt with your supplier, you list the items on the site.
• The customer visits your site and orders a product.
• Once it is sold, you collect the money from the customer and pay to your supplier (keeping your revenue) by ordering the item that just got sold from your website.
• The supplier ships the item to your customer by putting your website/company logo on the packing, which indicates that the product was sold by you.

Learn more about AliExpress Dropshipping

 

Conclusion

So you can see how Oberlo makes your dropshipping business simpler and easier to handle. Oberlo is a free app and offers a 14-days free trial on Shopify. If you are landing for the first time in the dropshipping business then using the Oberlo app on Shopify will make your job convenient with its features. You can import hundreds of products to your Shopify store in minutes and ship them directly to your customers. It saves your time and automates your product and order management so that you can put more effort in developing your business. Oberlo automates your work so that you can focus on generating sales and leads. You can even track your shipment, track your sales, and fulfill orders automatically with Oberlo. Oberlo helps you maintain a good and healthy relationship with the customer which will probably make your dropshipping business a successful one.