Dropshipping is certainly a lucrative business model and anyone with the right insights can reap large profits by using it sensibly. It is an e-commerce model that allows you to run a retail business without even keeping inventory!
If you do not want to take much risk, dropshipping is perfect for you because it’s one of the few business models where you don’t need to spend money before the customer actually pays you!
Dropshipping can easily be summarised in just three lines:
1. The customers pay you for a product.
2. After receiving payment from the customer, you pay the supplier.
3. The supplier ships the product directly to the customer!
In a nutshell, dropshipping is perfect for startups because of less capital requirement for the initial investment, and no investment required for manufacturing or stocking the products. You just sell and the suppliers do all the heavy-lifting!
So What Do I Need To Get Started?
Courage, Will, Determination, and research. Lots and lots of research. Dropshipping usually takes longer than say, Amazon Prime delivery. So, why would a customer buy from you? Because you are selling something that is not sold elsewhere! So where can you find these virtual assistants to help you run your business and be successful? Below are 3 of the best sites where you can find assistants that specialize with dropshipping.
Whether it be on eBay, Shopify, or Amazon. Finding that niche product is crucial to the success of your business. Researching for the product with utmost care and then actually reaching out to your target customers will jumpstart your business and get the proverbial wheels turning!
What To Look Out For?
Even though dropshipping eliminates some of the traditional business risks like over-stocking, there are several pitfalls that you must avoid in order to succeed.
Since you are not manufacturing anything, you will be relying completely on your supplier for shipping quality and speed. As this is a huge part of customer experience, anything that goes bad with your supplier, you will be the one receiving blame from the customers.
A cautionary tale might also help you understand the pitfalls of dropshipping. I have personally known an e-commerce shop that ran really well and had earnings in the six figures. It almost had a monopoly over the niche products it was selling. However, just before Christmas, there was a sudden and huge spike in demand. Neither the shop nor the supplier was ready for such a large volume of orders. It took weeks just for the orders to be sent to the supplier, who then ran out of stock of the products, and then the raw materials. Halfway through the fulfillment, they ran out of packaging’s too.
The shop had to refund thousands of orders, and the unhappy customers looked elsewhere to buy the product. As a result, that shop lost its market leader status and eventually led to its downfall.
So What Can I Do?
In order to truly take advantage of dropshipping, you must first find your own place in the market, and pick a niche that you can really serve well. Choosing a reliable supplier is very important, as your shop depends on their quality and service. Keeping communication with the supplier on inventory levels is also vital when you are expecting a large spike in the volume of orders.
In our business world, time is money. Fulfilling orders manually takes up a lot of time. When you have hundreds of orders to fulfill, you will certainly be spending an unimaginably long time fulfilling those. So, to save you precious time, as well as getting rid of those annoying errors in copy-pasting while fulfilling orders, you can take help of some nifty software that helps automate your order fulfillment!
One of the most convenient and easy to use time-savers is Spot N Paste. It can work on Amazon, eBay, and Shopify, and you can program it to work with ANY supplier that you want to use!