If you’re considering starting a business, then eCommerce should be at the top of your list. eCommerce has been continuously growing for the past decade and it’s still expected to thrive amidst the pandemic. In fact, eCommerce sales is expected to reach 14.4% of all US retail spending this year and 19.2% by 2024. The exciting news is that it’s not too late to share a piece of the pie. You can still dive into eCommerce and establish a brand that can generate up to a 7-digit revenue.
However, before jumping into the eCommerce industry, there are tons of things that you need to learn in building and running an eCommerce store. Diving straight into eCommerce without enough knowledge and background about the industry will only set you up for failure. Just like in any other businesses, you’ll need to walk, before you can run. Not fully understanding how to run and manage an eCommerce store may be a perfect recipe for disaster.
It’s likewise important that you carefully choose the kind, business model, tools, and logistics of an eCommerce business as these are the crucial parts of an online business. One kind of eCommerce business model is dropshipping.
Dropshipping in its Simplest Sense
Dropshipping is a kind of eCommerce business model that allows sellers to sell directly to consumers, products of a third party supplier, and earn from its margin without keeping stock of the said products. Essentially, the sellers in this kind of business model acts as middle men between the suppliers / manufacturers and end-consumers.
In dropshipping, when a customer submits an order, you’ll just need to forward the order/s to your supplier, and your supplier will take care of fulfillment and delivery. Essentially, dropshipping allows you to sell items, which you don’t physically possess.
From this point of view, it certainly seems like easy-money, but I’m telling you now, it’s not. For dropshipping to work, a good combination of hard work, strategy, and good decision making skills is required to start flourishing.
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Why dropshipping?
Dropshipping is perfect for those who want to manage a store but is not keen on managing product development, packaging, inventory, fulfillment, and all other logistics. If your strength involves marketing, business management, and finance then dropshipping will surely work for you. Since suppliers and manufacturers don’t typically invest much in advertising and marketing, they sell their products in bulk by partnering with merchants who can market and sell their items.
In addition, Dropshipping is a good business if you’re looking to establish an eCommerce business that requires low upfront investment requirements.
Exclusive Tips on How to Start Dropshipping
Find a Niche
Identifying a good product is a key element in a dropshipping business. Thus, ample research and testing is required to be able to find a good niche that’s worthy of selling. You would want to find a target market that’s big enough for you to take on space but small enough in terms of competition. Once you find a niche that works for you, the rest will follow.
In finding a niche, you want to make sure that you only choose products that offer great margins and high profitability. You don’t want to sell products that offer low margins with very tight competition as it will only lead to insignificant returns. To help you decide on which niche to pick, here’s a list on the best niches for dropshipping.
Source out from a Reliable Supplier
There’s no sense of having a really good niche or product when your supplier is failing. Since fulfillment is the lifeline in dropshipping, you would want to partner with a supplier that has a good track record and one that offers utmost reliability. Plus, it would be best to engage with several suppliers of the same niche, so that when your primary supplier fails, the next in line will come save you.
Having a reliable supplier is extremely important for all dropshipping businesses since you don’t want your customers to end up receiving wrong or damaged items. Essentially, careful selection of suppliers will save you from headaches in the future. Here are tips on how you can find a good supplier.
Marketing plan & strategy
In dropshipping, you don’t have to worry about all those menial and tedious tasks of merchandising, product development, inventory, delivery, tracking, and whatnot. Rather, your focus is on selling. That is exactly the reason why having a good marketing plan and a defined strategy is a must. This includes aligning your target market’s purchasing habits with your campaign efforts, among others.
Put out Advertisements
Since selling is your primary goal in dropshipping. You need to put out word of the items you’re selling to reach potential customers. For instance, launching campaign ads or Google ads will surely attract customers. Aside from these ads, you can also release email campaigns, blogs, and social media campaigns. Here’s an example on how to launch Google Ads for your dropshipping business.
Customer Support
Since you’re not directly managing your inventory, you can focus more on customer service and support. Nowadays, consumers are leaning towards better consumer experience, they feel a sense of belonging to a brand that makes them feel good across all customer touchpoints – from website, social media, customer chat / hotline, to seamless delivery. Thus, it’s imperative that you make sure all your customer touchpoints are friendly and will give your consumers a good experience.
Outsource Staff
For all other things that you cannot manage, it would be best to outsource services rather than hiring in-house staff directly. This is a more practical alternative and will save you a lot of money in the long run. Outsourcing will also give you the flexibility to hire only for a certain period for specific projects / undertakings. With outsourcing, you’ll only hire people when in need. If you want a detailed guide on how to hire freelance staff for the first time, check this guide.
Choose a High-Performing Platform
An online store needs to meet both consumer’s expectation and satisfaction. What sense does it bring when you have a really good product but your website doesn’t work? In order for your web store to sell, it should function seamlessly. When I say seamless, it’s load time should be below 2 seconds, it must have a good sales funnel to entice your customers to buy, and must have all the security features to ensure that your customers’ transactions are safe. Building a good web store is essential for all eCommerce businesses, a lousy looking website will make your customers leave instantly. If you have no idea on how to create your website, here’s one of the best eCommerce Platforms for Dropshipping.
High-ticket Dropshipping
When you check for drop shippers online, you will see that most of them only sell low-cost items around $50 or so. This is good if you want a steady stream of income and is not after huge margins and faster returns. However, if you’re after big margins and bigger profits, then you should try high-ticket dropshipping.
High-ticket dropshipping focuses on selling high-valued items, on average these are the products that cost above $1000. High-ticket dropshipping is best for entrepreneurs who want bigger allowance for margins and faster returns. With high-ticket dropshipping, you also enjoy a good playing field as it’s not saturated with tons of competitors. Since you’re selling high-cost items, competition is low and you get maximum store viewership. Plus, with this kind of model, you enjoy full control on your pricing and it allows you to generate bigger profits. If you’re interested in high-ticket dropshipping, here are the things that you need to know in running a high-ticket dropshipping business.
Why High-Ticket Dropshipping?
We’ve already listed the main reasons why high-ticket dropshipping is the better version of dropshipping. But to give you a better understanding, here are the reasons why high-ticket dropshipping is a good choice:
Low Investment Requirement
This is probably the greatest thing about dropshipping. With this dropshipping, you don’t need tons of money to start running your business as compared to a physical store. Even if you’re selling high-valued items, you don’t need to purchase numerous units to start your business.
Less Work, Better profits
Since you’re leveraging on the products of your supplier, there’s no need to constantly create and develop new products to keep up with the trends. Rather, you only focus on running the business in terms of marketing, sales, and customer support among others. Dropshipping allows you to solely focus on making sales unlike other retail businesses that require you to manage inventory, plan merchandise, and organize SKUs.
Sustainable and Flexible
With dropshipping, there’s no need to set up your own factory or warehouse. You don’t also need to hire tons of in-house staff as cashier, or customer support. With dropshipping, you can start small and add more assistants as your business grows.
Another thing that we love about dropshipping is the flexibility that it offers. With this business, you can easily manage your store from anywhere in the world!
Dropshipping is a really good business because it allows you to build, run, and scale an eCommerce store as much as you want to. There are many high-ticket dropshipping stores generating up to 7-digit revenue and it’s really incredible as to what level you can scale your store. If you’re now convinced about dropshipping, here’s a good high-ticket dropshipping guide for beginners.
Trevor Fenner
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
