Want to start a dropshipping business and achieve dropshipping success from the start? Now is the right time to start planning towards that. With dropshipping, you can become an e-commerce entrepreneur without owning products or managing inventory.
Dropshipping allows you to display, advertise, market, and sell other people’s products on your own terms.
Here’s how dropshipping works in a nutshell:
- You create an online store
- Identify and contact pre-approved suppliers
- Obtain product images, description, and prices
- Import products into your store
- Edit product information (as desired) and set price rules
- Advertise and market your products
- Receive orders, take your commission, and forward cost price plus order details to your supplier
- Your supplier processes the order, packs and ships items to your customers
Very low startup costs and a wide profit margin are two key attractions of dropshipping.
In practice, it is not as easy as it sounds (as it requires work), but it is equally easier than you might think.
In this post, I’ll be highlighting five essential focus areas to help you achieve dropshipping success from the start, but first
Why Dropshipping?
- Ready e-commerce market worth trillions of dollars ($6.5 trillion by 2022)
- Can be done anywhere with an internet connection (location independent)
- Low startup cost
- Low entry barrier
- Relatively low running costs
- Huge profit margins
- Wide range of products and suppliers
- Access to global markets
- 24/7 market
- More and more people are shopping online, etc.
Some Dropshipping Success Stories
Some dropshippers like the following have been able to cut through the noise and achieve dropshipping success.
- Irwin Dominguez
- Scott Hirse
- Raphael Citron
- Tan Choudhury
- Cole Turner
- Suhail Nurmohamed, and many more
To start dropshipping, you will need:
- A little cash (for domain name registration and hosting)
- A website (e-commerce store)
- Internet connection
- A lot of determination and hard work
Below are:
5 Essentials for Dropshipping Success
To achieve dropshipping success, you will need to pay extra attention to the following:
- Business/Store/Domain Name
Many business owners do not realise this, but it takes 5-7 impressions on average for people to remember your brand, especially your business name and logo. So important is this that Cars.Com sold for a whopping $872, 320, 000.
Your business, store or domain name can make a huge difference in how you’re perceived and received. Will your chosen name fit into a business card, face cap or t-shirt and still be legible? Choose a name combination that works across your brand assets including your social media handles.
One of the ways to achieve dropshipping success from the start is by partnering with a reliable supplier for your print on demand business. By ensuring that your print on demand provider offers high-quality products and timely order fulfillment, you can provide a positive customer experience and build a strong reputation for your eCommerce store.
Aim for names that are short, easy to spell and pronounce. A flexible name will work well for a general store. If you’re pet focused, for instance, a niche name will serve you better.
- Dropshipping Suppliers
This is another key area to focus on if you want to achieve dropshipping success. Extra care should be exercised in picking your dropshipping suppliers.
By virtue of its modus operandi, most dropshippers never get to physically see or handle the products they are dropshipping. Because of this, shoddy suppliers can package and ship defective items to customers.
This can damage your reputation as a dropshipper, lead to returns, refunds, poor reviews, high churn, and low sales, all of which won’t help you achieve dropshipping success.
Several dropshipping suppliers directories exist that can help you select from pre-qualified and trusted suppliers. Examples include Salehoo, Worldwide Brands, Inventory Source, Doba, among others.
- E-commerce Platform
Your e-commerce platform is the foundation upon which you build your dropshipping store. It is as important as the foundation of a physical building. Choosing the right e-commerce platform is critical in helping you to build a high converting store and achieve dropshipping success.
There are several e-commerce platforms you can choose from depending on your market, needs, technical know-how, experience or preferences, but Shopify is the most popular of them all, with millions of users and counting.
A good e-commerce platform can impact every area of your dropshipping store including landing pages, advertisement, product display, SEO, shopping cart, checkout, payment gateways, etc.
When it comes to choosing e-commerce platforms, the overall best platform may not be the very best for you. Do your research and find which most closely addresses your unique needs.
- Marketing
Although dropshipping appears simple on the surface, it actually involves a lot of work, especially in the areas of advertising and marketing. That’s how you let potential buyers know about your store and what you’ve got in store for them.
Effective marketing is one of the most surefire ways to achieve dropshipping success. Once you have a winning product and can market it to the right target audience, you’ll be able to make more sales than you can imagine.
Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, influencer marketing, content marketing, among others, are some of the ways successful dropshippers market their products.
Don’t be that dropshipper who just builds a store and expects it to market itself and make money on autopilot.
- Shipping and Fulfillment
After you have effectively advertised and marketed your dropshipping store/products, you should expect to start receiving orders from potential buyers. This can take anywhere from minutes to hours to days to weeks, even months in some cases.
Once orders are placed, your time starts counting. Thanks to same day delivery, online shoppers can now expect to receive their orders within 24 hours, the next day or a few days afterwards. Speedy and efficient shipping can help you to achieve dropshipping success
Since most dropshippers source their products from China (AliExpress, etc), it can take between 7-70 days for customers to receive orders across the world with popular Chinese shipping services like China Post which also provides parcel tracking.
Air freight is faster but costlier, surface shipping (by sea and land) is cheaper or free in some cases, but takes the longest time. Consider this and always provide multiple shipping options for your customers to decide.
Conclusion
Dropshipping success is not a given, it depends on several factors. It is not enough to simply open an online store, stock it up with virtual products, and sit back waiting for sales to roll in.
You can achieve dropshipping success from the start by paying extra attention to:
- Business/store name and niche
- Dropshipping suppliers
- E-commerce platform
- Marketing
- Shipping and fulfillment.