Dropshipping is becoming increasingly attractive as a portable business model for online stores. This sales model is closely related to online sales and relieves the owner of an e-commerce site of all logistical tasks. Before we take a closer look at what dropshipping is and how it can help online stores, let’s look at some basic facts.
Dropshipping is essentially about the following: the consumer buys a product in an online store and the distributor registers an order. When the order is completed, the dropshipping supplier is the one who sends the product to the consumer.
So you have no stock, minimal upfront costs and potential access to millions of products you can sell from suppliers all over the world.
One of the key factors to consider when you want to succeed with dropshipping is choosing the right product that you provide to your potential customers. That means doing some research and due diligence as if you don’t get the right product then you simply won’t make the ROI (return on investment) you should. Dropshipping is very lucrative when you do it right.
Though trending products can work short term and can be a good place to practice. If you are maybe a new drop shipper you can also look at products that sell consistently well. What you don’t want to do is find you are investing money in marketing and ads and are not getting any sales.
So you can do the research manually, that means looking at the competitors, checking out suppliers, viewing their inventory and reviews, assessing prices and margins and choosing your niche. That’s important, as general stores can be almost impossible to market. You don’t want to have Amazon as your main competitor!
Doing this research phase is vital to the success for your dropshipping business and it can be very time intensive! The good news is there are a few tools and some clever software that does most of the heavy lifting for you. So you can get your Shopify or Woocommerce store live faster with the right products. Let’s take a look at one of the more popular ones.