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Starting an online store with dropshipping
A great example of dropshipping is you have an online store and a customer purchases an item. Instead of you processing that customer’s shipment, you send that order to the dropshipping vendor of your products. You don’t have to handle or store the inventory that these consumers purchase. You pay your vendor and they will take care of the shipping process for you.
How to start a drop shipping business?
- Determine should you get into dropshipping
- Determine how much money can you make dropshipping
- Create a plan for your dropshipping business to succeed
- Begin your dropshipping business
- Start your dropshipping website
- Marketing your dropshipping business for success
- When you can start making money drop shipping
The vendor will ship that order directly to your customer. You pay the vendor for the cost of the goods and you keep the difference from what your customer paid. Can you imagine the type of money you can make!
Your vendor will also have the ability to take care of the customer service details. They can take care of your return or exchange issues for you.
Should you get into drop shipping?
Sure, it’s possible that you can make serious money drops hipping! For starters, you need to find the source of the best products to sell drop shipping. Yes, you’ll see a lot of Youtube videos or articles about drop shipping sources that ship from China.
Of course, shipments coming from a long distance can take a while to arrive to your customer here in the US. The longer wait time can lead to customer dissatisfaction. Finding the best products to sell drop shipping is important to increase the success of your dropshipping business.
How Much Money Can You Make Dropshipping?
When you watch Youtube about drop shipping, it’s exciting to see the possibilities of making a lot of money. Or, are those people really making that much money after all? Drop shipping is a legitimate business. How much money you make is dependent on you.
What you put into your drop shipping business determines your success. You need to spend time researching the items that people want to buy. There will be items that are popular and there will be those that are duds that waste your page resources on your website.
Building a drop shipping business takes time. It’s something that won’t happen overnight. However, if you’re highly motivated your progress will be much quicker.
Create a plan for your dropshipping business to succeed
For a big house to be built, it requires a plan or blueprints for the house to be built successfully. The success of your drop shipping business is also dependent on your plan for it to succeed.
Map out your drop shipping business. To start a business there are various costs or expenses that you will encounter. Write that down or create a spreadsheet for your reference. Try your best to determine a budget to get your business started.
There is your startup cost for getting your drop shipping website started. Are you going to build the website or hire someone to build it for you? Keep in mind that an attractive website will help keep people browsing your website.
Reputable drop shipping companies will require to have an actual business entity or LLC. You will also be required to submit a resale certificate for tax purposes.
Never let these requirements hold you back from starting your drop shipping business. These are just the basic requirements that you need to do as a business owner.
Determine the type of products that you will be selling on your website. There’s a lot of different products that you could drop ship. From high dollar items such as furniture, electronics, women’s handbags to simple items like jewelry.
Begin Your Dropshipping Business
Do your research and locate trends on the internet for what people are searching or buying. This can take time but it’s worth the research if your business will be successful.
Once you’ve decided on the items that you want to feature on your drop shipping website, you will need a source for drop shipping products.
An excellent source for you to visit is Salehoo. Salehoo is an excellent resource for drop shipping. From finding products to sell to getting detailed support for your drop shipping website. Find drop shipping companies that will take care of your customer service for you. Services like shipping your order, order inquiries and product returns. You can find it here at Salehoo.
Dropshipping vendor shipping items to your customer.
Start your dropshipping website
To start your drop shipping website, you will need a means of displaying your products online. If you do research, there are multiple drop shipping platforms available out there.
For simplicity, we’ll be looking at two popular platforms that you can choose from for your drop shipping website.
Start a dropshipping website using Shopify
Pros: Easy to use
Shopify’s web hosting is fast! Pictures of your products display quickly.
Free themes are available for your drop shipping website
Social media friendly- you can easily connect with Instagram and Facebook etc.
Cons: Monthly cost can be expensive for new drop shipping businesses.
Shopify premium themes are expensive
A number of Shopify apps needed for your site have additional fees adding more expense.
Start a drop shipping website using WordPress
Pros: No high monthly cost
You can get your own lower cost web hosting service. See Stable Host
You can customize your drop shipping website according to your personal liking.
There’s a number of no or low cost WordPress plugins available to streamline your website.
Cons: Will take longer to set up
Can be complicated for newbies unfamiliar with WordPress content management system.
You will have to integrate a credit card payment system using a WordPress plug in.
Marketing your dropshipping business for success
Traffic to your drop shipping website is a must! You need to generate traffic for your drop shipping business to succeed. I’m old fashioned and still believe that word of mouth and networking with business colleagues can give your drop shipping business a kick start.
3 Quick Ways To Promote Your DropShipping Website
- Start a social media page or channel to promote your website.
- Use paid ads to get more traffic to your website.
- Hire a social media influencer to promote your website or products
When you can start making money dropshipping
When you have no experience with dropshipping, the many tasks are overwhelming. Especially, if you’re doing dropshipping part-time or as a side hustle.
There are so many details to pay attention to. Product research, finding the right suppliers, the time to actually build the website, inputting product information/prices and the list goes on!
Where do you find the time to do all of this? You can take the work upon yourself and complete your website in a few days, weeks or months. But, do you really want to wait that long? “I wanna see the money!”
As we’ve mentioned above, determine your budget. If you don’t want to take the time to build your site, find workers who’ll do it for you. You can find affordable workers at onlinejobs.ph or Fiverr. Set your budget so you have funds to hire your website developer and a marketing agent. Having workers taking care of these details from start to finish, can bring your site to the stage of making money.
You’ve read about Salehoo in the section up above. Anyway, to help you get your website operating, they got drop shippers that can integrate your website platform with theirs. Through Salehoo, you can import the pictures and product information that you’ll need for your website. This will help you out when it comes to inputting all that data. So, look to Salehoo to get your drop shipping website off the ground.
As you’ve read, is it really easy to get into drop shipping? It’s totally up to you what you want to do. We’re giving you the scoops on the basics of starting your drop shipping business and the possible situations that you may encounter.