Drop Shipping Guidelines for Retail Entrepreneurial Success

Drop shipping sounds exciting as a concept to many budding entrepreneurs, but it’s important to delve deep and understand different aspects of the new mode of business.

Drop shipping has undoubtedly changed the dynamics of retail businesses today and made it far more democratic. The thought of selling a wide range of products with no machinery or inventory at your disposal was unimaginable and even seemed a joke a few years ago. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to even hail drop shipping as a revolution of sorts considering the way it has revived the retail realm for the better. However, new business entrants of the retail sector, especially those of you who are on the verge of trying your luck with online trade by just a glimpse of what drop shipping could offer , here are a few more aspects to consider.

Scroll down to learn more about drop shipping guidelines. If you are taking baby steps into entrepreneurship, this article should hopefully serve as a simple-yet-sensible guide until you master the tricks of the trade.

Chinavasion too offers its own, exclusive drop-shipping model, which can be utilized to collaborate with the brand and become a reseller. Even if the term is sort of alien to you, you could learn more about it right here.

The Dark Side of Drop Shipping

Most online sources of information on drop shipping present a rosy picture of the business model and how it has the potential to help you amass large profits and eventually amplify your clout as a retail businessman. However, there’s more to drop shipping than what you have perceived so far – a dark underbelly of sorts revolving around the term that’s seldom spoken about.

The recent popularity of drop shipping has also resulted in a sharp incline in the number of retail business aspirants, most of who are already affiliate members of renowned brands such as Amazon and eBay. So, if you are a new entrant to the retail realm, embrace yourself for stiff competition from hundreds of individuals who are trying to sell the same products as you and even adopting social media platforms and websites.

If you indeed want your tryst with drop shipping to be lucrative it is crucial to devise new strategies to pip many competitors and steer ahead. So how does one emerge successful by adopting a dropship lifestyle? The pointers below should help get over the challenges.

(a) Drop Shipping Websites

One of the smart steps to make your drop shipping venture a successful endeavor is to indulge in a research of the many drop shipping websites available around us today and what they can offer. The new concept of business and how Amazon and eBay are flagbearers of drop shipping is well-known among most households across the globe today. Hence, it is important to also look for several other brands websites that offer drop shipping models that are highly-profitable, beginner-friendly and aren’t the obvious names in the business most laymen know.

There are definitely portals that could help new drop shippers earn great profits, yet are largely unknown, which implies less competition. One of your early efforts should definitely involve fishing such a website to begin with.

(a.1.) Conflict of Interests

Another important aspect which is often overlooked by several drop shipping aspirants, while choosing a portal to work with is conflict of interest. This clash is the aspect several successful drop shippers have understood over the years and have been suggesting new entrants to consider. You must understand that while a few portals are entirely dedicated to the interest of 3^rd party resellers like yourself, endorsing their products, a few other brands are striving to sell the products themselves.

For instance, Amazon is one such seller that advertises its own products to get them sold, and if you too are trying to find buyers for the same brand’s products, there is a clash of interest. The brand employs sophisticated metrics and analytical tools to understand the profit-making pattern among its affiliates and resellers. When the authorities at Amazon realize that a reseller registered on its portal is earning a good income by selling its own products and dampening the company’s own sales ambitions, it would try its best to eliminate the reseller or hinder his business prospects.

Else, based on the results of its analysis, the company would learn which product is getting the cash registers ringing and do its best to ship as many numbers of the item to buyers. This behavior in turn would harm the reseller and result in dwindling profits.

 So, the inference to be drawn here is the success graph of a reseller trying to sell the products of  reputed retail brands would witness a sharp incline only for a short duration, after which the profitability would decline. Hence, it is important to find a drop shipping website that’s exclusively a platform for resellers like yourself and you wouldn’t end up becoming a competitor of the brand.

eBay is one such site tailored for 3^rd part resellers. However, a bit of research would lead you to more such websites where you wouldn’t just find less competitors but reap an impressive huge amount of profit.

If you are relatively naïve about drop shipping and yet interested to explore this business avenue, Chinavasion could be a great place to start. The site lets you buy products at really low prices, if bulk purchase is an idea you are toying. If you want to indulge in drop shipping with absolutely no inventory at your disposal too you can leverage Chinavasion’s business model. You can pay the Chinese retail brand only when a buyer has placed an order. There are several other benefits too of collaborating with Chinavasion, which you could read here.

(b) WooCommerce

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Now that you have decided drop shipping is the best way forward for your business endeavor, it’s time you harness the benefits of WooCommerce to build a more intuitive, attractive website. For those of you who aren’t aware what it is, WooCommerce is a simple, powerful, and extendible platform for ecommerce that’s available with WordPress. So, if you have used the tool to build websites earlier, it’s time you leverage the WooCommerce plug-in for a better experience.

The WooCommerce dropshipping approach helps you gain total control over your virtual store, make it aesthetically more appealing, customize the design to make the whole interface more enticing to the visitors. You could change the way the best drop shipping products are listed and make the platform more scalable to accommodate new additions. Thus, the WooCommerce-powered virtual store makes your virtual store far more interesting than traditional websites and increases your probability of selling and get those cash registers ringing.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time building a website, you could even harness the benefits of a platform such as Shopify, which has been tailored for ecommerce endeavors.

(a) Choosing a Niche Product

 A visit to any virtual retail store would lead you to an overwhelming range of products that seem attractive and which you would consider selling. Often, individuals who are quite alien to the whole drop shipping realm would land up in ambiguity as to what could be sold.

An obvious, but a definite NO-NO approach is to try selling products that aren’t preferred by a large number of competitors. However, you must notice that probably the product is not being sold by a large number of drop shippers since it doesn’t have many takers. Choosing to sell such a product with almost no demand would prove to be suicidal.

The wiser way to generate a demand and reap rich dividends is to identify products that are quite expensive, and yet high in demand. Deciding to sell such costly products that are highly popular among people belonging to a stratum would suffice in ensuring your drop shipping endeavor is successful. Even if you sell just a few of these costly products, such as expensive electronic gadgets, the margin you would end up earning would easily be much more than the profits that could be generated through routine essentials such as oil or soap.

In your bid to choose a niche product, it is also important to ensure that the items you are considering aren’t easily available at nearby retail outlets for cheap.

(a) Generating a Buzz

How do you ensure a regular inflow of customers that result in transactions? Well, make the best of your social media accounts to get people to visit your website and buy your products. This is the best way to market your products since these platforms are absolutely free and you can get people to buy your products without spending absolutely anything on marketing.

 All you have to do is create exclusive pages of your brands or the goods that you want to sell and you would have to get your friends and followers to subscribe. As you may already know, any new arrival or an update on any of these pages would notify all the followers of these social media pages, which would lead to visitors and buyers.

A big challenge with online selling is that a lot of visitors of ecommerce portals check out the stuff available but wouldn’t really try buying. An analytic study would even reveal that a lot of people had visited your website and social media accounts yet not many items are sold, to your dismay.

Overcoming the ‘window shopper’ hurdle is something a lot of individuals have failed at over the years. This also implies that the common challenge of all these competitors is also your business opportunity. It is important to target those impulsive buyers who can spend money almost instantly. If you are aware that most of your potential segment is the laid-back kind, then it is important to change their behavior and instill a sense of urgency to buy the products you are endorsing.

One way to create a feeling among the subscribers of your page that it is vital to buy your products is to post product reviews with click bait headlines which could trigger curiosity in their minds. This approach would definitely see a slight improvement in your sales. You could also make the best of email marketing to grab a few eyeballs, if you think the social media approach isn’t going to prove to be fruitful.

A few other ways to post content on your website and social media pages includes keywords that are widely searched across engines such as Google. A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) study definitely helps a great deal in knowing the popular terms which are being searched by people worldwide, and including them would easily grab the attention of people on the internet.

(a) Building Your Own Brand

If you are looking to make a few quick bucks through drop shipping then you could merely register yourself as a reseller on one of these brand websites. However, if you are one of the ambitious kind who wants to carve a niche and thrive in the retail realm for many more years by relying on drop shipping, you should probably think of creating a brand. Make yourself heard among thousands of individuals belonging to your targeted customer segment and create a sense of trust among them, although you are merely reselling products manufactured by somebody else.

Creating a brand and amassing a lot of dedicated followers would help immensely in leading you towards many more business avenues in the near future. One such opportunity could also be the possibility of being a trusted partner of multi-Billion Dollar retail giant.

 So, it is wiser to include drop shipping in your larger scheme of things, be futuristic in your way of thinking, and think of a brand name and logo at the earliest.

(a) Realistic Pricing

Several websites give resellers the liberty to adjust the prices of the goods to allure more buyers. This is another reason why a lot of young entrepreneurs are turning towards drop shipping today. Pricing is a tricky aspect of the business which could determine your fate in this business realm. Utmost care must be taken to ensure that the pricing isn’t unreasonable enough to shoo away potential buyers and at the same time there’s also an opportunity to earn a fair bit of profit.

 Adhering to low pricing to attract more buyers would be pointless if you can’t absolutely earn any sort of profit margin. Hence it is important to price your product in such a way that you earn handsomely too. A lot of successful resellers in the past have sold products for exorbitant prices, more than what they deserve. You might recall many such examples too.

Well, good marketing is the trick to reap high monetary benefits. Make the best of your social media accounts, and even word-of-mouth publicity through your peers, friends and family members. These marketing ways are free of cost and could prove to be vital in your drop shipping success.

(a) Timely Accounting

If you are aiming to be a businessman, a routine task you must be prepared for is accounting on a regular basis. During your early days in the drop shipping or any business, you could simply wear your thinking hat and accurately calculate the numbers being generated on a daily basis. However, the task would become quite complex as your sales increase or sky rocket.

When a drop shipping business or any trade endeavor for that matter progresses, the tendency is to hire few assistants to manage a part of the business for you. When your drop shipping business has reached this stage, accounting becomes inevitable. Tracing transactions and the profit generated on a monthly basis would help you know if it is practical to hire a lot of assistants and compromise on a small percentage of your profits.

(a) Relying on Multiples Sales Channels

During your research of drop shipping websites, you might find a particular portal interesting and even consider it for your business endeavor. However, each such retail portal has its own shortcomings, which simply means it’s wiser to have yourself registered on several other sites as well.

As the old adage goes ‘never put all your eggs in one basket’, similarly pinning your hopes on a single platform would be absurd considering the drastic economic fluctuations in today’s times. This would make your drop shipping approach far more robust since you are surely not doomed even if one of the sales channels crash. It is wise to indulge in a research of various dropship direct opportunities online to figure multiple monetary avenues.

This compilation has hopefully helped paint a clearer picture of how drop shipping can be leveraged to the best of your advantage to gain a competitive edge over competitors. You could probably refer to this article on drop shipping guidelines just before getting started with your endeavor.

Now that you are reasonably enlightened about the benefits, challenges and pitfalls of drop shipping, it is time to introspect and deduce an approach that helps you carve a niche and amass large amounts of money.