Business start-up capital has always been the biggest hindrance for entrepreneurs who would like to start new ventures or businesses. But innovations in the Internet technological field has led to the development of e-commerce fulfilment method called dropshipping where you don’t need large initial capital investment to get started. In fact, even established companies, can leverage on dropshipping to introduce new product lines to their customers before they can make a decision whether they can invest in stocking the inventory at the their warehouses. Applications like Spocket built around dropshipping, and embraced by thousands of users, helps businesses access thousands of suppliers all over the world.
What is Dropshipping?
In a nutshell dropshipping refers to an e-commerce fulfillment where a business never involves itself in product fulfillment and warehouse storage operations. Instead, a customer makes an order to your online store. The order is processed, and then goes to your supplier. The supplier ships the product directly to the destination i.e. to the customer. The supplier in this case, manages the product inventory, storage and the transportation logistics. You as the online store owner simply need to drive customers to your store and take orders from them.
How Dropshipping Works
The dropshipping model typically works as follows:
- You promote the products of suppliers that know and use the dropshipping model in your online store.
- Potential customers visit your online store and make orders of these products from your website (your online store site).
- The customers pay you for the requested product, directly in your online store and you receive the money from your customer.
- With your customer’s money, you order from the supplier the product that was ordered by the customer.
- You deliver the shipping details of your client to your supplier.
- Your supplier confirms the details of the order and is ready to make the fulfillment and send the order directly. (Note that, in reality, steps 4 and 5 above, are done automatically, using dropshipping applications like Spocket, provided you have entered in the right details with regard to your profit margins in terms of %).
- Your customer receives the product through the shipping methods of your supplier.
- Your customer is satisfied with your purchase.
- You receive a profit for each sale, by subtracting what the product costs you with your supplier and what you charged the customer in your online store.
Since you don’t need stock your own inventory or spend your money and time on fulfillment tasks, the upfront investments required to start your own dropshipping business are lower than a conventional e-commerce business handling storage and logistics . For online entrepreneurs, this is one of the best ways to make money online, as it comes with flexibility allowing you to work from anywhere in the world with Internet connection. You can also experiment with new products without losing money as would happen if you had your own inventory. This can help you find out which products works (performs well) for a particular audience.
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While dropshipping has a number of advantages over the traditional e-commerce fulfillment, it comes with its own demerits. For example, the profit margins in dropshipping sales are usually lower as you have to keep the costs of the products lower to be competitive (in actual fact, you share the profits with the supplier for managing the product inventory, storage and fulfillment). Additionally, you have little to no control over the customer experience because you don’t control quality of the products being shipped.
How to Get Started With a Dropshipping Business
Start with an audience and a problem or need, before thinking about a product; in other words, focus from the start in solving a specific problem or meeting a certain need of your ideal group of customers by offering a solution through your products. Additionally, you should be able to drive demand and conversions with your product solutions. Being passionate about what you are doing is the drive that will keep you going even in challenging times, thus, picking an area that interests you is also important factor to put into consideration. Take your time in selecting your audience and market niche(s); analyze multiple types of audiences, their needs, tastes, hobbies, locations, income level(s), problems, purchasing capacity, etc. This will help you distinguish sales opportunities and find and match the right product with the right audience.
After picking a niche, invest time to research e-commerce platforms that can help you set up an online store. Spocket integrates with all the major e-commerce solutions such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, and BigCommerce, just to name a few. These platforms provide the necessary tools you need to create an online store front, without having to know any coding.
Build a brand, this involves finding a suitable domain that fits that niche you have selected, and investing in professional design (with the help of a graphic designer) of your online store with a unique logo and appropriate colors that identifies your business online. You may seek technical support from a web developer to ensure speed, design and functionality of your website is top notch.
To attract audience and drive sales, you need to have a content marketing strategy in place. You can write articles (blogs) around the niche you have chosen. For example, you can talk about how to solve problems your audience face (assume you are dealing with tech niche, say laptops), a problem may be how to fix slow speed in laptops and match these with some of your laptop products.
While optimizing your site for search engines to drive organic is a good marketing strategy, it may take a very long time to see any reasonable number of visitors from search that can sustain your business online. This means, you may need to look beyond organic traffic and move to paid traffic. In this case, you will have to learn about how to use Google AdWords, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, Bing ads, and other channels like Quora ads, Reddit ads, etc.
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Other key considerations to keep in mind when you are operating an online store, is the holidays. This is the time to incorporate promotions, coupons, discounts, free shipping, etc. to increase your orders during festivities. Additionally, keep looking for new products and new suppliers; this is where Spocket can be of great help to you.
What is Spocket?
Spocket is an application that allows you to select the best products to sell on your online store from thousands of dropshipping suppliers all over the world.
Why should you consider Spocket?
With Spocket application, you can improve your dropping shipping business 10 times:
- No upfront cost – start utilizing Spocket app for free since there is no requirement for a credit card details or registration fees.
- Spocket comes with branded invoicing – this enables you to mark your dropshipping business with a unique brand identity.
- Access to US and EU original suppliers – with Spocket application, you have access to reliable US, EU and Global suppliers with fast shipping on high quality winning products.
- Best deals on products – heavy discounts ranging from 30 – 40% on all products. These deals are exclusively on Spocket.
In addition to the above key features, you can also order product samples from the Spocket dashboard right from your dashboard in a just a few clicks. This will enable you to test out the products and suppliers to a build a reliable dropshipping business. Also, you can fulfill orders with just one click. Spocket app can easily sync with your online store and all the orders automatically appear in your app. As indicated earlier, Spocket is integrated with platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Alibaba, Square, eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, WooCommerce, etc.
With Spocket, in addition to automated order fulfillment, you can import products with one click, automate the pricing process i.e. choose to calculate your profit mark-up and track the order in real time.
Last but not least, Spocket ensures every supplier that is on their platform is vetted and rated based on their order processing and shipping times and product quality. This can greatly impact the quality of your customer experience.
How to start using Spocket
First you have to have an account with Spocket. You can get started for free here.
Since you can integrate your e-commerce platform store to your Spocket application, you can easily link your store within Spocket dashboard, and then import some of high performing products in terms of sales by browsing the catalogue, selecting from the various categories, for example the trending category has products with upward sales trends, additionally, with Spocket premium plans you unlock access to the bestselling and discounted products.
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Spocket Pricing Plans
Spocket has three pricing plans that you can select from.
- Starter
- Pro
- Empire
- Unicorn
Starter
This is priced at $39.99 after the free 14-day trial.
This is particularly for those who have just started their dropshipping businesses and want to start getting sales.
Some of the features of this plan include:
- 25 unique products
- Email support
- 24×7 chat support
- AliExpress dropshipping
Pro
This plan is priced at $59.99 after the free 14-day trial
This is targeted at drop shippers who want to boost their sales.
Some of the features include:
- 250 unique products
- 25 premium products
- Branded invoicing
- 24/7 chat support
- AliExpress dropshipping
- Supplier communication
- Image search
Empire
This is priced at $99.99 after the free 14-day trial.
This is the most popular plan used by businesses to maximize their sales.
Some of its features include:
- 10000 unique products
- 10000 premium products
- Branded invoicing
- 24×7 chat support
- Supplier communication
- AliExpress dropshipping
- Image search
Unicorn
Price: $299 after the free 14-day trial.
With this plan you can manage sales at scale.
Some of the features of this plan include:
- 25000 unique products
- 25000 premium products
- Bulk checkout
- Product requests
- Supplier communication
- AliExpress dropshipping
- VIP chat and email support
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Bottom Line
The advancement in technology has made it possible for the innovations in e-commerce area. Internet entrepreneurs can now leverage on technology to build their businesses online. Dropshipping is one of the ways you can generate passive income online if well executed. Tools like Spocket gives you access to multiple products to sell in your online store as well the suppliers of these products thus boosting your dropshipping business.
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