- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
Dropshipping has made selling online easy. It allows you to start an online business without investing capital in inventory and warehouses.
But its ease is a double-edged sword: since it is relatively easy to start a dropshipping business online, many online retailers use the model, making the competition extremely tight, especially in big markets such as Amazon and eBay. You can find yourself in highly competitive dropshipping markets where thousands of other merchants offer the same exact products at very low prices, squeezing out any of your profit margins should you attempt to compete head-on in terms of price.
Is it too late to start a dropshipping business? Definitely not. But if you want to succeed in using drop shipping as your business model, here are some strategies you can do:
Table of Contents
Treat dropshipping as a real business.
Many online entrepreneurs are attracted to dropshipping because it is “easy.” Many eCommerce providers and even drop ship suppliers have made it easy to set up a website selling drop shipped products. They offer merchants stock photos and product descriptions, which merchants then use because it is an easy way to build their websites and populate their product assortment.
If you think that starting a dropshipping business simply means finding drop shippers who will give you their product feed, setting it up with your eCommerce system and automatically presenting it on your site, then you are most likely going to fail. There is more to dropshipping than simply uploading to your website thousands of products straight from a drop shippers feed.
>> RELATED: Advantages and Disadvantages of Drop Shipping
If you want to earn money from dropshipping, you need to do a lot of work in presenting the products uniquely and setting up your site differently from other online entrepreneurs selling similar drop shipped products. You may be more successful with just 10 products all uniquely presented rather than 10,000 products using the drop shippers’ photo and descriptions. It’s not easy, but this is essential to success in dropshipping.
Find your own dropship suppliers.
Avoid using directories and online drop shippers lists as they are most likely already being used by thousands of other merchants and competitors. Your business will go belly up fast if you launch on Amazon using the same drop shipper as hundreds of other merchants. The only way to make good money now from dropshipping is to find your own suppliers. The most successful drop shippers are those with the ability to find the right suppliers and get the right deals.
Find a good niche.
Do a lot of research to find a good market niche that is not yet saturated to make good revenues. Children’s toys may be crowded in the market, but there may be many opportunities in smartphone cases. Clothing – women, men’s or children’s – also remain a viable market. Or check out products that do well in other countries but have not found their way to the United States or Europe.
Be an expert in getting targeted traffic.
Getting products to sell through dropshipping is just the first step of the equation. You can blow your competition out of the water by knowing how to find traffic – lots of it, and preferably traffic that converts.
Think of online marketing strategies that can bring in targeted traffic. Get your website at the top of the search engines; and one way is to make sure that you spend time crafting unique descriptions for your products and avoiding the cookie cutter photos and product descriptions supplied by your drop ship suppliers. Create a blog and write information about the products that you are selling. You must also know how to use paid advertising efficiently, such as Google AdWords and Facebook ads.
Provide your customers with an excellent store experience.
When you are drop shipping, you are competing with businesses that offer the same products. It is important to differentiate yourself from these other merchants. Set yourself apart with your website design, product range, usage of promotions and guarantees, and service.
Combine pure dropshipping with offering your own shipped products.
A good evolution for a drop shipping business is to offer your own branded products for sale. This is a riskier and costlier business model, but it offers you a more defensible revenue stream, and you won’t have to fight in terms of prices as much as when you are dropshipping.
Be mindful of your bottom line always.
One of the biggest problems of drop shipping is competitors driving down prices for the same products. You will run into problems of getting really low margins while struggling to get the volume up. You can also have issues with shipping calculators underestimating shipping cost per order.
You can still succeed with dropshipping. But you will need unique products or unique selling points while marketing your online store like crazy.
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link