How to start a dropshipping business?: A step by step guide

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Starting a dropshipping business isn’t as easy as projected. You have to drive through a lot of complications. But on the other hand, it provides you the facility of ‘starting off’ without much cash. Although you get much ‘freedom of business’ in this segment and you won’t need much of the formal approach to start an online business. There are certain steps you should follow to be a successful drop shipper. Follow me to understand the rest of the process.

Starting a dropshipping business: Introduction

To start a dropshipping business requires the following assertions as per suggestions by experts:

A delivery partner

To start a profitable dropshipping business you will need a reliable shipping partner to ship your products to the customer. As you do NOT get inventory as a ‘plus’ to store your returned products. Therefore, a product undelivered might occur as a loss for you.

Choose your niche

Choose the product niche you wanna start with. Either it should be interesting as a business or profitable from another perspective. Else you’ll fail, losing a lot of money.

This can be done easily by finding business research using the below-discussed tools:

• Ubersuggest: This tool suggests amazing business ideas and their search trends across the world for free. 

The below snippet shows the trends of ‘nail polish’.

• Google Trends: This product tells you the trends running currently in the market. You enter a keyword i.e. product and you get the trends, search volume trending period, etc. as information for free.

The below snippet is a representation of google trends of ‘nail polish.

• Keywords Everywhere: This tool does the same job of finding trends in products, their trending time, and search volume.

Do competitive research

Do competitive research to find out the best business niche that suits your conditions. It is easy to find competition and related research. Just act as following steps while doing the competitive research:

• Google search: SERPs act sometimes as the default method to solve problems. Here too, happens the same. The top 15 search results in the SERP show your top 10 competitors.

• Practice competitor research tools like ‘Alexa’: These awesome tools help you find and keep track of your competitor’s social media activity. These even keep a track record of competitors’ competitors.

• Peruse social media: Watch the advertisement pages of top brands. Follow the SMO ( Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) posts of top brands. This predicts the paths being followed at the top level in the market to get success. 

• Subscribe to the competitor’s email list: This helps you find the competitor’s marketing strategy.

Study everything you can of your contestants. From the website to their reputation keep them on the record. This will help make decisions based on research and you will feel confident about it.

[Source]

Opening an online store: Guidelines for dropshipping

The below snippet shows you the process of a successful dropshipping chain. Let us discuss the same in detail:

• Your customer places an order: This is the first step towards the start of a dropshipping module.

• The order sent to the supplier: The algorithm in the software( in an ideal dropshipping store) uses an auto-synchronization code which allows the inventory to be updated as per the availability of the product.

• The order is prepared: The order is prepared by the supplier to be shipped directly to the customer.

• The order is shipped: After the packaging is done, the order is shipped directly to the customer.

[Source]

What product to sell?

After competitors’ analysis, product research is the most important of the dropshipping business domain. As we have discussed most of it in the “Choose your niche” sub-heading. We are going to discuss some of the best products that are sellable on Amazon while dropshipping. Remember we are discussing dropshipping from Amazon to Shopify

• Electronics: These are the most sold items on Amazon as per the below-mentioned sources. So buying them on Amazon is easier as compared to the below items. Hence dropshipping them is hassle-free.

• Clothing, shoes, and jewelry: These are the second most available products on Amazon. These are available ‘a click away’.  Hence easy to dropship.

• Beauty and personal care: The same story continues here as well.

• Books

• Cell phone and accessories

• Movies and TV

• Pet supplies

• Sports and outdoors, etc.

The rest infographics are mentioned in the snippet below.

[Source: Statista]

Finding products: DOs and DON’Ts

There are methods one should follow while finding a product on Amazon or one will be lost in the sea of products. Let us discuss some quick tricks for finding products to dropship. 

Dropshipping is a traditional method of business that gives you small but noticeable margins of profit. In such scenarios, you ought to keep track of even the smallest changes in the market. To conclude, let us discuss some DOs and DON’Ts for a successful dropshipping business

DOs

• Products being listed should contain weather or seasonal products.
• The products should be trending as per the result on SERPs.
• The use of software for inventory management always eases the task

DON’Ts

• Never list a socially banned or abusive product.
• Do NOT rush while listing a product. There should be enough inspection of the virtual inventory.

Establishing eCommerce store

After all the above processes you need to establish an eCommerce store to enlarge your business module. The next big thing in starting a dropshipping business is opening an eCommerce store like Shopify.

How much is an eCommerce website necessary?

Enlarging a business requires a personalized eCommerce website for business promotion. Consequently, the website makes a ‘stronghold’ in the expenditures.

Shipping costs

These are costs that are covered by you or the customer. It depends on how you have listed the product. For example, for a freely shipped item, you as a seller have to pay for the shipping expenses, and for a ‘charged for shipment’ item, the customer pays for the shipping costs.

Promoting your product

Promoting your product through advertisements can go ‘heavy on the pocket’ for some, but they fruit well. Let us discuss some types of promoting the products via the following types of ads.

Google ads

Google advertisements provide a wide range of opportunities while serving a wide range of popular purposes. Being one of the largest advertising platforms, google ads contribute a lot of options to be selected from the menu.

Facebook ads

Facebook advertisements are an important way of connecting to the audience on the world’s largest social media platform. As Facebook’s algorithm keeps changing from time to time, which is very hard to cope up with. Henceforth it becomes a challenge to grow the traffic organically on Facebook.

But Facebook’s ‘micro-targeting’ features allow you to target the apt audience at the right time. Therefore, giving you the quality number of targeted customers that want or would want to buy your product. Thus, giving you more return on investment (ROI).

Email marketing

As the famous author Neil Patel says, “Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on sending emails and developing relationships with prospects and customers”. 

This means It turns ‘prospects’ into ‘potential customers’ and ‘customers’ into ‘recurring customers’.  

Is email marketing dead?

The answer is no. Those who think that email marketing has moved past its prime time are wrongly focused.

Conclusion

Starting off a dropshipping is a low-cost, low-risk, ‘workable for a newbie’  business module to start selling online. With the rise of new dropshipping tools and software, dropshipping has become easy to comprehend and work with. 

With this guide, we hope that you are more motivated than before to start off as ‘your own boss’.

How to rank your products in search engines (product SEO)?

Ranking your product is not an easy task. It requires a lot of hard work to be done on an SEO part. Let us discuss some methods to rank a product in SERPs.