Why Drop Shipping is Beneficial

Why Drop Shipping is Beneficial

People today are looking for convenience as well as ways to save time and money.  With high gas prices, travel time, and busy schedules the option to shop online any time of day or night is a fitting solution.  Online stores who provide drop shipping provide a favorable solution.

In case you are not familiar with drop shipping, it is a retail method where you don’t keep your own products in stock.  That’s right – no inventory required!  You partner with a wholesale supplier who stocks its own inventory.  You send the details to them and they send it directly to your customer.  Most customers don’t know you are drop shipping, because the return address information is customized to your ecommerce store.

Here are the top 10 drop shipping benefits:

1. You don’t need buckets of money

2. You can offer thousands of items to your customers without having physical inventory in stock

3. It is convenient and efficient

4. Allows you mobility to run your store anywhere in the world where you get an internet connection

5. No physical presence is needed since it is online not a brick and mortar building

6. Drop shipping is a trusted model used even by big retail stores

7. It is the best return on your time

8. Drop shipping eliminates wait times when products are shipped from the distributor or manufacturer to the merchant; a merchant can start selling the moment the product is published on the ecommerce site.

9. Gives you more time for customer service and marketing

10. Faster profits with less cost and no recruiting

North America’s Top 1000 retailers by online sales, which collectively account for about 90% of e-retail purchases in the United States and Canada, are growing far faster than total retail sales. Web sales of the Top 1000 increased 15.7% to $302.56 billion up from $261.47 billion in 2013. That’s slightly higher than the 15.4% growth in 2014 online sales, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

 Not having to deal with packaging and shipping inventory yourself saves you extra work and time.  Drop shipping eliminates many steps for you and is more direct, since the customer gets their order delivered to their door.

These are just a few benefits mentioned here.  Please share any other benefits you have found with drop shipping.  If you are just getting started, let us know what other benefits you discover along the way.

How Hard is it to Start a Dropshipping Business

1. Decide on a type product you care about. To launch a business, you will need something to sell and it is strongly advised that you pick one that is close to your heart. This way, you won’t find it difficult to promote it and convince other people to love the merchandise as much as you do. You can have your pick from a variety of choices – toys, electronics, clothes, accessories, and so on. If you want to narrow down your options, what you could do is go over some of the activities you love doing and base your product choice on that. You could also list down pros and cons for your final selection – for example, accessibility of resource, price, seasonal appropriateness – so you would have a better picture of what would be more convenient to stock on your Ecommerce store.

2. Find a wholesaler. Once you’ve figured out what product to start dropshipping, you can move on to landing a wholesaler.  It would be good for you to choose a drop shipper that is experienced in the field and carries large quantities of the wares you want to sell. And it is certainly important that they extend great after-sales service and have received positive feedback from other clients. Popularity may be a consideration for choosing a wholesaler since it suggests great performance. However, that may also mean competition for attention. As such, you might want to have less popular candidates in your roster as well.

3. Creating a Shopify or WordPress w/ WooCommerce account. Creating a web store for your business will be the easiest step for starting a drop ship enterprise. All you have to do is sign up on the specified websites, then, put up pictures and descriptions of your product. One option is to install wordpress and woocommerce plugin for those already familiar with WordPress as a blog.  Another option Shopify, meanwhile, extends a 14-day free trial for interested sellers and has a $14/month starter kit that equips you with enough specs to sell 25 products.

4. Finally, start selling products. To get your dropshipping business into full swing, you will have to do some marketing. Getting people back to your store to purchase your products by talking about it on networking sites and search engines helps. You could post site links on Facebook and Twitter, upload pictures of the products on Instagram, and submit write-ups about your merchandise on blogs and article sites. You could also start making dropshipping profits with the help of a search engine optimization (SEO). Just by working part time on your business, you should get you enough momentum to start making a reasonable profit.

Drop Shipping Definition

Drop shipping is defined as a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. As in retail businesses, the majority of retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price, but some retailers earn an agreed percentage.

When a drop ship store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never sees or handles the product.

The biggest difference between dropshipping and the standard retail model is that the selling merchant doesn’t stock or own inventory. Instead, the merchant purchases inventory as needed from a third party – usually a wholesaler or manufacturer – to fulfill orders.

Drop Shipping Benefits

Low Overhead – Because you don’t have to deal with purchasing inventory or managing a warehouse, your overhead expenses are quite low. In fact, many successful dropshipping businesses are run from a home offices with minimal overhead or expenses. As you grow, these expenses will likely increase but will still be extremely low compared to those of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.

Flexible Location – A dropshipping business can be run from just about anywhere with an internet connection. As long as you can communicate with suppliers and customers easily, you can run and manage your business.

Wide Selection of Products – Because you don’t have to pre-purchase the items you sell, you can offer an array of products to your potential customers. If suppliers stock an item, you can list if for sale on your website at no additional cost.

Easy to Scale – With a traditional business, if you receive three times as much business you’ll usually need to do three times as much work.  By leveraging dropshipping suppliers, most of the work to process additional orders will be borne by the suppliers, allowing you to expand with fewer growing pains and less incremental work.  Sales growth will always bring additional work – especially related to customer service – but business that utilize dropshipping scale particularly well relative to traditional ecommerce businesses.

All these benefits make dropshipping a very attractive model to both beginning and established merchants. Unfortunately, dropshipping isn’t all roses and rainbows. All this convenience and flexibility comes at a price.

Drop Shipping Disadvantages

Low Margins – Low margins are the biggest disadvantage to operating in a highly competitive dropshipping niche. Because it’s so easy to get started – and the overhead costs are so minimal – many merchants will set up shop and sell items at rock-bottom prices in an attempt to grow revenue. They’ve invested so little in getting the business started so they can afford to operate on minuscule margins.

True, these merchants often have low-quality websites and poor (if any) customer service. But that won’t stop customers from comparing their prices to yours. This increase in cutthroat competition will quickly destroy the profit margin in a niche. Fortunately, you can do a lot to mitigate this problem by selecting a niche that’s well suited for dropshipping.

Inventory Issues – If you stock all your own items, it’s relatively simple to keep track of which items are in and out of stock. But when you’re sourcing from multiple warehouses, which are also fulfilling orders for other merchants, inventory changes on a daily basis. While there are ways you can better sync your store’s inventory with your suppliers’, these solutions don’t always work seamlessly, and suppliers don’t always support the technology required.

Shipping Complexities – If you work with multiple suppliers – as most drop shippers do – the products on your website will be sourced through a number of different drop shippers. This complicates your shipping costs.

Let’s say a customer places an order for three items, all of which are available only from separate suppliers. You’ll incur three separate shipping charges for sending each item to the customer, but it’s probably not wise to pass this charge along to the customer, as they’ll think you’re grossly overcharging for shipping! And even if you did want to pass these charges along, automating these calculations can be difficult.

Supplier Errors – Have you ever been blamed for something that wasn’t your fault, but you had to accept responsibility for the mistake anyway?

Even the best drop shipping suppliers make mistakes fulfilling orders – mistakes for which you have to take responsibility and apologize. And mediocre and low-quality suppliers will cause endless frustration with missing items, botched shipments and low-quality packing, which can damage your business’s reputation.

Is It Worth It?

Dropshipping isn’t a perfect, stress-free way to build a successful business. The model has some definite advantages but comes with a number of built-in complexities and problems you’ll need to be able to address.

The good news is that with some careful planning and consideration, most of these problems can be resolved and need not prevent you from building a thriving, profitable dropshipping business.