How To become A Successful Dropshipper Online

What Is Dropshipping Business?

Dropshipping is a business model which you can use to run your store without ever holding any inventory. Once you’ve made a sale your supplier will ship your products from their warehouse, straight to your customer’s doorstep.

The biggest difference between dropshipping and the traditional eCommerce business model is that the selling merchant doesn’t stock or own inventory, they act as the middleman.

How To Start A Dropshipping Business?

Step 1: Choosing a Dropshipping Business Niche

The truth is, what you sell matters. You should take some time to find the best dropshipping business ideas. Most people tell you to pick a niche you’re passionate about. But that’s only a half-truth. It’s about a combination of profit and passion, skewed towards profit. The reality is the best dropshipping business ideas are usually the profitable ones. It’s a lot easier to be passionate when you’re actually making money.

The products you decide to sell can make or break your business, so it’s important to find a product (or a few products) that meet the following qualifications:

• Interesting: Choose a product you find interesting or it may be hard to sell.
  You can use Google Trends and other tools to find trending products that people actually want to buy.

• Focused: Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Find a specific customer base you can customize your marketing for.

• Profitability: Remember that it takes a dropshipper the same amount of work to market a $50 product as it does to market a $5 product. Choose a profitable niche that will maximize your payout.

• Cheap to ship:. maller lightweight items that don’t cost so much to ship.

• Hard to find: Focus on products that aren’t available locally. Make sure your customers have to turn to online stores to find what you’re selling.

• Evergreen: Choose products that are available and in demand year-round—seasonal items mean inconsistent cash flow.

• Brandable: Try to choose products that can be easily branded with your business name, logo, or unique flair (you may have to find a supplier that allows you to brand their products).

Note: You can use this online calculator to determine the profitability of products you are thinking of selling. It deducts Amazon fees from the retail price and estimates how many items are being sold each month, which is an indicator of demand.

Step 2: Research The Competition

A lot of new dropshippers make the mistake of choosing niche markets with no competition, thinking that if no one else is selling the product they’re offering, they’ll be able to stand out and win sales more easily.

The problem? If there’s no competition in your niche, it’s probably because customers have no interest in the product. Successful dropshipping businesses choose a niche where there’s already some competition, then they figure out how to make their winning product better or more marketable.

That means researching what other businesses in your industry are doing. How are they marketing their goods? What’s working well that you can use too? What can you improve on? This research will shape your customer acquisition strategy and help you stand out from your competitors.

You should also spend time reading customer reviews for both your competitors and their products. Your competitors’ customers are also your potential customers, so reviews can give you great insight into what your customers like and don’t like. This data may have a direct impact on what supplier you choose (since your supplier controls both the quality of the product and customer interfacing via order fulfillment).

Enter the name of one of the products you want to sell into Google and do a quick search to see who shows up on top. The top ten results on Google or any other search engine will give you a good indication of your competition in a certain location. If you are selling products in a location different from where you are based you can use third-party tools to gather data. Use tools like SEM Rush or Ahref to get information about search results in different locations across the world.

Search through Alexa or SimilarWeb to find niche competitors that might not show up high in general search results. These websites will give a summary of the websites you are searching for including their social media profiles, any advertising they are doing, audience and traffic information for their website, and a list of competitors for that business.

Step 3: License Your Business

While not all solopreneurs need a business license, dropshippers sometimes do—especially if your dropshipping niche requires you to partner with an overseas supplier. 

Step 4: Find A Supplier

For many aspiring eCommerce entrepreneurs, finding a reliable supplier is the hardest part of starting a dropshipping business.

You rely on suppliers to keep your product in stock, uphold product quality, and ensure orders are shipped to your customers in a timely manner. As a dropshipper, your supplier is your most important business partner.

To avoid problems when you do find the right supplier, be sure to ask these questions upfront:

What’s their return policy?

Do they offer insurance?

Do they offer fraud protection?

• Production capabilities: Can your supplier keep up with your sales projections? Can they scale up with you as your business grows?

• Order fees: Check to see if your supplier charges a fee every time you submit an order. If that fee is too high, it may cut into your profit margin too much. Deal-breaker.

• Turnaround times: Test your prospective supplier’s speed to ensure the promised delivery time matches your experience.

• Product quality: Read customer reviews and test your supplier’s product quality to ensure it passes muster.

• Product photos: Because you don’t own the products you’ll sell, it’s better to rely on your supplier’s product photos to avoid legal trouble and a lot of extra work. But make sure your supplier’s photos are high-quality, showcase the product to its best advantage, and match the style of product photos used by your competitors.

• Support: Does your supplier offer fast, helpful support when you have a question or a problem? Make sure they’ll be responsive when a customer contacts you with a product question you can’t answer off-hand.

If you’re still unsure whether your prospective supplier is right for you, it never hurts to ask for referrals. If the supplier is legitimate and reliable, they should have no trouble providing glowing testimonials.

Where To Find Reliable Suppliers?

It can be easy to find a good supplier with Oberlo and AliExpress. Once you are on the platform you can search for products, and choose suppliers from the list of results. On these platforms, you can see reviews, ratings, and how long the supplier has been on the platform, for each supplier and this should sway your decision on which supplier to choose. 

Step 5. Build Your eCommerce Store

One option is to build your own eCommerce website on a website-building platform. Having your own Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify dropshipping store gives you maximum control over your brand. And depending on your platform, you may be able to integrate your website with other sales channels (like social media marketplaces).

While pretty much any website builder will do, eCommerce-focused platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce may offer extra advantages. With the Shopify app, for example, you can manage orders, chat with customers, and process payments on the go from your smartphone.

While building your own eCommerce site gives you lots of control, it also means more work. Plus, it can be expensive, depending on the platform you choose.

Another cheaper option is to use an eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. Setting up your store on a trusted marketplace automatically lends your business more credibility, which may make you seem more trustworthy to potential customers. It also gets you at least a little bit of guaranteed traffic to your store right off the bat, and it’s usually more affordable to start up.

The downside? Some marketplaces charge you fees for every sale you make. You also have less control over your online branding and customer service. On densely populated marketplaces like Amazon, you may also have more competition since your products will be listed side by side with your competitors’ products.

Step 6: Implementing A Customer Acquisition Strategy

Having a great product and a great website, but without customers, you are not going to have a successful business. There are many ways to attract consumers, and one of them is to catch their attention through: 

• Social Media: You can use many platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to start a campaign for the success of your business. It will allow you to generate sales and revenue right from the start, which will contribute to the quick scaling. Facebook enables you to put the offer directly inform of the highly targeted audience. It can give you the ability to compete with the largest brands and retailers immediately. You can also use YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and other video platforms to produce relevant content that's useful for your users and promotes your brand.

• Influencer partnerships: Teaming up with influential businesses or people within your niche to promote your product.

• Search Engine Optimization: Using relevant keywords on your site to help your store show up in search results

• Email marketing:: You can collect the emails from the start and can set up an automated email sequence that will offer discounts, new products, announce sales, insider deals.

• Get free media coverage: Using the free HARO tool you can subscribe to a three times a day email list where reporters reach out to you to get stories for their article. Some may be looking for influencers in a specific niche others may be looking for product recommendations. Either way, if you’ve got that retargeting ad running, that free traffic back to your website could result in some sales. Instead of adding a link to your homepage ‘websitenamehere.com’ send it to a product collection or a specific product to create a more targeted focus. You can still add your brand’s name as the name for the hyperlink.

• Content marketing: The way you use blog posts, tutorials, guest posts on other sites, and even product copy to reinforce your brand and win new customers

It is effortless to leverage your existing customer base and generate revenue without additional advertising and marketing spending.

The right marketing strategy will depend on your product niche, your understanding of your eCommerce users, and the marketing techniques being used by your competitors. Be sure to rely on the information you gleaned during your product and competition research.

7. Analyze And Improve Your Offering

Once you have spent time building your website, brand, and marketing you can start to analyze the results of your hard work. You may find that certain marketing activities are hugely successful while others are not so much. Or you can look at your pricing against competitors and see if you could change things up a bit to make things more competitive.

You can use tools like Google Search Console, Analytics, or Facebook conversion pixel data >to evaluate your online traffic to make sure that traffic is increasing, not decreasing. If you are using third-party tools for email marketing or social media reporting, set up weekly or monthly automatic reports so that you will be reminded to analyze this information regularly. Even a quick snapshot of data from a tool can be enough to decide if a campaign is working or not.

Overall the most important part of a successful online eCommerce store is to test and optimize in order to increase the revenue that you generate online. This makes sure that your website will not fall behind best practices and keeps you ahead of your competitors too.

Where To Find A Dropshipping Business For Sale

If you don’t want to create a dropshipping business from scratch, you can find a dropshipping business for sale on Exchange, Shopify’s marketplace for buying and selling online stores—from ready-to-go stores to dropshipping eCommerce businesses to established empires. With over 10,000 online stores for sale, you can find a dropshipping business that matches your interests and budget and start running it right away.
Through Exchange, you can see information about a potential dropshipping business for sale, including traffic and revenue data, in the listing. The data comes directly from Shopify and cannot be edited, so you know exactly what to expect once you buy your dropshipping store.

There it is friends. I hope this article helped in your goal to become a drop shipper.

Now I’d like to hear what you have to say.

Please let me know by leaving a quick comment below.