Introduction
It’s time to learn how to do drop shipping for beginners.
There are many people in the world of online business who are making good money just by doing drop shipping. And they all say it’s really easy to get going and there’s low risk involved.
So, you might be wondering: what is drop shipping? And how can I make bank with drop shipping?
In this article, we’ll go over how you can get started with drop shipping and how you can really make good money with drop shipping as a complete beginner.
We’ll go over the steps you should take and what you need to know as you start your drop shipping business.
So let’s begin with the most important question.
What Is Drop Shipping?
Drop shipping is the process of buying a product from a supplier that you sell when a customer decides to buy it. As a drop shipper, you are the middleman where you connect the supplier with the customer.
You sell the supplier’s items at a higher price for profit and, when someone decides to buy it, you buy from the supplier and the supplier ships it right to the customer who paid you for it.
If this all sounded like a mouthful, then let’s take a quick example.
Suppose Charlie saw a pair of headphones he needs on Ashley’s online store. The headphones Ashley is selling belong to the manufacturer; it’s not hers. Ashley is selling the headphones for $35.
Charlie buys the headphones from Ashley. At that point, Ashley sees she got an order for a pair of headphones. She buys it from the manufacturer for $10 and tells the manufacturer to have it shipped to her customer who bought it.
So, basically, Ashley made $25 profit just from selling a supplier’s headphones.
Now, do you see how this all works? Ashley was the middle man between the supplier and the customer. Ashley is a drop shipper.
Pros and Cons of Drop Shipping
Pros of Drop Shipping
Here’s what makes drop shipping a good online business model to implement:
- You don’t have to touch any physical products at all. All you do is set up your online store and have any products you sell go right from the supplier to the customer.
- You don’t have to worry about shipping. The supplier does all the shipping for you, so you don’t need to spend money on shipping and handling. That’s all left to the manufacturer.
- You can turn your store into passive income. If you have an automated system that can notify your customers’ orders to the supplier for you, then you have a stream of passive income that can earn you good money as long as you keep your online store active. I will talk about how to automate the process later in this article.
Cons of Drop Shipping
And here are some downfalls to drop shipping you should be aware of:
- You will need to deal with customer satisfaction. If a customer wants to return the product they received, you will lose all your profit and jump back to square one. You will need to refund the customer and the supplier will need to refund you.
- You won’t know how good the product is. Unless you have a copy of the product yourself, you won’t really know whether or not the product you’re selling from the supplier is even worth selling. If you end up selling one lousy product to five customers who thought they were getting a bargain, days later, you’ll be handing out refunds and losing profit. A great way to waste time. So, always make sure you look up product reviews before deciding to resell a supplier’s product.
The 4 Steps to Start Drop Shipping
Now that you have a better idea of what drop shipping is, let’s go through how you can get started with your own online drop shipping business. I’ll also give you my best advice on how to make good money doing it.
It is important to note that I don’t do drop shipping myself and don’t have any drop shipping experience. All the information you see here was gathered from research. So always look up drop shipping resources for more insights on drop shipping. A good drop shipping resource I recommend is the Ecom Elites blog.
With that said, let’s get going with the four steps to start.
Step 1: Start an online store.
You obviously need a place to start selling, first and foremost. This is why you need to start an online store. I recommend Shopify to host your online store, but there are other online store providers like Volusion.
All you need to do is buy one of their pricing plans. I recommend the basic plan for your online store as that’s all you really need for your online store.
Step 2: Import products to sell in your store.
Now you need to find a website where you can import generic products from suppliers for customers who want to buy them. There are many of them out there, but probably the most widely known is AliExpress.com. Other sites exist, like Wholesale2B.com and Spocket.
Afterwards, you need to find products to sell from suppliers on that website. Simply do research and think of what can sell best for you. Remember to consider the niche you are targeting.
Then, for each product, just import the product information to your Shopify store. Make sure to describe your product well, give a reasonable price (such as its market value), and post a realistic image of the product.
To help you with importing your product, use a Shopify plugin like Oberlo or Dropified.
Step 3: Promote your products.
Now you got your products ready to be bought, so now you need to figure out how to get traffic to any of your products. There are several ways you can drive traffic to a product in your dropshipping store.
- You can upload a video on your YouTube channel giving advice on a topic related to your product. For example, you can talk about wedding tips or the best wedding dresses and promote your wedding dress, telling viewers why it would be perfect for their wedding.
- You can post a picture of your product on Pinterest along with tips around a topic related to your product. You can post a picture of your wedding dress and give helpful tips on preparing for a wedding alongside it. If it gets enough pins, you can earn visitors to your product.
- You can advertise your products on social media. You can purchase an ad on a social media ad site like Facebook Ads and advertise products inside your online store to social media users who might be interested in your products.
Step 4: Complete orders you receive.
The last step you need to know is that your work isn’t done once you earn your money. You need to give your customer the product they ordered.
Go to the supplier who is selling the product and buy the product wholesale from them. Then give them the information you received about your customer: their name and shipping address. Once you pay them and the supplier ships the product, you’re all set.
You can automate this whole process so, once an order comes in, the system can buy wholesale for you and give the supplier the customer’s information, all without you knowing about it. There are a few drop shipping automation software available, such as Spark Shipping and Ecomdash.
Conclusion
And that’s it! As long as you complete these steps, you can start making hundreds of dollars a week selling stuff through drop shipping.
I hope this gave you a good idea as to how to start drop shipping as a beginner. And again, if you need further information on how to do drop shipping, I recommend the Ecom Elites blog, where you’ll find lots of articles pertaining to ecommerce and drop shipping, and how to successfully run an online store.