How to Dropship

Dropshipping is when you advertise and sell products under your own branding. However, these products are manufactured by another company, a merchant. The merchant is also responsible for shipping the products to your customers when you make an order and they will do this with your branding on the shipping labels.

The consumer pays you and not the merchant for the products they’ve bought and you pay the merchant and shipping company for processing the order. The difference between the price the customer pays and the price you pay to process the order is your profit.

There are numerous benefits of dropshipping for many entrepreneurs. The first is that the setup costs are really low. You only need to get your website up and running and that can be done fairly cheap. There are free themes that you can use on Shopify and some free apps, like Oberlo, that can help you get started.

Other costs are there, but you only pay for goods when there are orders on your website. This can make it much more cost-effective than having an eCommerce store where you have all the products in stock.

Another benefit is that you can save time. Fulfilling orders can be very time consuming and by taking this process out of the selling process you can spend more time completing tasks like social media, email marketing, blogging, etc.

There are some disadvantages to dropshipping. Namely that you are going to be out of control on certain aspects. Quality control can be harder to maintain and your reputation can be based on the quality of the products sent that you can’t see first hand.

There are ways around this by ordering test products. Some dropshippers make this easy for you, however, by offering you a huge discount for test products.

As mentioned before, dropshipping is really simple. All you have to do is to create a website and link it to a dropship app, like Oberlo. Then you can choose the products you want to sell, import the product descriptions, images, reviews and more into your store and then set a price. Once this is done, you can start advertising your brand.

When orders come through, they’re easy to fulfill usually. Just be sure that you follow general eCommerce common sense when marketing and speaking to customers.