The last business idea, which involves becoming an eBay reseller, will appeal to a large number of people. This is a plain and understandable business plan that involves the sale of physical, tangible things.
The biggest drawbacks of this technique are that you must invest in your initial order and that you must store and carry everything. This can easily get tedious if you don’t enjoy wrapping packages.
But what if I told you there was a way to eliminate all of the boring bits while yet achieving the same result?
That type of business exists, and it’s called as ‘drop shipping.’ In this situation, you’re effectively acting as a cross between a reseller and an affiliate, and you’re cutting out the middle man — eBay in this example – in the process.
Drop shipping is the process of selling items on behalf of a wholesaler. You advertise the products as usual, and then you handle the money. Then all you have to do is provide the shipping details to the supplier and pay them for their portion.
In many ways, drop shipping is the ideal business model. You may sell actual things to a wide range of potential customers without having to deal with fulfilment and inventory management. Even better, most of your customers will have no idea you’re drop shipping. The option to send a product from a wholesaler with your logo and return address on the box is referred to as “private label shipping.”
How to Get Started with Drop Shipping
The only disadvantage of drop shipping as a business model is that finding willing distributors might be difficult at times. This means you’ll most likely have to do a lot of research to find a company that sells what you want to sell and also offers drop shipping.
Fortunately, there are certain tools that might assist you in finding drop shipping wholesalers faster. Alibaba (www.alibaba.com) is one such site that allows you to easily search through a product directory and then contact the seller.
For example, Worldwide Brands (www.worldwidebrands.com) is a paid membership directory (oh look, a membership site!).
Another option is to go straight to the makers. If you find a product you like, look up who made it and their contact information. It’s never a bad idea to try!
Creating an Online Shop
Setting up an ecommerce store would be useful in terms of generating sales if you wish to become a drop seller. In addition, an ecommerce site can be useful in a variety of other company models.
An ecommerce store, which is simply an extension of your website or blog, can be used to sell a product. This will list your items, make it simple for people to purchase them, and keep track of your sales so you may pass them on to your manufacturers/wholesalers.
Similar to how you might develop a membership site, you can usually build an ecommerce store by simply adding a plugin to your WordPress site. WooCommerce (http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/) is a popular solution that allows you to add products, prices, and payment information to your WordPress site by simply installing the plugin (for receiving payments).
If you’re looking for something a little bigger, Megento (www.magento.com/) is another alternative. Magento is a similar eCommerce platform to WooCommerce, although it is not a WordPress plugin. This means you’ll need to set up a Magento store as a separate site on your server and then point to it. In exchange, you get a much more powerful system that can store up to 50,000 items (whereas WooCommerce is suitable for up to 500 items).
Shopify (www.shopify.com) is another option. You don’t have to install or upload Shopify because it’s a ‘hosted’ solution.
Shopify, on the other hand, is a separate website with a login from which you can create a store and connect to it from your own blog. Shopify provides less flexibility than a self-hosted solution like WooCommerce. It is, however, a little easier to manage because it isn’t ‘your obligation.’
See you in the next post.
Frederick Empaga
Founder, digitalecommerce365.com
Partner, myonlinestartup.com
PS.
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