the whole basic idea behind drop shipping is that it allows you to have a huge catalog of products on your online store without having physical inventory of the products.
drop shipping can be referred to as a system of business where you display the products of a certain manufacturer or groups of manufacturers on your e commerce store and then when an order is placed, you send it to the manufacturer to fulfill the order. in order words, all you need to do is to get list of orders and send them to the manufacturer.
so lets take an instance, assuming you own a wrist watch drop shipping store, yiu can choose to display watches from aliexpress that cost $25 on your website listed for $30 and when Mr a sees the wrist watch on your website and is interested he makes an order.
you then send the order directly to the merchant at aliexpress and he ships and delivers the wrist watch directly to Mr a while you keep the profit of $5.
so as you can see, it is extremely easy and sometimes highly profitable as welll depending on your niche.
to start a drop shipping business you would need the following
- an online store to display your products
- a reliable supplier
- and a marketing strategy
the most important however is the second which is a reliable supplier. if your supplier is not reliable you are doing to have a lot of problems with your customers.
to built your online store, you can easily o so using wordpress and the wocommerce wordpress plugin.
after which you source for suppliers from any foreign store or website.
advantages of drop shiping
- if built well, it can be completely passive
- it requires little to no capital to get started
- you do not need to keep an inventory or deal with product delivery
disadvantages of drop shipping
- if your supplier goes down, you go down as well
- searching for reliable suppliers can be hard work
- in case of any error or delay in deliver, you take all the blame
- the market is quite competitive and that affects your profit margin
- with the rise of mini importer, you can hardly compete with the speed of delivery because their products are already in the country