It is true that the term may sound familiar to you or that you are already familiar with the subject. Nowadays, dropshipping is a common practice in many shops that use it as a fundamental part of their business. The best known success story is that of Zappos, a company founded in 1999 which was acquired by Amazon for 1.2 billion dollars in 2009.
What is Dropshipping?
In short, dropshipping is a business model that you can use to run your online shop without having to manage any inventory. The shop enters into an agreement with its supplier and when it makes a sale, the supplier sends the shipment directly to the end customer on behalf of the shop.
In this case, Zappos, in the beginning, had agreements with the big shoe companies and sold directly through their website. The key was to avoid spending money on stock and its management.
You could say that it is a win-win situation for both supplier and seller in their respective areas. On the one hand, the supplier is in charge of producing and stocking, and the retailer is in charge of selling. In this case, think that the seller has the flexibility to add or remove products in his marketplace in a very simple way.
If you are thinking of setting up a Dropshipping model…
Although the initial investment can be very low, it takes a lot of time and effort to get started.
Let’s start looking for hosting
First of all, we need to find the type of website/hosting we want for our shop. Personally, we recommend Shopify (web template platform focused on ecommerce) very easy to manage and is well structured to work with SEO positioning. There are also other platforms such as Magento or Prestashop that can be very useful.
We will continue with the products
Choosing the right products is one of the keys to business. Positioning yourself ahead of the competition is fundamental given the context of this saturated market. Here are a couple of tips on how to find relevant products:
- Difficult to find elsewhere online
- Price is hard to guess
- Interesting to the customer and encourages them to click
- Can be purchased without having to do much research
- Price not too expensive
We will manage our suppliers
There are several suppliers that work with dropshipping but we recommend that you do not limit yourself to them and that you try calling companies that have products of interest. In this way, you will be able to access wider product catalogues, create a closer link and get better conditions.
And we will put a lot of effort in giving visibility to our shop
To do this, it is important to work on all parts of the funnel and the different channels in which we can be present.
It is important to work on SEO from day one. We recommend that you create a blog and update its content from day 1. At CROnuts we are specialists in creating strategic content for fast organic positioning.
On the other hand, you will have to work on paid advertising. In this case both instagram, facebook or Adwords are key to generating traffic to the web. Without leaving aside, email marketing campaigns either by sending newsletters or offers segmented by interest.
