One of the best ways to become an entrepreneur is to start dropshipping. As it does not require a lot of investments, and you do not need to handle any items you are selling.
If you do not know what dropshipping is, let me explain it to you. When you sell products online, it is a business model, but you do not have those items in your warehouse. You rather order those products from a manufacturer or your supplier and send them directly to your customers.
Here is a short introduction to dropshipping and a guide on how you could start your own successful dropshipping business.
Find Your Target Audience
It is essential to pick the right niche and target the right audience if you want to succeed. When you do not have a target audience, it might be pretty hard to advertise your shop and sell items. You should also be somewhat passionate about the niche you pick as this might increase your motivation and allow you to put much more work into your shop. You can search for some ideas in the best Shopify stores list.
When you are selecting a niche, try to pick one with more attractive profits. You will need to put the same amount of work either you are selling items for $10 or $1000; however, you can put bigger price markups on more expensive items. Try to find the lowest possible shipping rates because high shipping costs might discourage your customers from buying.
Do Research on Your Competitors
Do not forget that you are not alone in the market most of the time, and your competitors might be other dropshippers as well as such retail giants like Amazon and Walmart. Please do not go for a niche where there is no competition because it might be a sign that there is no demand for that specific product.
The perfect scenario would be to find a niche that does not have much competition, but products are in high demand. When you have identified your competitors look for their weak spots and avoid such things in your business. Also, recognize the positive aspects of your competitors and try to apply those to your dropshipping business as well.
Find a Supplier
It is crucial to partner with the right supplier because otherwise, it can ruin your business. One should look at this step really seriously. You should conduct thorough research on the supplier of your choice. Keep in mind that communication with your supplier is essential for your business success, and the location of your supplier cannot be an excuse for communication problems. If you are not sure about a potential supplier’s communication abilities, you should search for another supplier.
There are many online marketplaces for suppliers like Alibaba, AliExpress, and Dino Direct. Most of them have inbuilt message systems. You should use them to contact your potential suppliers and make sure to ask them a lot of questions at different times of the day to learn about their communication capabilities. Also, try to ask them for product samples that would allow assessing product quality.
Build Your Website
There are many possible ways to build an e-commerce website; you could use WordPress or Squarespace. The fastest way possible would be to use Shopify, which was specially created for purposes like this. It does not require any technical background to set up and get your site running as it has an intuitive drag & drop builder and many plugins that will help you increase sales.
One of the most popular quotes these days is “fail fast,” and you should follow this tip too. Even if you have a pretty big budget to hire a web developer, I recommend using such a platform as Shopify to get a grasp of the market and the challenges you could face.
Have a Marketing Strategy
It is essential to have a good marketing strategy because nobody will buy from you no matter the quality of the products if nobody knows about you. There are quite a few ways how you could start advertising your business. However, at first, you should try to run Facebook or Instagram ad campaign as it allows you to target specific audiences.
Also, one of the most profitable marketing strategies is so-called influencer marketing. You basically pay money for internet celebrities to advertise your companies. An average influencer charges about $200-$400 per post, so that it can be a bit pricey from the start, but you should definitely try it later.
Analyze Gathered Data
You should always keep track of your website’s analytics and your sales to keep your business growing. Use Google Analytics to see how people find your website from search engines, check Facebook data to see what products people clicked the most. When you can track every conversion, you can understand what works and what does not.
This allows you to scale what works and increase sales and eliminate things that do not work. Do not always experiment and find new opportunities because there are no such things as set-and-forget marketing campaigns.
