What is drop shipping?
Dropshipping is a method of fulfilling customer orders, thanks to which you do not have to maintain stock of your products. All products are shipped directly from another provider after placing orders on your website. As the store owner, you don’t even touch the product. Instead, you are responsible for accepting orders and handling customer service issues. Under this retail model, stock and order fulfillment is not your responsibility.
What is a drop shipping online store?
Starting an e-commerce business is an intimidating adventure. Setting up all the aspects of an online store involves taking care of many things. Add to that product management and inventory and it’s easy to get your head spinning. This is why so many people go the dropshipping route. And luckily for you, dropshipping WordPress themes are plentiful, especially if you want to use WooCommerce as a platform for your online store.
However, before we dive into our listing, let’s first pause for a moment to talk about what dropshipping is and how it works.
These are, from my point of view, the minimum requirements that a dropshipping provider should meet in order of priority:
That the products are of quality. We do not look for top brand products, but they do have a minimum quality that guarantees that we will not have many returns.
Have experience selling online. I usually discard those that have been selling for less than 5 years.
Good prices. For a dropshipping store to work, we need to offer attractive prices, but that in turn gives us a minimum profit margin (at least 50% for products with a medium-low ticket; € 20-50). In conclusion; we need to buy cheap.
Fluid communication. That is, if we contact the provider, it does not take a week to respond.
This is very important to take into account in case we have to manage a return.
Taking these requirements into account, it is common to look directly for suppliers in China. And the web par excellence for this is AliExpress.com
Apart from AliExpress, there are other marketplaces from which to look for suppliers, such as eBay or DealExtreme.
However, the biggest drawback of these two is that they are not compatible with the main dropshipping tools, the product catalog is usually smaller and the prices somewhat higher. Hence, AliExpress is still the most used option today.
Start with the most important thing: the niche.
The market niche you are going to focus on will make the difference between the success or failure of your dropshipping online store, even before you start selling.
A very common mistake that is repeated over and over again among people who start dropshipping is that they spend 10% of the time (at most) looking for the market niche and 90% setting up the store.
Error.
If you really want to have a chance of dropshipping success, don’t skimp on finding your niche. If you need 4 or 5 days to do it, go ahead! It will be your time best spent.
Seriously, be patient at this stage of the process and carefully analyze the pros and cons of each niche you study. Because this will be one of the few things that you will not be able to change once you launch the store.
To make it a little easier for you, I am going to share with you below a checklist of requirements that a good niche for dropshipping should fulfill.
Focus on a very specific niche, the more specific the better. This will greatly reduce your competition, help you stand out more easily from the rest, and make your store a reference for your target audience.
An example of a specific niche would be training material for yoga lovers.
If there is already someone selling, all the better. I’m not saying to look for niches saturated with a lot of competition, but rather to look for a balance between specialization and market size.
That is if you find a very specific niche that you find interesting and you do not detect any competition. Hmm … that niche is probably too small or not profitable and that’s why no one has stayed with it.
Avoid complex products. The easier the product to understand, the easier it will be to sell and the less likely it is to receive returns. For this reason, if you are starting in this, I would not recommend entering the technology or electronics niches.
Focus on mid-ticket products. That is, products that you can sell from € 20 to € 100, and that allows you to apply a good profit margin.
Selling “non-brand” products above that price consistently overtime is going to be tricky. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it will certainly be much more complicated.
Make it timeless. That is, do not depend on specific dates/seasons of the calendar for sales. So I would recommend that you try to avoid niches related to; Halloween, Christmas, summer, etc
That allows you to create attractive content for social networks (Facebook and Instagram especially). This may seem silly at first, will give you a beastly advantage over other niches that do not have it. Mainly because it will allow you to quickly get a qualified audience at a very low cost.
That it has a stable consumption trend and if it is increasing, the better. Forget about fads and niches “hit”. You can use Google Trends to get a rough idea.