Dropshipping Business: Make Money While You Sleep
Would you like to start a business where you do not have to do a lot of work, do not have to invest a lot of money, but just sleep while your pockets fill with cash? Dropshipping is the business for you. Dropshipping is you sell products through your own store or through ecommerce marketplaces without ever holding them in your warehouse. When someone buys form you, your product supplier packs, and ships products directly to your customers. Your jobs is to build a beautiful website, do SEO and digital marketing, all the while your supplier handle the logistics. It's like having a genie in a bottle, fulfilling your orders for you!
How to Create Dropshipping Business With Minimal Investment
Dropshipping business does not require you to invest in inventory, warehousing and shipping. Therefore, a lot of people believe that you can create a dropshipping business with a low investment. Well, that’s just a half truth. Creating and running a dropshipping business requires a sizeable investment, you need to invest in a domain, hosting, as well as ecommerce platforms. You also need to invest in website themes and ad-ons. On top of that you will also have to spend good amount of money on marketing. However, there are ways to cut down your costs. Here are some tips you can try
Building a Dropshipping Store With a Small Investment
Domain and Hosting: There are hosting companies that gives you free domain (including dot com) if you purchase hosting and pay for annual subscriptions. You can also try low cost hosting package like shared hosting instead of VPS or Dedicated Server. For a starter dropshipping store, shared hosting can be good.
Open Source eCommerce platforms: While platforms like Shopify, Wx, and BigCommerce makes it super easy to build a dropshipping store, they have high subscription charges. Therefore, opt for open-source content management. Joomla, Drupal, and Magento are good, however, you need some level of skills to manage websites on these platforms. If you are a beginner, try Woocommerce, which is a free ecommerce management plugin on Wordpress.
Free Themes, Add-ons, and Plugins: Sure there are a lot of benefits of using paid themes and plugins, however, using premium themes and plugins will increase your cost. You can always upgrade to premium themes and plugins but when you are starting, avoid paid themes and plugins. Free options have limitation but it will cut your cost when you are starting. If you know where to look for, you can even find free add-ons that will import products on your store. If you cannot find any free add-ons to import products from your dropshipping supplier, you can try adding products manually. Your workload will of course increase when you are manually adding products, however, you will also be able to cut your cost.
Building a Dropshipping Business on eCommerce Marketplaces
Even when you are using open source content management systems and free themes and plugins, your dropshipping business will require some investment. If you are not in a mood to spend money on building your store, you can try ecommerce marketplaces for your dropshipping business. For example, you can try eBay to start dropshipping business, you can source products from Aliexpress and then sell it on eBay.
Is There a Free Method to Build a Dropshipping Business
One of the main reasons why people are interested in dropshipping is because you don’t have to spend money on products and you don’t have to fulfil the order. However, not many people realize that you will have to spend heavily to build a dropshipping store. For example, shopify, probably the most used dropshipping platform costs $29 per month. Bigcommerce, another popular dropshipping platform charges at least $30 per month.
Does this mean there are no free platforms to start a dropshipping store?
Well, wordpress with woocommmerce is free. However, you will have to spend money on domain and hosting, which means it is not 100 percent free method. Even though woocommerce is free, you will need paid plugins to be used on our store to connect with suppliers. Having said that there are also free plugins for product import. For example, you can use Ezusy on your woocommerce store to import product from Aliexpreess.
How to Generate Sales in Dropshipping Business
A lot of people venture into a dropshipping business because they don’t have to invest in products, and they do not have to fulfil orders. Despite being a low cost business, many people end up abandoning their ventures prematurely due to the challenge of generating sales.
You cannot generate sales without running ads. Therefore, you need to craft unique advertisements that can attract your target audience. Create original ads that can connect with people. One of the best strategies is to order sample products, take high-quality images that you can use on ads or create videos to produce promotional content tailored for platforms like video-sharing websites to further enhance your visibility.You cannot make money easily but if you keep the cost low and if you market well, you can of course make money. By the way, have you ever tried dropshipping business?
Dropshipping Suppliers for Your Dropshipping
For a lot of dropshipping businesses Aliexpress is the go-to place to outsource products, however, there are a lot of Aliexpress alternatives where you can find good products for a cheaper price, and even faster shipping times. Here are some options to choose form
Banggood: Since not many people use this store for dropshipping, you can find unique products, which means you have high chance of selling if you use this company for your dropshipping business.
Deal Extreme (dx.com): This dropshipping supplier is not well known but you can try this one as well. You can find cheaper products having good quality. They have warehouse in the US, so you can ship products faster if your customers are in the United States.
CJ Dropshipping is probably one of the best dropshipping companies. If offers a wide range of products, from clothing to electronics, there is nothing that you cannot find in the store. The pricing is also comparatively cheaper, which gives you leverage to make more money by adding bigger margins when selling products. What makes CJ Dropshipping best?
Warehouses around the world: The store has warehouses in North America (Canada and the US, different Asian countries (Thailand, China, Japan, Indonesia, India, etc.) different European countries (France, Australia, Russia, Britain, etc.), South America (Mexico, Brazil, etc.), and Africa (Morocco, Uganda, etc.). Since they have warehouses around the world, shipping takes just 3-14 days.
Find products trending on social media and ecommerce platforms: The platform also allows you to search for the products that are trending on tiktok, etsy, ebay, Amazon, shopify, etc. You can take ideas from these trending products to sell yourself.
Authorization with ecommerce: You can connect with a lot of ecommerce platforms to sell directly, for example, etsy, shopify, woocommerce, etc.
Other dropshipping suppliers that need mention are is DHGate. While choosing the supplier, all you need to remember is where your buyers are based. It makes sense to use a company that has a warehouse in the US if the buyer is based in the US. If the warehouse is in China, and the buyer is in USD, shipping time will take very long.
Supliful: Health Supplement Dropshipping
When it comes to do dropshipping, a lot of people go with clothing niche. However, the niche is so competitive that most of the people fail. If you want to do dropshipping, you should not only find winning products, but also a niche that is in high demand but has less competition. Health supplement dropshipping is one of the less competitive niches you can try.
If you want to do health supplement, supliful is the company for you. This company offer white label products on health and supplement niches. You can use products like amino acids, ashwaganda, beetroot powder, mushroom extracts bioflavonaids, curcumin, vitamins, garlic extracts, Ginko Biloba. Moringa pure, etc. They offer around 60 different products.
You don’t have to spend upfront cost, you can use the platform with various ecommere platforms like shopify, woocommerce, etc. You can even directly sell on TikTok and Instagram.
They offer FDA-compliant, nutritionist-approved products.
The only drawback is they ship to the US only.