You might be intrigued by the entrepreneurial world and if you are wondering how to make money online, this entire article could help you achieve it.
You may have seen the term “dropshipping” floating around. But what is it actually and how can that help you make money online? Let’s explore in detail below.
What is Dropshipping?
Have you been thinking about opening up your own business, but don’t know how? If you don’t know what you should sell, you don’t have the money to invest in products, and looking around, you don’t have any place to store inventory, don’t worry! That’s what dropshipping is all about.
All you need is a computer, an online store, and a basic understanding of how to market and sell online.
The dropshipping business model has become popular and it is opening up the world of eCommerce to many more entrepreneurs. You see, with dropshipping, you can sell stuff online without the products ever being in your hands.
When you are running a store with the dropshipping business model, you will never need to worry about managing your own products or find a place to store them.
Instead, whenever a customer places an order through your store, you will purchase the item from your supplier, and then it’ll be shipped from your suppliers’ warehouse directly to your customer’s door.
Below is how it works.
How does dropshipping work?
First, you find what you want to sell from a supplier, then list that product on your own website at a price you set.
Next, when someone places an order for that product, your customer pays you the retail that you have set, and you make a profit. Then you will place the order with your supplier at their wholesale price and have it shipped directly to your customer.
Let’s say you have found a watch on a supplier’s website for $150, you would then list it on your own website for $200. When the order comes in through your website, you then place your order with your supplier using your customer’s shipping information. Then you keep the $50 profit and have the product shipped directly to your customer.
Why wouldn’t somebody just order the watch directly from the supplier’s website?
There are mainly two reasons.
First, it’s a very big internet and customers may not know about the supplier to buy from them directly.
Secondly, when people buy things, they are not just buying products. They are buying into the marketing, positioning, trust, brand, and lifestyle those products represent.
With dropshipping, you can focus on marketing your products. You could say the right things at the right time, and provide the real value to the right people. It is because you are not warehousing any inventory, or dealing with most of the other challenges that come with running an eCommerce business. So it it entirely self dependent.
How to get started with dropshipping?
To get started with the dropshipping business, all you have to do is start a Shopify store, install Oberlo, AliExpress or any other app from where you want to find products and start selling online.
- Start a free 14 day trial on Shopify.com
- Go to Shopify.com/app-store and install your required dropshipping app.
- Find products from the app you would like to sell and add them to your store.
- Enable a payment gateway so you can start accepting money. Shopify Payments is a great default option if you are in one of the supported countries. Though you may want to enable a few other gateways like PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, or any of the 100+ payment gateways that Shopify is integrated with.
- Once you have all that, you will need to create a plan for sending traffic to your store.
- Finally, try to produce quality content for your store. From eye-catching photography to engaging product videos to great posts for your blog, your audience loves to know more about your products, how they can be used, and the story behind them.
Why do people get into dropshipping?
- First off, it’s really fast and easy to get started and you can dropship with incredibly low investment cost. Also, you don’t need to have an established business entity when you start, though it’s even probably smart to have one once you grow.
- There is no need to worry about managing inventory, packing, or tracking, which means you can focus almost exclusively on marketing, promotion, and merchandising.
- You will have access to millions of products instantly that suppliers are constantly researching to determine what is trendy and what will actually sell.
- You set the retail price, so you control the margins. And dropshipping is really easy to scale because you can hire virtual assistants as your order volume increases.
Challenges in Dropshipping Business
Some challenges that need to be considered with dropshipping are finding credible suppliers with good quality products and making sure you have visibility into your customer’s fulfillment process.
Honestly, you can find suppliers on your own. However, when you are dropshipping completely on your own, you can end up spending a lot of time researching and negotiating with suppliers to guarantee your customer’s satisfaction.
Another option is tools like Oberlo, Alibaba, or AliExpress, which with a few clicks give you access to millions of products to sell and has dozens of other features to make your life easier. The features include like monitoring inventory levels, automatically calculating profit margins, fulfilling and tracking orders, monitoring shipping status, measuring delivery performance and more.
They also help you partner with vetted, trustworthy suppliers of great quality products. You also get faster shipping times, and awesome customer service with thousands of different products available for you to choose from.
Competition
Because it is really easy to get started, there’s a lot higher potential for competition. That is why you will find a lot of advice out there that recommends you to start off finding a niche audience – like dog lovers, or gamers, so you can operate with less competition.
Supplier Errors
There are supplier errors in dropshipping. Though uncommon, a supplier will inevitably ship the wrong product to your customer by mistake. If this happens, there’s nothing to take it personally. You can handle the return like a professional, either order a brand new product from the supplier or offer a complete refund.
Longer Delivery Times
Also, since many dropshipping suppliers are based in China, shipping times are generally longer, turning some customers off. ePacket makes it easier, delivering some orders in as little as two weeks. But generally, if you make your shipping times clear throughout the buying process, many visitors appreciate the clarity- especially if you are selling an item or in a niche where delivery times are less crucial.
Important Things To Know About Dropshipping
1. Face Challenges
Dropshipping is pretty easy to learn. But there is a learning curve, and you will experience challenges along the way. However, mistakes can become learning opportunities, and if you can develop resilience along the way, there are plenty of people out there finding a lot of winning dropshipping products.
2. Spend Money
While there is a significant advantage in terms of capital investment over traditional eCommerce, dropshipping is not free. You’ll likely have to spend money to drive traffic, market your products and handle returns.
3. No Overnight Success
There’s no overnight success and this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Dropshipping still requires you to work consistently for your store. You will need to dedicate less time compared to traditional eCommerce businesses, but it’s not going to succeed without your hard work.
4. Invest Time
You will always need to invest time improving your business.
5. Don’t Source Copyrighted Items
Most importantly, don’t source copyrighted items. This is illegal all around the world and can cause you some serious trouble.
Choose products from a network of trusted suppliers who make it a priority to avoid copyright infringements. That way you can rest assured that you won’t infringe any copyright laws and everybody remains legal.
If you are completely new to dropshipping, start small with a single product or a small handful of complimentary items from a single supplier.
You can always add more inventory as you become comfortable, but it’s better to start small and build than to start big and become overwhelmed.
Once you feel comfortable with dropshipping – diversify. Many dropshippers don’t rely on a single store for their entire income stream but operate a series of stores targeting various niches to build multiple sources of income.
Best Dropshipping Product Spy Tools 2021
Dropshipping is really not so easy but it has become easy nowadays due to the availability of various dropshipping product research tools. These tools can help you find winning dropshipping products that can make you up to six figures and more. They are pretty good, inexpensive, pretty cheap specifically for beginners. Let’s check them out below.
- AdSpy
- Ingramer
- Ecomhunt
- Dropship Spy
- Niche Scraper
AdSpy
If you are selling excellent goods, no doubt, your dropshipping business will excel. Hence finding the trending products is vital. AdSpy is one of the best dropshipping product spy tools that simply has the largest pool of data about Facebook and Instagram ads. If a hot product is kicking off and dropshippers need to know, you can be sure that AdSpy knows it already.
Key Features
- AdSpy offers excellent and advanced search filters that help you to discover the trending dropshipping products on the internet.
- The tool can accurately access who the dropshipping product is actually targeting. It includes the age, location, gender, etc of the people who are targeted.
- AdSpy is great for affiliate marketing. You can easily find winning dropshipping products promoted by affiliates just by searching for products in specific affiliate networks.
- Using AdSpy’s comment search, you can easily get to know about the positives and negatives of the product that you wish to sell.
- AdSpy powers a rapid interface. It can search for a product through millions of records within its database in seconds.
Price
Costs $149 per month. Take advantage of our exclusive $150 AdSpy Coupon Code and save a lot on your AdSpy subscription. Hurry up! This is just a limited-time offer!
$150 DISCOUNTIngramer
Ingramer is an effective Instagram automation tool and a powerful dropshipping product research tool. It helps you to discover trending products that are going viral on Instagram. Unlike Facebook, Instagram is also widely used for promoting dropshipping products via engaging ads.
Ingramer, through its AI technology, finds the hot products in seconds. It also provides you the entire details about the product, so that you don’t have to spend time researching products. It has all the necessary instruments to help Instagrammers gain interested fans around their content. So the tool is really worthy.
Key Features
- Ingramer Direct Messaging lets you find users by indicating keys in the search bar. You can filter the conversations by labels.
- Ingramer allows users to welcome new followers and send auto-replies based on trigger words.
- Ingramer helps you to attract real followers fast by its Hashtag generator. Hashtags are capable of bringing your post to the Explore page and increasing your reach organically.
- Ingramer’s profile analyzer can examine the posting time, hashtags, keywords, and top posts of prosperous users in your niche to copy their promotion schemes.
- The scheduled posting feature of Ingramer helps you to arrange all your content in advance. You can add videos, photos, carousels, and Stories, and they will be uploaded at the specified time.
Price
The cost of Ingramer varies depending upon the module you choose.
Promo Module – Costs $37 per account for 2 weeks, $57 per account for a month, and $144 per account for three months.
Direct Module – Charges $19 per account for 2 weeks, $29 per account for a month, and $74 per account for 3 months.
Scheduled Posting Module – Costs $12 per account for 2 weeks, $18 per account for a month, and $46 per account for 3 months.
Hashtag Generator Module – Costs $14 per account for 2 weeks, $22 per account for a month, and $42 per account for 3 months.
Claim our exclusive 39% Off Ingramer Coupon Code today & start availing benefits.
39% OFFEcomhunt
Ecomhunt is a really popular product research tool that helps with the curation of winning products for any eCommerce business owner willing to sell hot products online. This tool is great if you’re just beginning with dropshipping. Ecomhunt gives you a lot of information so that you can easily sell any product online.
It saves you the stress of searching for hot and fast-selling products online. Instead, you can focus on other things that matter for your e-commerce business. Also, EcomHunt updates several products daily for its users and which of course are specially handpicked by experts. The products updated include the following data:
- Profit
- Analytics
- Engagement
- Links
- Facebook Ads
- Product Video
- Facebook targeting etc.
Key Features
- With Ecomhunt, Getting access to trending products daily is easy and effortless
- Allows you to know the actual price you will be getting the product from AliExpress and as well as the potential profit of the products
- Ecomhunt gives you access to Facebook ads that are performing well in the eCommerce industry
- The tool provides you links to suppliers and existing selling stores
- Ecomhunt offers the AdHunter tool, which is a very interesting tool that allows you to monitor your competitor’s ads on Facebook.
- Another feature that makes EcomHunt stand out is their free webinars and tutorials they offer their members.
Price
Costs $20 per month.
Dropship Spy
Dropship Spy is designed to help find the latest hottest products for e-commerce retailers to sell. It has a lot to offer members, with several membership tiers available. The tool tracks various products to see how they are selling and performing across various social media platforms and online stores.
Dropship Spy offers plenty of handy features to help run a successful eCommerce store. A lot of the information provided could be sourced on your own, but the time and effort saved by using Dropship Spy make it very appealing and improves the chances of selling products. Thus it is an excellent tool for spying trending dropshipping products.
Key Features
- Dropship Spy has a quite impressive interface
- The Winning product section shows the latest products that the company has tracked that are performing high across various metrics.
- The product finder has a nice variety of products, covering almost any niche you can think of, so it’s certainly useful for finding just about anything you may want to sell online.
- You get a selection of different supplier links to choose from, with each one coming with information. They include feedback score, product rating, amount sold, number of reviews, product prices, shipping fees, etc.
- Dropship Spy provides access to sale reports from both Amazon and eBay to get a better understanding of how products are selling.
Price
Costs $39 per month and they do offer a trial account.
Niche Scraper
Niche Scraper is a Saas tool that helps dropshippers to discover hot products on their eCommerce stores. It is super easy to get started. So you can also outsource the products you want to sell on your Shopify Store.
You can find top-selling products or trending products from a Shopify store of your choice or top Shopify stores in the world. Niche Scraper generally allows you to find the products that are the best selling, frequently asked, and are capable of giving more sales conversions and high ROI.
Key Features
- The dashboard looks simple and easy to use.
- Niche Scraper has got a section from hand-picked products. The section will be updated every day, so you can stop wasting money on the bad products. If you want more power in product research, the tool can scrap products based on keywords, sites, growth rate, competition, price, recent orders, growth rate.
- You can simply search a category of product that you wanted to sell and the crawler of Niche Scraper will provide you a list of the relevant result to your search.
- You can also analyze other Shopify dropshipping stores, generate Facebook ads, and get access to full-covered resources on dropshipping to get started.
- Its advanced research bot can search every product and one can find some amazing opportunities for their dropshipping business.
Price
Costs $39 per month
Conclusion
Starting a dropshipping business is surprisingly easy, and requires very little upfront investment. You get to be your own boss and set your own rules. It’s by far one of the most flexible careers that anyone can pursue.
When you implement all the steps required for running a successful dropshipping store correctly, you’ll be able to run a profitable dropshipping business in a matter of weeks or months. Now it’s your turn to sleeve up and turn your dropshipping business plan into action.