Dropshipping business: building a high-profitable store

Currently, starting a dropshipping business becomes one of the easiest ways to make money online. The growth of the biggest marketplaces in the world like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and more gives the chance to anyone to start an online business for little budges with high profits.

The benefit of not stocking or handling the items you are selling provides the possibility to start dropshipping with limited budgets. When an ecommerce business that runs a dropshipping model receives purchases from buyers, they sell the items from a third-party supplier or manufacturer, who then fulfills the order to the customers.

If you’re thinking of starting a dropshipping business, you can save time and money for success by following the quick run 3 steps you need to get right. I’m 100% sure you won’t find it hard to start making money online.

Now, let’s move into these 5 basics.

1. Choosing a specific niche:

To start building a dropshipping business, you should Choose a niche which is a segment of a market. Selling a product that isn’t focused will be difficult to market. The more specific your niche is, the better. It will take a lot of work to successfully scale your dropshipping business.

A shared misconception people have about dropshipping is that any niche can be successful and profitable, but that’s not true. choosing a niche that’s already dominated by sellers or by major brands makes a huge competition.

But even if it’s harder for you to find a less saturated niche, new products and niches are emerging every day, which makes endless opportunities.

And to help you get them, here are some points to consider when selecting your niche:

• Create a brand: If you can rebrand a product and make it as your own, your drop shipping business will have more value. Look for products that you can customize and sell as your own brand with custom packaging.

• Obsess interests and passions: For example, if you’re interested in beauty, you’re going to have enough knowledge of the products and trends that can help you identify a special niche.

• Research the competition and customers: It’s normal that you’ll find your niche nearly everyone is already saturated. Doing deep research on your competitors and customers will help you discover their pros and cons, and know what they want.

This will help you create products different from competitors’ offers and represent the needs and wants of potential buyers. That way, you become more attractive to a new customer.

• Be sure the niche makes high profits: you need to check the profitability of every niche and product idea that you come up with. To run a dropshipping business, you need to focus on both marketing and customer experience.

Select a niche with higher-profit margins starting from 40% profit after selling the product, with low shipping costs, like free shipping, will attract more buyers.

The products impulse buyers with disposable income: When you focus on driving traffic to your store, you want to gain the highly conversion rates. In this case, your products should trigger impulse buys and appeal to those with the financial ability to purchase immediately.

2. Deal with a secure supplier:

Finding a consistent supplier can be the rigid step of starting a dropshipping business. You look for suppliers who can keep products in secure, protect products’ quality and ship to customers in time.

To find the right supplier for you, try to learn from others. There are plenty of information sources available, from business blogs and courses about dropshipping. It’s a popular topic that can help you avoid costly supplier mistakes.

A good dropship supplier should:

• Support dropshipping services: Not all suppliers support dropshipping service. Some are simply wholesalers or manufacturers. Before you select one, make sure the supplier assists dropshipping.

• Have a high experience and communication levels: A supplier that has years of experience with dropshipping and makes communication very important makes you always count on them. Response speed and the ability to ship orders extremely on time are significant to know if you start dealing with the supplier or go elsewhere.

• Charge small fees on huge orders: Charging a small fee for their services is what dropshippers look for. A supplier must hold products on stock and custom packaging and shipping for you. If a supplier charges you more than 2-5$, you should find another one.

• Provides fast shipping delays: Make sure a supplier ships orders to customers and will let them get their items as fast as possible. Check their shipping information they provide to the countries you sell in. the shipping time mustn’t move in more than 2 weeks or your customers will give you negative feedback.

• Sell quality products + high quality pictures: The supplier should have high quality products and images that you can use in your listings. So, try to request product samples to test quality before committing to a supplier.

• Make referrals available: A good supplier is the one who can connect you with services to verify their business. Referrals like customers and dropshippers reviews can help you decide the reliability of a supplier.

3. Build a user-experience ecommerce website:

If you’ve chosen a product and you’ve trusted a supplier, the next step is you need a place to list your product and start selling.

The best, easy way to build a website that supports dropshipping businesses is to use ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and more others. They provide you with all the resources you need even if you’ve now experience in building a website, and it gives plenty of apps to help you increase sales.

Even if you have a sizable budget to hire web developers and designers to build a store, it’s much wiser to begin with. Start by simple customizations until you establish and the revenue starts coming in, then you can advance in your website customization.

Choosing deep-rooted platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce is essential when starting out.

Some of their pros are:

• They are easy to set up an account on them;
• They provide useful tools to customize your own store;
• You have complete control over your store;
• You can build independent business;
• Charge low fees with higher profit margins;

But on the other hand, they have cons like:

• Costs money to set-up and design your own store;
• You miss out the potential traffic from huge marketplaces;
• invest in SEO and marketing to start converting.

So, if you have the time and money to invest in your dropshipping business, building your own store with well-established platforms is the best option.

4. Build a customer acquisition strategy:

Having a product and an online store without customers looking to buy is imperfect. There are several ways to get more customers, but the most effective option is advertising.

This allows you to generate more sales and get high revenues from the start. Start advertising on social media platforms like Facebook allows you to target a high number of audiences. This makes you place your products with the largest brands and stores immediately.

You can also use other strategies to attract more traffic like:

• Blogs and Forums: Finding blogs or forums that are related to your product/niche and actively participating in discussions. Providing your products information with your store’s links can increase traffic and acquire new customers.

• Content: Creating valuable content and video marketing on well-known platforms like Medium and Youtube can convert readers and viewers into customers. You should always focus on serving your audience than your store.

• Social Media: Creating and sharing interesting content on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter…etc can generate more organic traffic and build a following, which can be converted into customers.

• Email addresses: You need a way of building email address lists, such as using landing pages to request to sign-up, or create an offer or newsletter that requires an email address. Once you have a list of email addresses, you can reach many people regularly, for free.

5. Analyze your store and optimize it:

When you follow the previous 4 steps, you need to collect all the available data and deeply analyze it to grow your business. To do so, you can install tracking apps like Google Analytics or Facebook pixel.

They can help in tracking every conversion to know the customer personas, include their demographics, psychology, what path they took on your website…etc. It enables you to know what works and what doesn’t to build effective strategies.

You have to apply the advertising and marketing solutions that work for you. You need to test new opportunities and tune current strategies, which allows you to know when to optimize a strategy and when not.

Conclusion:

These 5 steps will help you successfully start your own Ecommerce dropshipping business from scratch. But keep in mind:

• never stop updating your store. Work on your SEO, your content and your marketing strategy to get high conversions;
• Uphold your connection with your supplier. Keep flaps on your chosen or future products;
• Improve your relationships with your customers. Use all the resources needed like answer their emails and questions;
• Use social media like crazy. Refine your ads, run A/B tests and promote them.

We hope you’ve found this article useful to start a dropshipping business. And, if applicable, don’t forget to add anything you know about dropshipping to startups build and develop their business.