What is dropshipping?
It is the sale of products that we do not physically own. In a nutshell, you can call it essentially selling products online without owning them. If you want to learn more about dropshipping, I refer you to the article just about it.
Why invest in dropshipping?
Dropshopping has become very fashionable recently due to the growing e-commerce market, which has greatly outpaced other sales markets during the pandemic period. During the pandemic, e-commerce markets grew from 35% depending on the country, but a study by RetailX, which showed that German consumers have a strong preference for online shopping - in 2020, it turned out that 85% of consumers moved to e-commerce, which shows great growth potential. As we can see in the difficult times in which we were ordered to live, unfortunately a lot of stationary or service companies had to close their businesses by the situation that people were afraid to leave their homes. Therefore, as I mentioned above a lot of customers noticed the convenience of ordering products from e-commerce.
The best dropshipping suppliers?
The best dropshipping suppliers may be small wholesalers not in our city or large international companies that allow us to have a similar business model.
One of the best dropshipping suppliers, for me, is Amazon. It is so diverse in terms of products which allows us to reach a wider audience.If I was looking for a fairly uncommon product or a product that would solve my customers' problems, the best supplier would be Alliexpress. This is one of the many large sales intermediaries on which we can find literally everything and, importantly, we can find new business partners who will be willing to sell products cheaper on us for the right amount of items.
How to find the best dropshipping supplier?
At first glance it may seem easy, that after all, any wholesaler that offers dropshipping services should be the good one that cares about high quality service and good prices, unfortunately, in reality this is not always the case. You need to consider many factors when looking for the best supplier:
- the prices of the products I offer on the supplier/wholesaler,
- the quality of the products we will offer to the customer,
- the speed of shipping to the customer,
- the speed of shipping to the customer,
- the quality of service related to complaints, returns.
These 5 golden rules I mentioned above are very important in choosing the best dropshipping supplier. All of these things we need to check ourselves before starting cooperation - let's be a mystery shopper at least for a while. Yes, unfortunately, we need to spend a lot of time to find that best dropshipping supplier because it will translate into our sales results, customer satisfaction and the number of referrals of our company on social media which will help show the company as professional and trustworthy unfortunately, once lost customer trust can project large drops in sales.
What do we need to start selling?
At the beginning we can try to sell through a marketplace or instagram. This will allow us to save some money to start, but it is suggested to open your own online store, which will allow you to attract new customers. An online store is a very good choice and solution because we can use a lot of custom solutions on our site. What is more important is that nothing limits us like the previously mentioned already created sales stores. Creating such an online store can be expensive because in addition to just having a store you need to encourage customers to enter it and meet the expectations of customers who would like to buy our product therefore it is worth preparing well for the initially high costs, which after a few months should translate into profit.
