You own no goods, don’t have any inventory, not producing anything, and you do not have any development site. Still, you have a store and you sell, sell, sell! It sounds like a scam, looks like a scam, smells like a scam but actually, it is 100% legitimate business called dropshipping. You really have your online shop and products you advertise and sell do really exist.
The benefit of dropshipping is that you do not have to produce or to buy and then resell those goods, you do not need stocks and you do not need to freeze your money in the inventory (especially if you do not have money to freeze). e-Commerce like no other, dropshipping and WordPress let you be your own boss, working on your own terms. With a little help from tools like Facebook advertising and Pixel, of course.
All you need is to find a (reliable) supplier to get started. And, instead of buying wholesale goods and then selling it to individual customers, create a link between supplier and customer. The customer sees the product on your site and buys it for the retail price. Only then you buy the same product from the supplier, paying wholesaler price and keeping the difference between retail and wholesale price. The best thing is, you do not ship the goods, the product is shipped directly from supplier to your customer!
Now you think “this sounds too good to be true” and you are correct. What is described above is just a model of dropshipping, but to be a successful dropshipper, there are a lot of things you need to think about.
Let’s list some of the most important:
1. Think about your niche
The success of the store depends on what you sell. You do not want to end up selling refrigerators on the North Pole or sand in Sahara! At the same time, you don’t want to compete with a shop that is selling the same or similar product but has 100 employees and a million USD advertising budget. Find your niche, ideally something that you are interested in, you know a thing or two more than the average person. Make sure you don’t have so many competitors but have enough customers and niche that you’ll enjoy working with (I am thinking cat clothes right now).
2. Find your supplier
After you decide what you want to sell, make sure that you find a reliable supplier. It is clear that you want a good looking, easy to sell product, but there are other things you need to check before deciding on supplier:
a. Do they offer Warranties? You do not want to end up on social networks in one of those stories “This is what I ordered/ This is what I received” because it will be a quick death for your shop. Not only that products need to look as close as possible to those on the pictures, but you need to provide a warranty (in case of normal use of products). Ask your supplier about product photos, choose two or three products you really like and expect to be a success and ask the supplier to make a photo of it with their smartphone, just for comparison. Also, ask them to use their professional photos on your store (you should not use it without supplier’s permission).
b. Shipping options. If it is free shipping make sure there are no exceptions in “small letters.” Make sure you know and can transfer to your customers all shipping options and eventual costs related to it, as well as time to ship and shipping methods.
c. Quality control. Make sure your supplier proves they have some quality control in their facility (you do not want to sell poisonous plastic toys or radioactive cat clothes).
3. Create your shop
Now when you have your supplier, you need to create the online store. WordPress wouldn’t be the world’s most popular CMS if it didn’t make this step extremely easy. It takes just some hours to create an e-commerce store and all you have to do after that is to make it dropshipping friendly.
4. Promote your business
Internet became such a crowded place that you need to think of promoting your store. Even more than all points above. You need to commit yourself 100% to your shop; you need to be different than competitors and to add value for the perfect customer relationship. Automation explained above does not mean that you put your products on the store and forget about it. On the contrary, it just gives you more time to promote your store on social networks.
Dropshipping and WordPress with a little help from plugins
You already know how easy it is to create an e-commerce website with WordPress, especially the WooCommerce platform, right? But in case you want to start big with dropshipping, you will need to invest a lot of time. And by that, we mean filling in all the data and description about each product you want to sell. Luckily, WordPress community created some plugins for automation of the whole process and (once again) made life easy for all of us.
A lot of dropshippers decide to find their supplier on AliExpress and let’s agree; it makes sense. There are over 100 million items to choose from, for start. The suppliers are already scanned and you can read transparent feedback from other people buying their stuff. If only there could be a way to automate product listing from AliExpress to your WooCommerce website… But wait, there is a plugin for that!
And no, we’re not taling about Oberlo for WordPress since it’s made for Shopify only. Instead, we’re recommending these Oberlo WordPress alternatives, equally good and effective dropshipping plugins.
With Alidropship you can automatically import numerous products with all specifications already available on aliExpress. Even more, this plugin will synchronize with AliExpress, collect fresh data from the seller about products you are selling and update your store automatically. As a cherry on top, order transfer is automatic as well, it receives an order on your website and as soon as you get an order from a customer, the plugin visits your supplier on AliExpress, fills in all the order data. All you have to do is just click the ‘Pay Now’ button which will confirm the purchase.
Another great option is Woodropship, a WooCommerce dropshipping plugin. This one does all of the above and a bit more, but it is a bit more expensive option (this one has a monthly fee option only, while Alidropship is a one time payment). Use it and you’ll become a WooCommerce dropship professional in no time 🙂
Hope we helped you with these tips and suggestions. Let us know if you’re considering doing dropshippping and share some success stories with us 🙂 If you want to learn more about WooCommerce and dropshipping read this great guide and watch this step-by-step video:
