Making Money With A Drop Shipping Store
When starting an online business, one of the key elements is having products to sell. So how do you get products, where do you find them, how do you know if they’ll sell, and how do you get them to customers?
In the vast world of internet entrepreneurship, there are many answers to all of those questions. You could create your own products—but that can be a long and time-consuming process. Or you could buy in bulk from a manufacturer and then ship out products to your customers as they buy. But that is an expensive solution, and you have to take the risk of investing that money in buying stock, storing inventory, and not having sales, which can be particularly troublesome if you're dealing with perishable goods to trendy items.
There is a solution that allows you to sidestep all those hassles. And it makes the whole startup process for your online venture that much easier. It’s called drop shipping. And it has taken the online business world by storm. A drop shopping business is one of the fastest, easiest, and most low-risk ways to get started with an online business. The SINGLE BEST way to get started in drop shipping is to have a company such as Turnkey Online Stores(www.turnkeyonlinestores.com) T.O.S. does ALL The work for you, and hand you over a store ready to market. Simply go the site, choose a pre-researched niche, and pay for it on the site. You will a turnkey online store delivered to you within a week ready to make money!
Let’s get back to the nuts and bolts….
Take a look at how to start a drop shipping business, how the drop shipping business model works, and the key things you should know before going into it.
The table below can help you with your decision-making process, and it provides an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of starting your own drop shipping business.
Advantages
- Sell almost any products, in any niche
- Use a proven business model, which is even used by large retailers such as Amazon
- No need to store any inventory
- No need to pack or ship out products
- No requirement for up-front capital
Disadvantages
- Expensive handling or drop-ship fees that eat up profits
- Not all companies are willing to drop ship
- Drop shippers must give you accurate in-stock numbers so you don't sell items if the drop shipper goes out of stock on them
- Some drop-ship suppliers have inconsistent service, slow ship times, or difficult return policies
Starting a Drop Shipping Business
Estimates vary, but industry watchers have found that between 20 percent to 30 percent of online retailers use drop shipping. So it's a proven business model, and you’ll be in good company if you go this route. Even big retailers like Amazon use drop shipping.
With drop shipping, you can sell just about any product in any niche. Considering that just about any product can be bought on Amazon.com - if it's for sale on Amazon then you can probably sell it with your own drop shipping business as well.
The benefit of drop shipping someone else's products means that you don't have to deal with the hassles of traditional businesses, such as:
- storing your products (it can be very expensive to buy massive amounts of inventory and rent warehouse space)
- packaging or shipping products, preparing orders and boxing them up multiple times a day and heading to the post office
- having to put down your money upfront to buy products wholesale to resell, that you aren’t sure will sell
When you run a business through drop shipping, you avoid those issues and the potential loss of any up-front capital investment.
Now that you have taken a look at the benefits of a drop shipping business, here's how the business model of drop shipping works.
When it comes time to actually send out the product and fulfill it, this is where the drop shipper takes over. The drop-ship company has the inventory in its warehouse. You send your drop shipper the orders that come in, paying the wholesale price for each order.
This can be done by email, submitted online, or through a spreadsheet file—it depends on the drop shipper. In many cases, this process can be fully automated taking you out of the equation and saving you time so you can focus more on the marketing of your business and less on the operations of your business. The drop shipping company puts the order together and ships it directly to your customer, without including any pricing details or information about the supplier, so that the customer thinks the package came directly from you.
When you order a site from a full service company such as the #1 supplier of turnkey stores Turnkeyonlinestores.com they will set up with a supplier ready to take on all of your orders. Typically the supplier is hooked up your store by a piece of software or APP. The APP allows the designer to upload products from the supplier's site to yours and in some cases, the APP allows order automation. Order automation is when the orders on your store get forwarded to the supplier with no manual work required on your (the store owner) part.