Even though the business world can be tough to break into I personally discovered along with tons of other people that the internet provides some great opportunities for starting a business. This will hopefully lead to business incorporation, which websites like https://www.incauthority.com/blog/2018/05/23/three-important-decisions-you-must-make-before-you-incorporate-or-form-an-llc/ can assist with. You can start a business even if you don’t have any products or specific services to offer. This is the category that I fit into but with some careful thought and research I came across a business opportunity online called drop shipping.
What Is Drop Shipping Online?
This is an opportunity to sell someone else’s products online. But the big feature is you don’t have to buy the products outright and you don’t have the responsibility of shipping them when they are bought. It sounds simple and easy which was my first thought but it does come with some hard work, perseverance, and patience.
The Hard Work
There are few successful businesses that don’t demand hard work. If they don’t then chances are, they are just a scam. Drops hipping is definitely not a scam but it comes with a lot of responsibilities.
- Choosing The Products:
The first step I had to take was to determine what type of products did I feel comfortable selling. I soon learned that there are tons of products available for drop shipping. These range from car parts to pet supplies. I did not want to become involved in products that I knew nothing about. This meant taking a look at my own interests. This was easy for me as I have a passion for fashion and design. My options were narrowed down to looking at clothing lines that I would be excited to promote.
- Choosing The Suppliers:
Once I knew what the client’s niche was going to be I now embarked on the journey of sourcing out suppliers. The bulk of which was located in China and I looked into using something similar to this CBX software to help manage my suppliers. As there were ample suppliers to choose from, it now meant that I had to carefully research each of these before making my final choices.
The Right Resources
Part of the hard work came with sourcing out the resources I would be able to use to help my client’s drop shipping business. However, various companies like Verum Ecommerce tend to provide valuable pieces of dropshipping advice. Thorough research in the subject helped me learn about plugins. I was going to use a WordPress platform for my business, thus using plugins was a good option for me.
- Plug-Ins: The plugin I choose allowed me to tap into a whole gambit of suppliers throughout China that were offering drop shipping. This resource would allow me to choose each product from any supplier within the dropshipping program and automatically download that product to my site. However, hard work was still involved. Once downloaded a lot of editing to the product material had to be done in order for me to set my own pricing and to make the content unique.
Careful Research
I also had the task of researching each supplier carefully. After all my credibility depended on their business ethics. This meant looking at their track record for the speedy delivery and authentic products as per their promotional materials.
Perseverance
The perseverance comes with not growing tired of all the hard work that comes with the set up of an e-commerce site which is what drop shipping normally requires if one wants to be fully successful with this business venture. The initial hustle is the hardest; you would have a lot of standards to establish, ranging from delivery to customer service. You would need to find strong and resilient vehicles to get the goods delivered, and later find high quality, truck, hgv and lorry insurance for them as well. If you ignore or slack on these early responsibilities, your company might suffer large losses down the line. The key is to keep the end goal and mind and work relentlessly towards it. The hard work is not going to end once the site is up and running. It is ongoing.
Patience
Patience is required in the efforts used to draw traffic to the website. This means becoming involved in different marketing tactics. Visitors do not automatically flock to a new site. I soon learned this after waiting a few days for sales to pour in. I started a robust marketing campaign that eventually led to good traffic which converted to sales.
