Dropshipping is an intelligent way to start your webshop at a low cost. You can then entirely focus on marketing your webshop and selling the products from your range. The entire logistics process is arranged for you by a dropshipping supplier.
Dropshipping is also an intelligent way to work at the times that suit you best and from the places you want. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection.
What Does a Dropshipping Supplier Do?
You receive an order from an end customer/consumer via your webshop. You pass this order on to your dropshipping supplier. This sends the order directly to the end customer.
The dropshipping supplier sends your webshop the invoice for the delivery.
You must send the invoice to your end customer yourself and ensure that your end customer pays you for the order. This will usually be done directly when ordering the product through an online payment method like iDeal, credit card, or PayPal.
The drop shopping supplier keeps stock of the products. Pack it and present it in the post.
With many drop shopping suppliers, you can still make agreements about packaging the products in your packaging material with your webshop name and logo. Packing beans can also be added to the order in the name of your webshop.
Upon receiving the order, it will not be visible to the end customer that his order comes from the dropshipping supplier. The end customer will not know any better than that the order comes directly from the webshop where the order was placed.
Advantages of Dropshipping
It should be clear that dropshipping has its advantages. The main advantage is that you do not have to keep your stock. This again has several significant benefits, especially if you are just starting.
1) Low Investment
The advantage of not having your stock is that you don’t have to invest money in building and maintaining an inventory. You also save time if you don’t have to build and maintain stock, especially carrying a wide range.
And if you don’t need to have stock, you don’t need a warehouse to store the inventory. This saves you on housing costs and insurance costs.
2) No Inventory Risk
And no own stock also means no stock risk. You will never be left with unsold items. Being able to go on vacation. Another advantage is that you do not have to send the orders yourself; after all, this is done by the dropshipping supplier. This means that orders simply go out while you are on the beach enjoying a well-deserved holiday, for example.
With all these advantages, drop shopping is ideal for starting webshops. You need little money of your own to get started. Of course, all these benefits come at a price.
Disadvantages of Dropshipping
The dropshipping supplier does have the costs for a warehouse, keeping stock, insurance, and personnel costs.
The dropshipping supplier will pass these costs on to the website with a profit mark-up. This is at the expense of your margin per product sold.
If your webshop is running well, it can become financially interesting to keep stock yourself and send the products yourself.
In any case, the dropshipping supplier allows you to grow to that level for a low initial investment.
1) No Complete Control Over Packaging
Another disadvantage is that you don’t have complete control over the packaging and how the orders go out. For example, if you want to put something extra in the box for that one good customer, that’s not possible.
2) Dependent
Another disadvantage is that you are dependent on your dropshipping supplier. If they make mistakes, you will be held accountable by your customers.
3) Returns
Most dropshipping suppliers will not accept returns. This is often at the risk of the webshop. So you will have to factor this in. If you make enough volume, that shouldn’t be a problem.
We’ll outline the steps below that will get you started with dropshipping on your own.
Step 1: Find a Dropshipping Supplier
There are hundreds of dropshipping suppliers UK. In this overview, you will find more than 600, divided into areas of expertise such as personal care, home, and garden, electronics, fashion, and jewelry.
If you want to start with dropshipping, you probably already know what industry you want to sell products to.
If you don’t have this yet, I would advise you to go for a product group that appeals to you and has some affinity.
Step 2: Pay Attention to the Dropshipping Costs
You usually only have to deal with the purchase price of your products. With dropshipping, your purchase price is made up of three components:
- The purchase price of the items
- The shipping fees
- A fee for order processing (the entire logistics)
Shipping Costs
You would, of course, also have the shipping costs if you were to send the items to your customers yourself. It is often even cheaper to have your items shipped by a drop shipper because they can negotiate better prices for shipping parties because of the volume they make.
Logistical costs
For logistics, you usually pay an agreed price per product or order. These are the costs for packaging material, order picking, storage, the printing of receipts, etc.
Sufficient Margin
You will have to compare dropshipping suppliers on price, and you will also have to calculate whether you can make a sufficient margin on the products with the prices you get from the dropshipping suppliers.
Step 3: Choosing a Dropshipping Supplier
You will have to make a shortlist of possible dropshipping suppliers for yourself. You can then compare these on various points (besides price).
Reliability
You will have to check whether a dropshipping supplier is reliable. If a dropshipping supplier has been around for a long time, this is a sign that it is reliable.
Of course, you want to avoid going into business with a dropshipping supplier that stops after six months. You may have already set up your entire webshop with products from this dropshipping supplier.
Logistics hero
And, of course, you want your dropshipping supplier to hold its logistics. If you don’t feel like it and don’t have the time for something, it’s answering angry emails from your customers because they don’t have the ordered products at home yet.
Returns and warranty cases
You will also have to look at the dropshipping supplier’s arrangements for returns and warranty cases.
As a webshop, you must accept returns from your customers. However, a dropshipping supplier is not obliged to do this; he does business with you and not the end customer. It is, of course, an advantage if your dropshipping supplier wants to accept returns so that you do not get stuck with returns yourself.
Inventory Size
You will also need to look at the stock size and delivery times that your dropshipping supplier maintains. The idea of a dropshipping supplier is, of course, that you can consistently deliver quickly from stock. Your dropshipping supplier must be able to make this happen.
Step 4: Register a Domain Name
Now that you have arranged the logistics process, it is time to focus on sales. The fun part!
Brand name
To sell your products, you need a webshop. An essential step in this is the domain name of your webshop is necessary. You can use the name of your company or brand for this. It will still be accessible.
Generic Domain Name
The best is, of course, a generic domain name for your webshop such as buyfbaproducts.com
However, there is a good chance that this domain name is already taken.
Therefore, you can start playing with words like a shop, webshop, store,, and store. You can then create names such as FBAproductsshop.com, fbaproductssale.com, etc.
Sell From an Existing Website.
Maybe you already have a website from which you want to sell products. For example, you have a blog about good cooking, and you want to sell beautiful pans and plates. You can do this by adding a webshop to your blog.
If your blog runs on WordPress, excellent standard solutions for this.
Another option is to set up a webshop on a separate domain name to be independent of your blog.
Step 5: Ready-made Webshop or Not?
You can build a webshop yourself (or have it made yourself), or you can use a ready-made webshop solution.
Advantages of the ready-to-use webshop
The advantage of a ready-made webshop is that it is usually cheaper to start. This is in addition to the following benefits:
- No technical knowledge is required to get started
- Professional looking webshop
- Your webshop can be live in a short time
- Using payment systems that are already integrated, such as iDeal, PayPal, Mollie, and credit cards
- Make standard connections with major dropshipping suppliers
- Well secured as standard
Disadvantages of the ready-made webshop
A ready-made webshop also has disadvantages:
- Periodic costs, are usually subscription types that you are committed to
- You don’t just switch to another webshop platform (you are ’embedded’ in the system you choose)
- Fewer options to personalize things
Step 6: The Marketing
Now that you have had a webshop built or made, visitors must come to your webshop so that the orders arrive.
You can use various channels for marketing your webshop. The most obvious is that you will use online media.
SEO and SEA
The most common is that you will be doing SEO and SEA. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEA stands for Search Engine Advertising (advertising in the search engine).
In addition, you can also use advertising options on, for example, Facebook or Marktplaats.
Advantage of SEO
For a webshop, however, SEO will be the most lucrative. These are the visitors to your webshop that come in via the organic (free) search results of Google. Because you pay nothing for these visitors, these visitors are the most profitable.
Disadvantage SEO
However, the disadvantage of SEO is that it will take a long time before you have a top position in Google. Depending on the competition on your keywords, it can take a few months to maybe a year before you rank high in Google.
SEO for webshops
We have already discussed how exactly you do SEO for your webshop in our SEO webshop article. If you want to know more about this, I can recommend that you also read this article.
SEA
To earn money with your dropshipping webshop until then, you can use the option to advertise on Google. Because of the costs, you incur with this, you will earn less per customer, but you are in any case right ‘in business.’ By advertising on Google, you can welcome your first customers to your webshop within an hour.
