What Is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a supply chain model in which a business can directly ship one product from wholesaler’s warehouse to the customer’s address without handling logistics and management. This lets dropshippers focus on the ‘actual’ business aspect of their business, i.e., growth and scalability.
These dropshippers earn commission by selling products of suppliers for a markup, earning handsome commissions.
In short, the dropshippers work as intermediaries between suppliers and customers. When an order is received, they transfer the order information to the suppliers and keep the markup amount as commission for themselves. The supplier will then dispatch the product from the warehouse to the customers. In most cases, the suppliers don’t even know that the person buying from them is a dropshipper or an actual person.
What is a Dropshipper?
A dropshipper is a person or business that uses the dropshipping model of buying inventory and fulfillment logistics from a third party, instead of warehousing and shipping the products themselves.
Because dropshipping relies on a third-party supplier to handle inventory warehousing and order fulfillment, a dropshipping operation may be managed by dozens of employees or a single business owner.
What You Need to Know About Dropshipping?
- A dropship store works similar to an ecommerce store. You place an order and receive the product.
- However, behind the scenes, dropshipper gets the payment and then places an order with a third party. This third party can be AliExpress, DOBA, or even a wholesaler from Salehoo and other platforms.
- Once the wholesaler receives the order, they ship the product directly to the customer
- Dropshippers don’t directly handle the product. However, they can track the shipment.
AliExpress Dropshipping Center?
The AliExpress dropshipping is a free tool for all our product research needs. It gives us a list of AliExpress products and rank them by sales value, rating, and sales performance. Furthermore, the center provides detailed analytic of product for in depth research. Therefore, the AliExpress Dropshipping Center is a perfect addition to our dropshipping store.
We can use it to find the most trending products with confidence that they are of good quality, affordable, and that demand is high enough to justify selling them.Finally, knowing that a product has good logistics comes with the peace of mind that products will deliver on time. As a result, we ensure our customers are satisfied and profits are high.
Can You Make Money Dropshipping?
Yes, you can make a lot of money dropshipping! Though dropshipping businesses traditionally have low margins, there is a lot of opportunity for creating a profitable business. It’s important to understand the difference between markup vs margin when pricing your products. Otherwise, you risk missing out on profits.
Here are five ways How to Make Money Dropshipping?
- Pick the Right Niche
- Focus on Marketing
- Use the Right Software
- Track Metrics
- Try Drop surfing
IS AMAZON DROPSHIPPING PROFITABLE?
Amazon dropshipping is profitable if your profit margin is above Amazon’s seller fees, which includes a percentage of each sale — around 15% of what you charge for the item, plus ship, on average. There’s also a $0.99 per-item fee or $39.99/month subscription fee, depend on the Amazon seller plan you choose.
Percentage fees can vary from 6% to 45%, depend on the product you’re selling.
Dropshipping on Amazon is different from the FBA program. With Amazon FBA, you store products in Amazon fulfillment warehouses. And products are ship by the fastest delivery network in the world.
With Amazon dropshipping, the products you sell go straight from the policy to the buyer. There are shipping caveats involved in Amazon dropshipping that you should be aware of.
How to Choose an Alibaba Dropshipping Supplier?
Alibaba is a safe marketplace with good and honest suppliers. However, like any other ecommerce platform, it’s not short of a few unscrupulous individuals. You will need to do lots of due diligence when choose a dropshipping supplier on Alibaba. Here’s how to go about it:
- Choose a verify policy: while you have the option to work with any Alibaba policy (including non-verified ones), you’re much safer choose verify policy. The confirmation icon means that the supplier has been screen by Alibaba for authentication. Besides, order from a verify business entitle you to free supplier inspection reports from Alibaba.
- Select policy who offer Alibaba’s Trade Assurance: Trade Assurance is a built in payment protection system that works like escrow. It’s a free service that protection buyers’ orders and money. Working with a policy who is part of Alibaba’s Trade Assurance means that you’re highly unlikely to encounter fraud and quality issues.
- Request for the policy contact details: at the very least, ask the policy to give you their business phone number, email address and physical address. They won’t delay if they are a legitimate business. Plus, you can use the information to run a quick Google Earth search of the policy. And don’t feel reluctant to call the number and prove its legitimacy.
- Ask for business document: if you want to go a step further to verify the business, make sure to ask the policy to show you copies of their business licenses and compliance certificates. You can even request for a few photos of their factory or warehouse.
- Prioritize gold supply: an Alibaba is one who has a golden icon on their profile and product page. Although any supply can pay to have this icon, it’s only issued to business that agree to on-site validation by a third-party scrutineer. Among other things, the scrutineer’s job is to verify that the supply is an actual, legitimate business. Therefore, if you wish to skip request for proof of legality yourself, you can rely on the gold icon as evidence of the supplier’s legitimacy.
- Check the supply reviews: Alibaba who are based in China are usually rated using the policy. Supplier Online Performance Index (SOPI). The rating system – which runs from 0 through 5 – take into account a supplier’s product popularity, presentation quality, service quality and transaction volume. A rating of 5 indicate excellence of the aforementioned metrics. On the other hand, a rating that tends towards zero suggests that the supplier doesn’t have products that meet consumer expectations. They don’t put enough effort into packaging either. Therefore, it makes sense to go with a supplier with a high SOPI score. You can see their