Thoughts On Dropshipping?

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16.8K followers

I'm looking to branch out and dropshipping seems pretty interesting. Does anybody have any experience with it and suggestions? I bought a $10 course on Udemy and went through it. I understand all the concepts and just want to know if anyone has any success with it.

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46

We paid $10K for a course, Had the website and the contacts to drop ship emerald jewelry and the jewlers went out of business. That was a very expensive lesson. Who would be doing your drop shipping, Amazon? That could work.

It would be aliexpress but there's not upfront costs orvinventory

We have no experience with aliexpress but no upfront costs sounds very good. You drop ship so you don't have any inventory.

Hi Dylan, have you connected with DaveSw? Dropshipping is part of his endeavours. :)

I haven't.. I'll make sure to reach out to him!

I like the idea of drop shipping and have registered with shopify.
I am still yet to fill my online store with products.

Wish you all the best and please do let me know how it goes.

Cheers and have a lovely day.

Mary

Thanks and I will

Dropshipping with Shopify and Oberlo is extremely easy.Setting up your store only takes a few minutes.Oberlo actually has a guide in pdf format on their website where they show you step by step how to set up everything.Your markup is normally about 200% and your biggest expense will be what you spend on marketing your store.

All the best and wish you all the success

That's what I was thinking.. It seems easy enough to atleast try out. Do you dropship?

Set up a store but never got a chance to market it properly as yet.

Nice alright.. thanks for the tips

I sell T-shirts through a drop shipping print service. To make a long story short I make 50% on every sale.

That's pretty good! Are you making money?

Right now just from family members lol! Enough for me to see the potential If I were to seriously beef up traffic to my site.

Dylan, I am just curious.Why you want to divert your attention away from your successful affiliate business?

I like to see you reach $10,000 or even $20,000/month with
your affiliate business.

Just a wish from one of your follower, but choice is always
yours,Dylan.

Just something extra to do.. it wouldn't take away from my affiliate site. I would still work on that just as hard

Keep going Dylan, you will be successful in drop shipping too.

Thanks

Hi Dylan,

I've been looking into drop shipping for a while but have not pulled the trigger yet.
In order to make a minimum of 15% to 20% margin, as mentioned in other replies, you will probably need a 100% to 200% markup, to cover costs caused by shipping fees, returns, etc. And I think selecting product(s) and supplier(s) is the most critical part for starting up. There are a lot of fake drop shipping companies which sell products directly to customers, and you will have to dig deep into the directories to find the real suppliers. Customer service is another critical part to set you apart from competition, provided you and your competitors are selling same or similar products.
You've found success in affiliate marketing by learning from WA and adding your own unique methods, I'm sure you will figure it out if you really decide to give it a try.

Best regards,

Hugh

Thanks Hugh for the comment.. I think I'll give it a shot and see what happens. I'll probably write a few posts on it so everyone can see what I think of it.

Hey Dylan,
It's a great concept, not having to carry any inventory, etc. However, as Chris stated (@cbarnes1), the margins need to be high because your overhead will be up there as well (advertising, marketing). You will need to handle the order processing and be front facing with the customer (returns, complaints, etc.)

Also, when you find great margins, competition tends to find them as well. The margins get slimmer over time because of this.

You need to take shipping into account and many companies that agree to drop ship will charge an extra fee known appropriately as a drop shipping fee. If you are trying to bundle products from different vendors, you would need to charge shipping for each vendor. This would not be particularly popular with customers.

Many drop shipping companies require state sales tax id's. These are free to get but you also may have to deal with taxes in different states, depending on the vendor, state, etc.

I am not saying people don't make money with drop shipping, but I know from experience these are the challenges involved with the process.

One way it could be used is as a loss leader. Basically, you would sell the drop shipped item knowing you would take a small loss or break even, all with the purposes of getting customers on your list or to funnel them to some other offer that is related to the drop shipped products.

Best Regards,
Jim

Thanks for the comment Jim. I think I might test it out and see what happens. I'm too curious not to. I'm not going to sink a lot of money in it unless I see profit. I'll make sure to keep all the problems you brought up in mind.

I know of some people who are making serious money with drop shipping. One guy from Greece grossed over 1 mil in a year. It's a great way to diversify and it's getting popular. I did some training on it last year but I didn't start a store.

You can also get a done for you store if you don't want to do it yourself. AliExpress as well as Shopify have got free guides and resources you can utilize with reference to marketing and such. Check out the video in the post below. It just might give a bit more insight. http://bit.ly/2tujL8R

I was thinking Shopify and Aliexpress too.. I keep seeing these videos of like 17 and 18 year olds making a lot of money doing this. I might have to test it our and see what happens.

If you're going with Shopify, and importing products from AliExpress, be sure to use the free Oberlo App. It helps with importing the products to your store and a host of other things. AliDropship has a plugin that would do the same but it's a one time payment option.

AliDropship also has a few free guides that might come in handy as well. If you are using AliExpress, be sure to sign up as an affiliate. You can make extra money processing orders for others.

I'll look into all of that and I've heard of Oberlo. Thanks!

You're welcome.

Make sure that you can make a minimum of 15% to 20% margin on your products.

This way if your successful at it then you will have some cash left to reinvest in the business.

It is also good to find products that have good distributors or manufacturers that won't sell direct to your customers or on Amazon.

Track every little expense because at the end of the month you will be surprised at what everything adds up to for costs such as hosting (ecommerce hosting is quite a bit more than blog hosting), credit card processing, accounting software, returns that you might have to eat etc.


With the success I have seen you having with affiliate marketing I don't think you should distract yourself with dropshipping in my opinion.

You make more in a month than some people make in a year dropshipping.


Thanks for the response! You gave me a lot to think about. Just of curiosity, do you think it would have been easier for you if you didn't have to actually ship the products? I was thinking of doing Shopify and Aliexpress - they would handle all the shipping.

I stopped dropshipping back in 2011 because I was spending all my free time trying to keep the site updated, handle emails from customers, return phone calls. I did have a full time job at the time which didn't help but it is still a lot more work than affiliate marketing.

Shopify is the cart but you still need to load products and keep them updated. There are plugins that will do it I believe but everyone is doing the same thing.

Unless you have products that are unique you will be in a price war with everyone else. Plus you will need to deal with the headache of products being shipped from China.

There will be bad products or wrong products shipped so you would have to eat the cost and reorder to make customer happy.

Right now your only overhead with affiliate marketing is a computer and internet connection.

You can go on vacation and still make money with your current affiliate sites.

Dropshipping will take up more of your time for sure.

That's interesting.. I guess I never really thought of it like that. I really don't want to deal with customers (it's one reason I love affiliate marketing). Maybe I'll hold off actually and just start outsourcing content to get my site bigger. Thanks for the tips Chris

Of all the comments, I like Cbarnes1's the best. I too looked into drop shipping, Shopify, Ali Express and Oberlo app.

I know you are saying that you will most likely wait, so this comment is for other people also.

People also need to take into acccount that they will also be competing with Amazon's prime member program. How would you convince customers that they want to purchase x product from your site and wait for two or three weeks for it to be shipped? Generally speaking, Amazon has us very spoiled.

The exception might be if your drop shipping is based on large items, like furniture. Even if a person goes to a local furniture store, they will most likely have to wait for their purchase.

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