Is Dropshipping The Perfect Business Model?

avatar
(Edited)


 

No business model is exactly perfect. The best model is always going to depend on the goals of the business, the industry, and the resources available to the business.

But while this is true, there are certainly some business models out there that come pretty close to being perfect. And probably the best example of this of all is dropshipping. What makes dropshipping so special? Well, lets dive in and find out shall we...

The Problem With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the route that most internet marketers will take when trying to make money from a blog, social media channel, or mailing list. The idea about as simple as it gets: they promote someone else’s product and then they get a profit. Pretty easy huh?

The problem is that these products are almost always digital products. In order to get the biggest money, that’s what you need to sell.

While this has big advantages for the manufacturer, it has some significant downsides for you. For starters, the appeal of a digital product is much smaller than that of a physical product. Try and sell a digital product to your Grandma for instance and you won’t likely have much luck. It could be the same for your parents or any of you no so tech savvy friends, and come on, let's face it, we all have those friends and family that still doesn't know how to send a proper email, haha.

Another other big issue with only selling digital products in this manner is that you’re sending customers away from your site. They’ll be more likely to remember the company that sold them the product versus the blog that sent them there! And this prevents them from buying multiple items from you and your business.

The Problem With Selling Your Own Product or Reselling

Well, then what is the answer for an easy to set up online business? Well, you could sell your own product, sure. But then you have to manufacture it, spending thousands of dollars and potentially wasting your money if the product isn’t a hit. Many of us don’t have the money or the knowhow to go this route.

So you can resell instead… only this way you still need to take a big risk by spending lots of money on inventory. Then you have to find a way to store all that product and then you have to deliver it and worry about whether it arrives on time or not. It’s a huge amount of admin and not much fun… Trust me... I have lost ALLOT of money and more valuable time this way...

Enter Dropshipping

So remember that nearly perfect business model I mentioned at the beginning? Well that is dropshipping! With dropshipping, what you’re doing is selling a product through your own store as though it were your own item and then letting the wholesaler worry about fulfilment and delivery – as though it were an affiliate product. You can find countless products to sell from the many dropship dealers out there!

This has all the benefits of selling an affiliate product because you can sit back and let the orders roll in without having to do anything. But it also has all the benefits of selling a real product as a reseller or manufacturer – you get to keep your customers on your site and improve your brand awareness, while also selling real, useful products!

Best of all, some companies will even offer ‘white label’ dropshipping services. This means you can actually print your logo on the product and claim it as your own! This will help you further develop your brand!

There are now many companies that will even do direct to print, basically, print on demand products. What you do here is you create a design and put it on any number of products that the company offers. The mockups are automatically generated for you so you can see what the product will look like. You set the price you want for the item then you put it on your store, take orders, order from distributor (if not done automatically via plugins), keep profits! It's pretty easy and you basically are only out your time and website fees. It is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get into ecommerce, or should I say, #hivecommerce!

In Conclusion

Does dropshipping have it's pros and cons, absolutely! You have to make sure you do your due diligence before getting into business with any company, especially if your business and reputation is on the line! That is why I do allot of searching around for the best suppliers before building any store! Yes, anyone can dropship from places like Aliexpress, I mean, most of the items on the Hivelist.store are sourced from there, and everything is dropshipped, but you may have to deal with things like various shipping times, and difficulty dealing with suppliers. So that is why you need to take your time, and sometimes, you might have to buy your way into suppliers, but it will be worth it to get into a good, sound company with good products for you to dropship!


Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://hivelist.io/is-dropshipping-the-perfect-business-model/



0
0
0.000
9 comments
avatar

Congratulations @hivelist! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You received more than 600 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 700 upvotes.

You can view your badges on your board And compare to others on the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Support the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
0
0
0.000
avatar

I read an article about dropshipping lately - heaps of people living in Bali and doing it for a living. Tons of people made money off it earlier on but the article kinda said the hey day was over. Liked the idea of it though - do you do it?

0
0
0.000
avatar

It's definitely been around for a long time, but is still a solid business model. It's an easy way for people to get into business for cheap, in most cases that is. Just takes time to get everything set up correctly. Yes, all of the physical products for sale on https://hivelist.store, as well as thelogicaldude.com, and weedcash.store are all dropship and print on demand products.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Key is finding the customer or market. That's true that ropshipping is minimum investment work but finding and convincing the potential customer is a real hard part.

But yes it is great idea and almost nil investment.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Great post on dropshipping! Thanks for sharing...



Made in Canva

@thisisawesome Moderator


This is Awesome Content, and it will be manually curated with an upvote of 65% from @thisisawesome (will be done today), and it will also be included in our Awesome Daily Curation report in category Awesome CTP Curation for more visibility.

The goal of this project is to "highlight Awesome Content, and growing the Hive ecosystem and the CTPtalk tribe by rewarding it".


Source

0
0
0.000
avatar

This is a business model I have always been interested in. I am still looking into it. Have not given up. One of the best things about it is you don't have to carry your own inventory. Which can also be problematic because you need to find a reputable company that is reliable to get the product shipped.

0
0
0.000