Drop shipping is not a new concept, but it is only in the last few years that it has evolved to be a popular, easy and profitable business. With the boom of ecommerce and the emergence of apps like Oberlo, now it’s easier than ever to build up a thriving drop shipping business.
Whether your sales are made from a brick and mortar shop or on the virtual internet world, one of the key aspects of a successful retail store is an effectively managed inventory.
Skip the Inventory Stocking Headaches
Traditionally, to start a retail business you had to invest a huge amount of money into stocking up your inventory. You needed warehouse space to hoard all these items, and the inventory had to be managed carefully to maximize the bottom line. Inventory management can turn into a nightmare for many businesses.
Messy storage habits can make inventory checks time consuming and frustrating. Stock-outs don’t just mean lost sales; they result in disgruntled customers, negative feedbacks and lowered seller ratings. Under stocking meant not being able to meet customer needs and it can lead to a substantial drop in customer satisfaction. More money gets tied up if you overstock and this also reduces profitability as these products cost more storage space. They may get damaged, or the product may even become obsolete. Obsolete stock is a dead weight that may ultimately sink your business.
Now imagine being able to skip all these inventory stocking headaches. This is where drop shipping comes in. It eliminates not just inventory investment and storage headaches, but also the packaging and delivery of goods to the customer. Sounds awesome!
Though drop shipping sounds really easy, it has its share of pitfalls which include finding and contacting reliable suppliers, setting competitive, yet profitable pricing and updating the inventory constantly on your ecommerce site. Now if all of these hassles could also be solved by someone else, wouldn’t that be just amazing! If so, then Oberlo surely is a retailer’s dream come true!
Launch Your Drop Shipping Business From Home
Oberlo is the ideal tool for those who want to get started with drop shipping without having to struggle through the whole procedure. Oberlo is an app that helps you import products effortlessly from AliExpress directly into your Shopify store and ship them to your customers.
It has never been as easy as with Shopify and Oberlo to launch a lucrative drop shipping business. Whether you want to do business from your fancy office room or from your attic – Shopify provides you with the best platform to build your ecommerce store and handle payments. They also provide you with the various tools you need to run a successful ecommerce business. The Oberlo app is one such extension you can install on sites built on Shopify, to import thousands of products quickly and easily from AliExpress for drop shipping. With more than a 1000 positive reviews, Oberlo is one of the most popular apps in the Shopify app store.
Oberlo is rich with features that are easy to use. The dashboard has a clean well-designed interface for managing products. The menu on the left-hand side offers options for completing a wide variety of tasks like importing lists, setting featured products, searching or viewing your products. The information regarding your products is displayed in a well-organised fashion. You can easily view the inventory, sales, and earnings of each and every product. Huffington Post had made a report on Justin Wong, who made $12K in one month with the help of Oberlo from his Shopify store.
Drop Shipping Solutions Made Easy
Now, how does Oberlo solve your drop shipping dilemmas? First and foremost it connects you with a reliable supplier – AliExpress and best of all – it auto updates your inventory of chosen products to ensure that you are not out of stock when a customer places an order with you. It has plenty of other features that help you convert sales and make your drop shipping business a great success.
Finding and Contacting Reliable Drop Shipping Suppliers
Finding and identifying genuine, dependable dropshipping suppliers on the internet can be an exasperating, time-consuming challenge. When you research and make a hope-filled list of potential suppliers, you might find that many of them no longer exist, quite a few of them are scams, and several of the real ones have terrible terms.
AliExpress is a colossal marketplace with an extensive selection of products that can be resold in your ecommerce store. Though AliExpress itself is an online retailer, the majority of sellers on AliExpress are overseas manufacturers trading their wares at extremely competitive prices. The best part is that most of them offer drop shipping, they understand that resellers form a major chunk of their revenue stream.
Increasing your Conversion Rate
The major benefit of drop shipping using AliExpress is that it has millions of product selections from multiple suppliers. These suppliers have their own prices and delivery times. The Oberlo app allows you to easily choose or change your suppliers for any product. You can check out the seller feedback ratings on AliExpress before you finalize on a supplier and if a different supplier comes up with a better offer, you can switch over to that merchant with just a click on the app. This not only gives you a wider choice of unique niche products that make your ecommerce store stand out, but it also provides a backup of your inventory when a supplier runs out of stock.
Oberlo not just gives you access to the huge AliExpress product database, its ePacket filter allows you to filter and navigate easily through this colossal marketplace to choose and import products with the fastest delivery times. Such a unique selling proposition helps to increase your conversion rates. Even if you already sell AliExpress products on your Shopify store, you will find that adding the Oberlo app creates a tremendous jump in your efficiency and sales conversions.
Automatic Inventory Updates
There are two huge benefits to this feature. Importing inventory reports and updating your records manually is a lengthy and frustrating job. Oberlo can save you a significant amount of time with its auto-update option. Once you put up your choice of products for sale, the Oberlo software automatically updates the inventory of these products depending on their availability from the chosen suppliers on AliExpress.
If your supplier runs out of stock at AliExpress and your inventory does not reflect that, you run the risk of accepting orders you have no way to fulfill. Oberlo can save you from such hassles and negative reviews from customers arising from out of stock scenarios.
Product Customization for Sales Promotion
Even if you are just reselling products displayed on AliExpress, your product page does not have to have a generic look. Oberlo helps you customize your product offerings to make them stand out from the crowd of competitors.
You can write catchy titles, attractive product descriptions with important SEO keywords and add captivating images of the product from various angles. This helps to project your store as a trustworthy and top quality retailer.
Setting Competitive and Profitable Pricing
The ecommerce world is fiercely competitive with cut throat pricing. It’s not the lowest price that wins over a customer; there are many other factors involved. But having a low price does help you compete better. So when there are better deals available from suppliers, you can also offer a better price to your customers without lowering your profit margin.
Oberlo also allows you to set the pricing rules beforehand and the product prices get updated automatically in bulk depending on the margin you have set. If the offer price drops at the supplier’s end, Oberlo will notify you in case you’d like to adjust your margins. If you want to create special promotions or holiday sales, then you can set the margin accordingly, and the pricing of your entire chosen inventory gets updated at one go.
Fulfil and Track Your Sales
This is the best part of using Oberlo as it takes the biggest burden of drop shipping off your shoulders. You don’t have to worry about the storage, packing or shipping of the product. Once you have received an order and the customer’s payment, Oberlo makes it incredibly easy to process and fulfill the order.
All you have to do is click “Order Product” on your Oberlo app to confirm that you want to order the same product from your chosen supplier on AliExpress. Oberlo will immediately process the order, and you will be provided with integrated tracking so that you can keep track of the delivery status and pass on the information to the customer, if required. Despite his significant role in the fulfillment process, the drop shipper is invisible to the customer. The customer never comes to know that you have not handled or even seen the product, at any point of the sale. Oberlo makes drop shipping what it should be. Super Easy!
The Oberlo dashboard has an option to view and keep track of items you’ve sold and when you sold it. This helps you revise your strategies to improve your sales. You can find plenty of true success stories online, about ordinary people like Allen, a 24-years old student from China who made $800,000 in sales in the last year from his Shopify store. If you need more motivation to get started with drop shipping, check out this terrific video of a recent interview with one of Oberlo’s co-founders.
The Secret to Getting Ahead in Dropshipping
“If you don’t start in the right spot, you are going to lose the game before you even get started.” – Mike O’Neil
Oberlo has already proven itself as the best drop shipping solution in the market. It is the best way to automate your drop shipping business, which in turn, allows you to focus on generating sales and growing your business. Since Oberlo’s launch in September 2015, more than 85 million products have been sold around the world by Oberlo merchants.
The innovations in ecommerce like Shopify and drop shipping solutions like Oberlo have now made it easier than ever to launch your own drop shipping business with zero investment. Oberlo has a free plan for those just starting out, and Shopify offers you a free 14-day trial. So don’t wait to start, there’s nothing for you to lose. The only failure is not trying. The secret to getting ahead in drop shipping is to get started with Oberlo.
Hi Pradeep,
So you are now into drop shipping business too?
Do you have any Guide how to start with this drop shipping business from scratch?