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!