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What is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment business for online stores, now these are pretty heavy terms let me explain to you in simple words, In Dropshipping you have to open an online store and when someone places an order on your site, it passes automatically to the supplier and he ships your orders.
Dropshipping is a simple e-commerce business in which you don’t have to worry about a Warehouse for product management, a courier for shipping, and maintaining the store.
Dropshipping is very easy to start because of its low cost and eases to learn and apply nowadays it is a popular business for retailers who already sell their products on the websites like Amazon and Flipkart.
How Does Dropshipping Work?
The business model of Dropshipping is really simple, You set up an online store and list the products on it, whenever someone places order on your site, it is automatically sent to the supplier and he take care of everything else from there like, packing and shipping the product to your place. You can say that there are two persons involved in this business.
There are few legal things you need to do with your supplier as terms of the agreement. You don’t need to worry about it everything takes hardly more then an hour.
Note : This is not a get rich quick scheme, so if you are looking for that you may leave.
Low Investment Business that you can start from home complete guide here.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Dropshipping
Advantage :
- Easy to Start : Starting a dropshipping business is really simple, there are number of players in the market which provide dropshipping services like Shopfy, Amazon and Aliexpress.
- Low Investment: Dropshipping business is very cheap, all you need is a online shop which can be set up for under $200.
- Minimum Risk : Even if you are not successful in dropshipping there isn’t much for you to loose because all you have is a store, and no shipping problem you aren’t responsible for damaged products.
- Product Variety: There are large veriet of products available to choose from.
- Flexible : You can choose your own working hours but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work, you need to stay updated if you want to be a successful dropshipper.
Disadvantages:
Although dropshipping is an easy task it has many disadvantages.
- High Competition: As I told you dropshipping is easy to start so there are large number of players are already in the market and the dropshipping market is already saturated.
- less Control: In dropshipping you don’t have control over the product quality everything depends on the supplier.
- Competition with large companies: Large companies have huge capitals and can place order in bulk to get extra discount to come up with more competitive process which becomes a problem for retailers.
- Low Profit: With the rapid growth in competition profit margin is disappearing.
Is Dropshipping Profitable?
Well, it depends, if you already have a customer base like an Instagram page, Youtube channel, or Facebook page then you can drive customers easily to your product and need not to burn cash on advertising your product, these factors affect heavily while dropshipping. The dropshipping market is already saturated and it will take a lot more to build everything from scratch.
And also you should take dropshipping as a side hustle, not the main business. because you only need few hours to manage this business. many people do dropship alongside their main job.
You can easily start a dropshipping business with Shopify or amazon there are tons of videos available on youtube in which people are teaching you how to start dropshipping business step by step.
You should note that many people are claiming that you can be a millionaire overnight with dropshipping, we all know that they are promoting a scam, there is no such thing as an overnight millionaire, stay away from these type of people, Dropshipping business takes time to be profitable.
If you need further information feel free to ask in the comment section.
Dropshipping with Shopify complete guide here.