Dropshipping Concept of eCommerce, and How Does it Work!
In the eCommerce industry, there are various aspects of establishing your business robustly. Order fulfillment is one of the most essential aspects of establishing a rewarding eCommerce business. Hence, you need to emphasize more on this factor. In this particular blog, we will talk about dropshipping. It’s a unique way to run an online business that can help you get started with less investment and implement hassle-free order fulfillment.
If we talk about it more precisely, dropshipping can let you skip the heavy inventory requirements of running an online store, and instead, it lets you outsource inventory management and order fulfillment to third-party suppliers or manufacturers.
To fulfill the orders of your valuable customers, you can use drop shipping if you are an individual seller. It is one of the most popular concepts for initiating the shipping process in eCommerce. If you have started your business initially, you can apply this concept in terms of fulfilling the orders of your customers. The following points can help you understand dropshipping and how it works.
Definition of Dropshipping for Online Sellers!
For the eCommerce industry dropshipping is one of the most trending and popular shipping concepts sellers use to fulfill their customers’ orders. You can say that it is the procedure of the order fulfillment method where eCommerce sellers can outsource procuring, storing, and delivering products that their customers ordered.
Once a customer places an order you need to simply forward that order to the manufacturing unit as an eCommerce seller. Once you place the order, it becomes the responsibility of third parties to manage the product and prepare it for delivery. You can take advantage of drop shipping if you do not want to invest much in your online business.
While implementing dropshipping into your business, you need to buy products from any third-party vendors and they will directly ship them to the customers’ addresses. Dropshipping doesn’t require inventory management because you do not need to buy products in bulk.
It may be a new concept in India, but foreign countries such as Canada, Australia, and California have been using this for a long time. You can go for this if you are new to this business and do not want to take any risk of failure.
Apart from this, if you want to make it a successful affair, you can take the help of an order management system for eCommerce, such as eVanik OWS. It can help you in many ways to establish your online business effectively by automating your back-office operations.
How Does Dropshipping Concept Work for eCommerce Businesses?
There are three significant aspects of dropshipping concept: order placement, order confirmation, and delivery. Let’s find out the details of this spectacular eCommerce business model.
Order Placement
This process begins when a customer orders through any eCommerce platform. For example, suppose a customer orders a handbag from any eCommerce marketplace such as Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart, etc. First of all, you have to ensure the availability of the product listed on the platform. Once the order gets placed, you need to forward the order request to the manufacturer or supplier who has stored the products.
Order Confirmation
In this process, once the order gets finalized and purchased by the customer, you need to send a confirmation email to the customer’s email id. This should include the shipping and tracking details of the order. On the other hand, you also have to inform the manufacturer about the ordered product. However, it seems like a regular order process. Still, the only difference is that sellers work as a bridge between the customer and the manufacturer in the dropshipping concept.
Order Delivery
The delivery process in dropshipping is relatively easy as well. The entire process of delivery is just like standard shipping. The order gets packed from the warehouse of the manufacturers after the order confirmation is received from the seller’s end and delivered to the customer.
One thing as a seller you need to take care of in this whole process is ensuring the order is delivered to your customers on time. Delay delivery can ruin your image at the marketplaces and disappoint your customers as well.
Best Ways to Select Products for Dropshipping
If you are going to implicate dropshipping in the online business, you need to make sure that you have chosen a beneficial product to sell. However, with the constant study of market trends and customers’ demand, you can make a strategy or plan to finalize a product category you want to sell on marketplaces.
Here we have mentioned some of the magnificent steps to help you select dropshipping products to sell on multiple eComm platforms.
Make a list of Best Selling Product
First of all, you need to understand that if you are an individual seller and handle your business individually through the dropshipping concept, you need to select a product to sell that can provide you with a good outcome. For that, you need to analyze several marketplaces, observe the latest trend, and make a list of their top-selling products. It will help you to identify what products you should sell or not.
Get the Product Selling Ideas From Social Media
To get on board and select what product you should sell that can help you generate decent revenue, you can take the help of social media websites as well. You can check out the shopping pages on Facebook and Instagram and analyze their top-selling products. Social media can also help you understand customer behavior toward specific products. Based on that, you can choose a top-selling product and sell it on various eCommerce platforms.
Examine the Local Market
The beauty of the Indian eCommerce market is that you already have immense opportunities to sell various products from diversified traditions and heritage. You can see Indian culture in several products sold in the markets. Local markets of each city and district offer a range of handmade products. These products even get supplied to foreign countries; you can study those products and decide to sell those on marketplaces.
Pros and Cons of Dropshipping
Pros
- The most tenacious pros of dropshipping are it doesn’t require a massive investment. This business model is budget-friendly, and anyone can get aboard initially at multiple eCommerce channels.
- It is an effortless eCommerce business model that helps in establishing your online store in the first place. It minimizes the risk of failure by providing you with real-time order fulfillment updates.
- Dropshipping eradicates the requirement of managing inventories. Eventually, it diminishes the chance of money loss and can add more value to your business.
- This eCommerce model is location friendly; you don’t require to be present at any specific location. You can simply run your business from anywhere just by keeping in touch with manufacturers and customers.
Cons
- Though the dropshipping concept doesn’t require a hefty investment, the return on investment rate is comparatively less. The process of revenue generation can be slower for dropshippers.
- You can not be able to customize the products as per the requirement of your customers. It can dissatisfy your customers, and you may lose your grip on your customer base.
- In the dropshipping model, you won’t be able to keep a check on inventories that change every day. It can keep you in denial, and sometimes your customers may face a stock-out situation.
- You may face the shipping complexities of working with multiple manufacturers and distributors. In this situation, you can get blamed for their faults if the order doesn’t get delivered to your customers on the promised time.
Conclusion
Thus, now you get to understand what dropshipping is and how it works. You can become a successful online seller by adopting the drop shipping concept. Once you finalize what product you want to sell, you have to look out for the manufacturers or distributors who can dropship the products on your behalf. It will help if you reach out to the manufacturers to look at those products.
A short supply chain is always a better option to make most of the eCommerce business. It also has its advantages and disadvantages, but the point is who doesn’t have it. Risks are always there, but you must identify them and eliminate them wisely. However, to ease your hustle, you can take advantage of the software of online sellers such as eVanik OWS.
