As an online retailer, you may have plenty of stock stored at a warehouse or some other facility. Building a catalogue of stocked goods often requires you to purchase your stock prior to making it available to your customers.
If you’re looking for a more efficient way to run your business that doesn’t require a large upfront investment, consider a dropshipping strategy. With dropshippers, you link products from your catalogue directly to the manufacturer or wholesaler. When orders are placed, they’re fed through the system to the dropshipper, who ships the product to the buyer. That way, you act as a virtual “bridge” between the supplier and the buyer without investing much on the front end.
The right shopping cart software will already have potential partners in place to get you started with your dropshipping strategy. You don’t have to work directly with the manufacturer or wholesaler; instead, you can work with a dropshipping company that gives you access to the manufacturers and wholesalers you need for your business.
If you’re not sold on working with a dropshipper, take a look at some of the benefits for your business below.
Reduce Upfront Investment: As we mentioned, when you work through a dropshipper, your business requires no upfront investment for products purchased through your store, creating a low barrier to entry.
Relinquish the Burden of Shipping: Because the order feeds through your platform directly to the dropshipper, you won’t have to manually ship your products.
Cut Costs on Warehouse Space: You don’t have the physical product, so you won’t need the physical space.
Save Time to Focus on Other Business Elements: With dropshipping, you’ll save tons of time, a benefit that gives you the ability to focus more time on other elements of your business, like marketing and maintaining customer support channels.
Lower Risk: Because you aren’t buying the products upfront, you’ll never have too much stock of an out-of-date or unpopular item. The risk of purchasing stock is essentially eliminated.
More Products: Working through dropshippers may give you access to more products than you would purchase for your business, diversifying your store and offering you more opportunities to make the sale.
Dropshipping may or may not be right for your business. Be sure to do some serious research on your market and available dropshippers before you put your strategy in place.
