Do I recall correctly that you purchased this from a locally owned Kentucky company? What’s the point of hanging around for a shipment from Shenzhen?
Let me introduce you to drop shipping.
Drop shipping as a side hustle is easier than ever thanks to social media. It can be a viable source of income for some people.
To put it simply, a dropshipping business is an intermediary that takes a cut of the revenue generated by introducing a supplier to a new customer. You create your own website, search for products that you think would sell well online, and have the manufacturers ship the products to your new customers. You can make money off of your interests without having to manufacture anything or keep a stockroom stocked.
Buying and selling online is easier than ever before. Don’t be duped by social media stars who boast about making easy money through reselling or dropshipping. However, there are some initial outlays required to launch a dropshipping operation.
What follows is a detailed analysis of the numbers you’ll need to open an online store and begin making money through dropshipping.
Setting Up Your Online Store
In theory, it wouldn’t cost you anything to launch a minimal dropshipping store. To no avail, unfortunately.
During the trial period of a free store, you would likely be limited to placing a certain number of orders, selecting from a limited number of designs, and making limited use of the available services.
Therefore, your website would only be functional for as long as the free trials are available for the software you require, and your life would be significantly more difficult because you would lack access to the vast majority of the apps and plugins your company requires.
That is to say, without putting up some of your own money, you won’t be able to keep your dropshipping business afloat for more than a month.
Before your first customer places an order, here’s a breakdown of the costs you can expect to incur:
Buying a URL and Hosting Site
Everybody knows that free domain names ending in “.HostingName” are suspicious looking.
Investing in the ownership of a memorable domain name is a crucial step in establishing credibility with online shoppers. Thanks to services like Shopify and BlueHost, you can get a unique URL for your online store for less than twenty dollars.
Which hosting service you use is really unimportant. It’s possible to use a site’s premade layout, or to have more control over the site’s coding and formatting, depending on the site. The decision will depend on your web design expertise and available funds. As one of the most widely used platforms for creating websites, Shopify is a good place to look for inspiration.
Getting Products Ready
Please don’t be the person who makes a living by sending people pointless junk.
In order to ensure the quality of the goods you plan to sell on your Shopify or Amazon dropshipping store, you should buy samples and put them through their paces before offering them for sale to the general public. You shouldn’t put too much faith in the pictures a manufacturer sends you. Feel free to get your hands dirty and try out the goods for yourself.
In addition, you’ll gain insight into how to increase sales and head off customer complaints with this practice.
Paying for Marketing
The most crucial investment you can make in your dropshipping website is in advertising. Unless you invest some capital into advertising, you can forget about turning a profit.
There is no simple formula to predict how much money will be needed here. Marketing your dropshipping company can be done anywhere and in any way that makes sense for the products and customers you’re targeting.
However, there is no doubt that you will need to expose your store to hundreds of people before you see any kind of a return on your investment. Find the best way to advertise your company on a consistent basis without breaking the bank.
Don’t forget that you’ll get even more return on investment (REI) if your product or service is well received by customers and the press.
The Best Marketing is Good Customer Service
Everyone has had an experience that completely ruined their opinion of a certain company or establishment.
Your dropshipping company can’t afford to fail like that!
If you don’t care about your customers, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on rent, utilities, and inventory. When providing service to your customers, it is important to:
Inquire About Products Before Purchasing
Inquire about shipping costs and expected delivery dates
provide product reviews, return merchandise, and learn the reasoning behind their refund or rejection.
Make sure you have enough money set aside to cover the costs of returns from dissatisfied customers and reshipping packages that have been lost or damaged in transit.
When in doubt, provide the same level of customer service you would want, if it was you buying something online.
Legal taxes registration
Finally, you cannot avoid paying taxes by failing to register your business with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and file all required returns by the due date. In addition, you must evaluate how these factors will affect your company; if you are only making a sale to cover tax obligations, your numbers are probably off.
How to Make Money Dropshipping: Do The Math
Stay away from cheesy, overnight success gurus. While legitimate dropshipping businesses can generate profits in the long run, it may take several months before you see any returns on your initial investment.
There will be fixed costs associated with maintaining a high level of service and product quality. To review, these are:
Domain registration fees are the expense incurred to have your own website.
Shopify, a website that hosts stores, charges a monthly fee.
Expenses incurred in acquiring quality-control samples for use in marketing
Payment processing costs
The cost of customers returning items or packages that never arrive
Taxes
Read more of our thoughts on dropshipping if you found this article on the topic interesting.