From a legal point of view, South Africa is a good place to start dropshipping. But some people don’t like this business model because it’s hard to figure out how to start dropshipping. In this article, we’ve answered all of your questions. Look at this to learn how to get started with dropshipping in South Africa.
What Is South Africa Dropshipping?
Before we talk about other important things, here’s a quick summary of the dropshipping model:
Dropshipping is a good way to run a business because it lets you buy products from a marketplace without stocking them. The dropshipping business can sell these products on their online store. When a customer places an order on the store, the order is placed on the marketplace and sent directly to the user.
In a typical e-commerce model, you can get products from a wholesaler or make your own stock, which you can even sell under your own brand name. In dropshipping, on the other hand, you can only send items directly to the customer.
Why you might want to consider dropshipping
If you’re wondering why this kind of online shopping is good for you, here’s why. Based on this survey, we can say that more and more people are shopping online right now. The pandemic has also changed how people shop and when they expect their orders to arrive.
In an ideal world, there would be a shift toward online shopping all over the world. More and more people are shopping online because the pandemic keeps coming back with new strains every year. So, it makes sense to think that the dropshipping business model will only become more popular over time. This also means that you may soon be able to make a lot of money by dropshipping to South Africa.
South Africa: How to Start Dropshipping
If you want to know how to start dropshipping in South Africa the right way, here are some steps we recommend:
Choose who you want to reach.
Make a buyer persona to start. You must already know what product niche you want to fill. You should make a persona of your users with this niche or product category in mind. This includes their age, gender, where they live, what they like and don’t like, and other information.
For example, you sell pillows and soft toys that look like Minion. Even without doing research, we can tell that your target audience is new moms whose kids are at least 3–4 years old.
In the same way, if you want to make the right dropshipping South Africa model, you need to know who your audience is.
AliExpress will ship items directly to South Africa
Use of the AliExpress marketplace is one of the best ways to do dropshipping from South Africa. How can you use AliExpress to dropship?
- Sign up for an AliExpress account.
- Find the things that you want.
- Search and sort products at random to find out how many sellers are selling the same thing.
- Find the seller whose prices and shipping options are the lowest.
- Check to see if this seller sends the package quickly as well.
- Add a seller or two to your list.
- Start living on your website and taking orders.
- Now, when a customer gives you an order, you can use the list of sellers to send the order to them.
- Don’t forget that you have to send the product straight to the customer.
- Once you have the tracking number, you can give it to the customer so they can follow the order.
- When you use AliExpress for dropshipping in South Africa, you need to take time to choose the seller and find the best product.
Choose a way to pay.
Once you’ve decided on the products and sellers you want to buy from AliExpress, you should start narrowing down the payment options you can offer your customers. When you think about it, many people like to have different ways to pay. They may pay when the item is delivered, with a credit card, or with a debit card. Many users also like to use wallets like PayPal to send money to other people.
If we’re talking about PayPal, this payment method has become well-known all over the world. PayPal is a reliable way to send money across the country or around the world. However, PayPal only works in South Africa with First National Bank. Now, that could be a problem.
This is also one of the reasons why we think users should be able to use two or three different payment methods.
Product Test
Now that you’ve chosen the above factors, you can start testing the product.
Many dropshippers might tell you not to do it, and it might be hard to test your products.
There are many reasons why we might suggest that you test the product:
- You’ll know how good it is.
- You can look at the way it’s packed.
- You can get nice pictures of the product to put on your website.
- You can carefully look at the features.
- You can find out how long it will take to ship.
- If you don’t check the product before putting it on your website, your customers might get really bad packaging, the shipping time might be all over the place, and the features might not be what they expected.
This will make things bad for the customer!
So, we always suggest starting a new dropshipping business in South Africa to test the product. Order one of each category you want to add to your e-commerce store. You can use this to look at all of the above and even take pictures. If the product isn’t as good as you thought it would be, you can choose a different seller and remember not to buy from the first one again.
Use the Right Instrument
The last tip for dropshipping in South Africa is to use the right tool for dropshipping. For example, dropship-empire is a useful, advanced dropshipping tool for AliExpress that can be used by any kind of business.
It lets you choose sellers and products automatically and has a lot of other useful features. Here are some of them:
- With the dropship-empire dashboard, you can use AI to choose the right seller without having to do it yourself. This will help you make as much money as possible.
- If your AliExpress store is connected to dropship-empire, you can choose products right from the tool. Here, you can look at all of the product’s details at once.
- All orders can be placed at once using the tool. This will cut down on the time we spend on each order.
- The order is synced with dropship-empire dashboard as soon as it is placed on AliExpress. This means that the only place you can look over orders is on your dashboard.
- dropship-empire has a lot of other features, like rules for choosing prices, better customer service, bundle orders, and many more.
When you use dropship-empire, you can easily connect AliExpress to the tool and take care of your dropshipping store’s entire supply chain.
Conclusion
Dropshipping in South Africa isn’t all that different from dropshipping anywhere else. You only need to follow a few steps, make smart choices about the marketplace and dropshipping tool, and test the products you add to your website. If you’ve done these simple things, you have nothing to worry about.