What is dropshipping?
With dropshipping you dont have your own products but sell directly from some other compagny’s stock. This means you show the inventory of your supplier directly on your website. When a client orders a product from your store, you need to inform your supplier and he will ship it directly to your clients adres.
What products do i sell?
First make a choise if you want to sell 10000s of products at once and just gamble on what works or not, or search for high quality products and research them. Find a niche where you feel comforable with, something you know about or are interested in. This makes it easier to investigate or help your cllients when they have some problems with the product you sold.
Find a niche
Today in 2022 there are hunders of thousends webshops, to stand out try to find a niche that works for you and you can specialise yourself in. People will think you are an expert in your product because you have this niche instead of 100000 products in your webshop you dont know about.
Find a dropshipper
Find a reliable dropshipper with a decent API. An API is a script where you can connect your store with. A dropshipper must have the following available for your store.
– List of all products and MRSP (market resell price) and prefer with a small description to import into your store. Also prefered in catagories so you dont have to add them manualy to the diffrent catagories.
– APi connection to stock: pcs in stock or high/medium/low/out of stock so you dont have to update your stock manualy.
– Api connection to import orders for automatic order placement.
Some api connections are not a must but more a nice to have so you can focus on marketing and your store. For example an automatic Track and trace code added to the customers order. However sometimes you want to do this manualy, for example to check an order if it has been paid for and put it on completed/shipped status.
Not all suppliers will accept a custom packaging slip to ship with the order to the client. However you can always automaticly send the packaging slip to the client trough e-mail automaticly with the paid invoice for example.
How to build your store front?
There are many systems online for your store front, choosing a system depends on your budget and also on your knowledge. Webshops can go from 500 to 50.000 depending on your wishes and how advanced you want them to be. For example your online branding or special SEO content.
Start from scratch with low budget and low knowledge.
Start building with any web builder program like shopify. However keep in mind that your supplier must have some kind of api connection to the web builder for later on. Or at least a API running so when you make the profit you can hire some one to build the api connection for you. Learn how the web builder works and start adding your products.
Budget friendly
If you have a bit of a budget but dont know anything about webshops then hire a developer and ask for a turn key sollution. Like let them build a store front for you in shopify, set up things and maybe add a few products so your basic store is ready for you to add products and content. You can hire some one on fiverr to do this for you starting at €200,- and you will have the store online.
No nonsense
There are many great shopify stores out there, some of them make a huge profit and are happy with a basic web builder. However a basic store builder has some drawbacks in the later run. SEO wise or technical wise you dont have a lot of options. Only those that are given by the platform them self.
This is why many shop owners have them build in WordPress with Woocommerce. WordPress is excelent scalable and highly customisable. This means you dont have to hold back on SEO or any other technical details. You might have heard about Magento, it is actualy a very good peace of open source software. But its more build for the bigger webshops with an own inventory who needs to ship 10s of thousends packages a day. Woocommerce is for the smaller to medium webshops, and even in woocommerce you can arrange your own inventory if you want to.
If you have a technical know how, or start learning fast. You should go with WordPress and install woocommerce on it. There are many themes wich you can buy and install very simple. Themeforest.com is something to start with.
When you dont have the time to setup a good webshop but want to be free in your shop. Hire a developer and let them build the store included the api connection and setup products etc. Price examples realy depends on how good the web developer/designer is. They can use a basic template and modify it so it fits your business. Prices will start at arround €1500 for a good webshop build on a basic template. If you want to add good SEO content, you should think about €20,- per product for SEO keyword search and the content based on that. If you want to have a custom design, you should think about the €3000,- price range to start with. Also depends on what your wishes are.
Full custom made
If you want a fully custom made webshop that totaly fits your infrastructure and wishes then the starting price will be €15.000 but can go as high as 100.000. You will need a programmer, front end designer, Content writer to start with but you could go much futher and hire a community manager for your social media network and branding. Do you want to sell international, then you could think about a CDN network so people in new york will have a fast website but also in China.
Futher cotst to think about
Webhosting is something you need, dont go with cheap hosters but get some one who has a starting package at €5,- a month. This is because cheap hosters cant guarantee speed and quality because their profits are low so they must put many many other users on the same server. You ofcourse dont have these costs to think about when you go with shopify. If you start with a webhosting then later on you can get a Managed hosting vps from a good provider. This is something we could help you with.
Domain name is the name of your webshop when they put it in the adres bar. Like https://www.evonets.net is ours. This costs arround 10 to 20 euros a year depending on what TLD you want. We have .net as TLD but you can choose you country’s TLD or go international with a .com.
Last and not least Make backups! We cant tell you how important it is to make regular backups. On our platform we have 15 minutes backups on the client database up to daily full backups on our complete server infrastructure. What happends if your webshop is some how not fixable after you broke it? you will lose all your invoices, clients, orders etc….
If you have any questions please contact us on info@evonets.net
