Make Money Online From Home Through Drop Shipping

Make Money Online From Home Through Drop Shipping

In an earlier article we discussed how to make money online from home through Affiliate Marketing. I promised to let you know how to make money from Drop Shipping, from Starting Your Online Business and from Taking Your Offline Business Online as well.

What is Drop Shipping?

In this article we will look at Drop Shipping. Drop Shipping is a great method for getting involved in ecommerce and working from home without having to sink your life savings. Basically Drop Shipping works like this. The retailer (you) sets up an online shop, but does not keep goods in stock.

Instead, when a customer buys something, the retailer (you) takes their cut of the price and transfers customer orders, payment and shipment details to the manufacturer, wholesaler or agency, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. The retailer (you) makes a profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.

Drop Shipping is more like a standard business than Affiliate Marketing is. You use ecommerce to create an online shop with a wide range of products that your visitors browse and purchase. However you do not have the hassle of having to hire staff, keep stock or manage deliveries.

What Are The Advantages?

What are the advantages of building a Drop Shipping site rather than an Affiliate site?

You are creating a site that actually sells items to your customers and gives you the experience of running a business.
You can do this without having to set up your own premises.
You do not need to hire staff (initially anyway).
You do not need to source products, manage stock or fulfil orders. Your supplier does all that.
You get the customer's payment, take your cut and then pass on the supplier's cut. This means you never have to invest large amounts of money, and cash flow should always be positive.

What are the Disadvantages:

You have no control over customer care, quality and service.
You must learn to manage a website and the links to your supplier.
You must keep your ecommerce site up to date, letting people know when there is a sale or a temporary dip in supply.

Who Might Want to create a Drop Shipping Business?

Those who might want to build their own online business include:

People who don't yet know much about running a business, but are totally excited at the thought of finding out.
People who have no or very little capital.

How Does It Work?

Website: Set up an e-commerce website with suitable shopping cart and credit card processing facilities.

Find Your Niche: Chose the perfect area for you to work in and make sure it is a profitable niche.

Search for and review relevant supplier sites. There are agencies and individual drop shipper suppliers online. Chose the one that suits you best.

Make sure you get recommendations from other retailers so you know what type of customer service your potential supplier provides. A poor supplier can break your business through bad customer service.

Open an account with the chosen supplier.

Put images and information about your chosen products on your site and incorporate it with your chosen shopping cart.

Market Your Site . Use SEO, article marketing, social site marketing, adwords etc.

Purchases: When people visit your site and buy products, you collect their orders and payment from your site. (BTW a good shopping cart will do all this automatically).

Inform the Supplier: Send full order details to the supplier company. They will charge the price you have agreed, then complete the order.

In most cases they will use labels on any packages which indicate it comes from you. A good supplier er will provide you with everything you need to know in terms of how to pass orders and payment back, how to follow things up etc. Indeed a good supplier will work hard to help you create a great sales site. After all, for every sale you make, they also make a profit.

Do I Have to Pay to Join a Drop Ship Supplier?

Most Suppliers do not charge, at least for their basic programmes which is all you will need to decide whether this approach is for you. Some programmes charge for joining 'higher' levels. Again I would think hard before I joined such a programme. If you are a good seller, they should pay you, not the other way around.

Setting up Your Ecommerce Website

There are many ways of setting up your ecommerce website. You can use the standard templates offered by many Internet Service Providers, you could design it yourself or have it designed for you by a professional company. The one thing you must ensure is that you have the appropriate shopping cart to deal with a Drop Shipping operation. Research and find the one that is right for you.

Good luck with your Drop Shipping Venture!

Onwards and upwards

Dee MacDonald at [my-businesscoach-online.com] is a Business Adviser, Consultant and Learning and Development Specialist who has worked with over 400 small and medium businesses to help them make their business more profitable and a better place to work.

She has also worked with large business and governmental departments, but prefers the edge of working in smaller organisations where she can see the whole picture and help owners and managers improve the business in every way, especially the returns it gives.

Dee has recently started her second online business, and runs a blog at my-businesscoach-online.blogspot.com my-businesscoach-online.blogspot.com.

She took all the learning from that experience and has put together a course that shows anyone, no matter how inexperienced they are online, how to set up a variety of different types of on-line businesses by following her simple step-by-step instructions. Simple, jargon free and cheap. Dee works with expert associates to present live, interactive, fun, hard but extremely practical seminars alongside the online coaching and development courses offered on her website. She comes from the Isle of Skye, Scotland. She has lived and worked in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East and is currently based in Hampshire, UK.