What is dropshipping in sales, how to use it, where to start cooperation? How to organize dropshipping on VKontakte with Aliexpress online? What is dropshipping: how it works, where to find suppliers and how to make money from it from scratch.

Creating a business from scratch is akin to how we learn to swim: some are sent to lessons in the pool, while others are mercilessly thrown into the pond with the words “Swim!” The second case is work without dropshipping: it’s good if the person doesn’t drown, but in the end there is a risk of developing a lifelong phobia so that he never gets close to water again (more precisely, opens his own business).

The first method, obviously, seems more humane, reasonable and civilized. But despite all the advantages, there is still a risk of making a lot of mistakes and never learning to swim. And with dropshipping, things are exactly the same. Today Reconomica will look at common mistakes when starting your own dropshipping business.

for those in the tank)

Dropshipping- a form of partnership between an individual and an operating enterprise, when the partner provides organization for the sale of goods (usually through an Internet site or landing page), and the goods themselves are produced and shipped by the manufacturer.

This is Lake Basin in Kazakhstan. Try to get out of there yourself!

The dropshipper has no physical contact with the product. In fact, this is a truncated business, or a business “light” version - you only do marketing. That is why we compared dropshipping and a regular retail business like a swimming pool and a natural body of water.

And this is the Round Lake pool. It's hard to drown in it.

Thus, the enterprise benefits by obtaining a sales organization, and the dropshipper receives income from the partnership, which has potentially no ceiling. Therefore, dropshipping is gaining popularity and is a good practical business school. Knowing how to sell, you can start your own production and switch sales to it.

Anyone can get into dropshipping. But let's move on to the pitfalls.

Bad advice for beginning dropshippers (and just as many useful ones)

And what needs to be done to ensure that you do not succeed in fruitful cooperation in dropshipping? This is a rhetorical question, which is not at all necessary to understand. And yet, there are answers:

Tip 1: Never contact the supplier

What not to do: We live in the wonderful 21st century, in which it is customary that decent people do not call. And really, why? You just need to go to a search engine, find the right supplier, save up money for the launch, and that’s it – it’s all in the bag.

How to do it: And yet, we really live in the 21st century, when it is easier to create a new website than to remake an existing one. As a result, the information may no longer be relevant 25 times, and the supplier of strollers has turned into a supplier of office furniture. Therefore, you definitely need to call and do everything possible to ensure that such a dialogue takes place:

Hello, are you a supplier?

Are you a stroller supplier?

What about a supplier of strollers, not wheelchairs?

And after the third “yes,” when there is no chance of error, you can safely start saving money to open your own online store. But that's not all.

Remember that not all people in this world are conscientious. Someone sleeps peacefully at night, selling goods not at a wholesale price, but at a retail price. Some don't even have a sane warehouse. And instead of getting into trouble and throwing away 3 months of your life, you only need to spend one day - come to the supplier and personally verify the availability of premises, people and signs of work. Trust but check.

What not to do: Think about details a lot, often and extremely hard. Visualize your desires, for example, start right away with choosing a CMS for the site, then move on to ideas about the colors of the buttons on the site and complete the fantasy with several original product descriptions. Charge yourself for success and start practicing in 2-3 weeks, when the fuse has subsided. Become a modern Ilya Ilyich Oblomov: think that you are doing something.

How to do it: Less words and more action. You will not lose anything if you randomly choose the platform on which the site will work - you can always change it in the future. The more you think, the more more problems find them instead of solving them as they come. Best advice, which can be given to beginners working in dropshipping: take it and do it, without unnecessary curtsies.

Tip 3. Concentrate on advertising - the more of it, the better!

What not to do: Spend as much as you can more money for advertising. To contextual, native, targeted, in general, to any one you can think of. Don’t think about numbers and indicators, just plug all channels of communication with the buyer so that you definitely don’t go anywhere and place an order.

How to do it: Get to know and make close friends with services designed to measure website traffic, for example, Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics. End-to-end analytics is complex, but useful. You need to know which advertising channels work and which ones simply eat up your budget. Advertising and working advertising are two diametrically different things; in the second case, you need an understanding of your target audience, knowledge of where exactly your potential customers are and the ability to choose the appropriate method of promotion.

Whiskers, paws and analysis of statistics - these are your documents.

Tip 4: Create a killer design

What not to do: Make a unique website design, polish every link and button, draw banners that no one else has. Just impress everyone with yours creative abilities and “hairbrush” appearance your site. And then, then the orders will flow like a river, you can rest assured.

How to do it: Of course, on initial stage There is a colossal amount of work to be done, including in terms of design. But it’s a little unreasonable to kill time by choosing the shade of the site’s header, it’s enough so that it just doesn’t look like an eye-catcher.

The primary task is to create a working and functional store, upload a product catalog, divide it into sections, etc. And only after receiving a stable number of orders per month can you worry about the length of the girl’s fingers on the main banner.

What not to do: Ask yourself the question “why would you pay someone money if you can do everything yourself?” That’s right, there’s no need, it’s better to spend money on advertising that is already loved on all fronts. You yourself are able to understand the difference between HTML, JavaScript and WordPress, you will quickly create a website just by looking at the example once.

How to do it: The fact is that you will only be able to draw a simple house using codes in Pascal after a week of studying this language. Creating a website and its layout will obviously take more time. Even on a ready-made engine, deploying a cursive and properly optimized store is not as easy as it seems.

Be reasonable. You should pay the nth amount to the Programmer Programmerovich at least for the sake of the coefficient useful action and wise use of time. Moreover, there are dropshipping providers in the world that sell ready-made websites. For example, Happiness Supplier, AdvantShop or InSales.

conclusions

Despite the simplicity of dropshipping, none of us are immune from mistakes, because we are people, not robots. But folk wisdom says: do it normally, it will be fine. That is, conscious, planned mistakes are the same problem as a panicked desire for an ideal (which does not exist, by the way).

And now you are warned, which means you are armed.

The profitability of an online project is influenced by a considerable list of factors. This is the level of demand for the product, the size of the trade margin, the number of potential customers, and, of course, costs. One of the interesting business ideas this year is the sale of goods via the Internet. With an emphasis on delivery directly from the manufacturer’s warehouse, without creating your own stocks, without costs for premises and personnel. This direction is especially interesting during the global crisis that has been observed over the past few years.

To launch your small/medium business, you just need to figure out where to start, what exactly the first steps should be, since dropshipping is available to everyone (in fact, this is what the new trend in online business is officially called). This topic is very popular and is vigorously discussed on the Internet. Appear different variants making a profit with this technology. After all, in the vastness global network You can purchase almost any product, regardless of the country where it is produced.

New online sales techniques

The transition to online trading only partially solved the problem of significant costs for maintaining offline stores (premises, staff, etc.), so the idea of ​​dropshipping became a real breakthrough - its concept offers the practical implementation of a “workplace on the couch.” The seller can only organize suitable advertising of the product on the Internet through his own website and wait for the flow of customers.

The scheme of work in dropshipping is proposed as follows:

• A list of suppliers with the goods selected for sale is selected.
• Compiled Commercial offer(a website is created, advertising is organized).
• All orders are forwarded to the appropriate supplier for fulfillment.

In this case, no procurement costs will be required (product inventories are stored with the manufacturer), the goods are paid to the supplier upon receipt of money from the customer for online wallet or the seller's bank account. There is no dependence on the exchange rate if the product is imported. It is enough to change the selling price on your own website and thereby easily avoid losses from exchange rate fluctuations in any direction. Understanding what dropshipping is, how to make a profit on it and where to start is no more difficult than learning how to work in in social networks.

Important: the Internet allows you to sell products from any number of manufacturers on one page, which is why dropshipping has earned its popularity.

At the same time, it remains possible to work simultaneously with several suppliers of the same list of goods, which will ensure the best purchase price and guarantee that customers will receive the order (even if one of them has empty warehouses, you can always transfer the request to someone who still has product stocks). Video tutorials on dropshipping regularly appear on the Internet, allowing you to get acquainted with the technology “from scratch”:

Obvious advantages

The full list of advantages of such a method of promoting goods as dropshipping is quite extensive, but a few of the most important points are worth noting. They stand out from the mass of advantages by matching modern image life, having big differences from habits even 5-10 years ago.

The most obvious benefits of dropshipping are:

• Complete absence of requirements for start-up capital. Finally, you can do without loans and other large investments. All costs in dropshipping relate only to payment for hosting for the website and its promotion in search engines.
• Flexibility of the product range - it is enough to choose a general concept, but suppliers can be changed as new players appear on the market or other conditions for working with old ones are obtained. Dropshipping is developing well and the ground is emerging for healthy competition with the provision of everything more bonuses for clients of such sellers.
• Full mobility - a business owner can manage trade from almost anywhere in the world, the main thing is that there is Internet access. Unlike offline stores, dropshipping allows you to quickly change your focus and start working with individual regions/cities literally within a few hours. At the same time, you can do online business directly from your home computer or from your tablet while relaxing on the beach.

It remains to add that this type of business is of interest to manufacturers and wholesale suppliers themselves, because it relieves them of the need to maintain staff to work on creating and expanding a customer base, reduces the costs that are inevitable when hiring third-party companies to promote Internet sites and trademark generally. This is done by a huge list of interested parties who provide the entire cycle of advertising on the Internet, taking on an important mission - communication with the consumer right up to the moment he pays for the product/service.

Are there any disadvantages?

Every potential online business owner, after he has figured out what dropshipping is, where its advantages are, how to start working and making a profit, is faced with a number of additional questions. Among them there are very significant points:

• There is no opportunity to independently study the product; you will have to advertise it based only on the description and technical characteristics. The disadvantage is not the most critical, because... in the field of dropshipping, products with high demand are usually sold. For example, everyone famous models phones, accessories for them.
• There is no guarantee that the supplier actually has the advertised product in stock. You don't have to worry too much about this problem. The more players there are on the market, the more careful selection of products they carry out. Sometimes they prefer to have their own warehouse stocks of the most popular goods.
• It’s easy to make a mistake when choosing a direction; competition in the market today is high and getting into at least the TOP 10 is not easy. To level out this point, it is quite enough to launch several parallel projects with different groups of products.

It is worth noting the almost complete lack of control the owner of the online store has over the forwarding of the order after it has been paid to the supplier. Of course, feedback from customers is possible, but appropriate measures will have to be taken for this. As an option, a mandatory response on the site, which increases the discount on subsequent purchases. Otherwise you will have to wait for reviews on other pages. Probably, where it will not be possible to remove negative information about your store.

The stated shortcomings are also compensated by the ability to quickly replace suppliers, for example, if a number of trends towards order delays and other problems are identified. The same applies to the niche where you plan to work - if profitability is low, it is easy to change the product category, add additional directions to it, or launch another parallel project.

Important. It is dropshipping that has made online business so flexible that with any change in the market it is easy to adapt to new requirements in the shortest possible time.

Steps before starting

For the success of the event, it is extremely important that the seller is at least somewhere first. There are many examples on the market when seemingly inconspicuous brands of yesterday became popular. Many modern online stores that previously sold their own warehouse stock have switched to the dropshipping system; this development has allowed them to start working with a wider range, further increasing profits.

To guarantee the success of your own dropshipping endeavors, you need to take a number of steps:

• Make every effort to find direct online suppliers. It is worth considering that promoted sites, as a rule, point to real competitors, while manufacturers often have non-functional and lackluster pages with simple lists of goods sold.

• Develop an assortment with the expectation that a potential client will find various accessories and related services on the website, and not just the product itself. All customers must buy in one place, otherwise they can easily be lost due to the likely transition to other sites on the Internet.
• Conduct an SEO analysis of the proposed offer, study competitors, find where they are weak, and which of their services are in greatest demand. Based on the analysis of this information, you can select your own catalog of goods (and services at the same time), which will make it easier to stand out, and perhaps become the first in something.

It is imperative to think in advance about the organizational and legal form of the company, even if it operates using the dropshipping method. After all, you will have to register accounts with banks and electronic payment systems. In the case, for example, of concluding contracts for regular deliveries, details will be needed; they will not agree to work with a private person on the Internet.

One more point: it is important to decide who will be involved in the creation, promotion, technical support dropshipping a website with a product. Perhaps this is the only point that requires costs if the business owner does not have sufficient knowledge of Internet promotion to do everything himself. It is not for the supplier to organize advertising of third-party resources.

You can learn more about the dropshipping system using the video:

For those who want to gain financial independence, there are a huge number of ways to earn money besides the classic “going out” to work. Is there a way to start full-fledged trading without major initial investments? Yes, it exists, we will analyze in detail what dropshipping is and whether it is possible to make big money from it.

What is dropshipping in simple words

First, you need to know that dropshipping is a business, with all the ensuing consequences, including legal ones. If you have no desire to contact the tax authorities or open your own legal entity, then, as they say, “ parachuting not for you." If you are ready for such difficulties, then I recommend that you read the article, which describes in detail all the nuances of opening an individual entrepreneur, the article is available . But there are a huge number of ways to make money online, in addition to dropshipping, if you consider yourself a person with sharp mind and great perseverance, you can try to make money on the foreign exchange market. Everything is described in more detail in the article. ", I recommend checking it out.

So what is dropshipping? If we talk in simple words, that is intermediary business between the manufacturer and the end consumer. In other words, in this case you are a reseller. Manufacturers are not interested in working on the B2C principle; it is much more interesting to work on the B2B principle. Dropshipping is one of the many types of startups related to online trading. Most new projects begin their journey on the World Wide Web. There are a lot of ideas, I recommend reading the article, which talks about the most promising ideas for online business, the article is located .

Getting to know the principles raises a simple question: “How is dropshipping different from a regular store?” The answer to this question is the following - if you are engaged in dropshipping, then there is no need to keep a warehouse or open your own store. The interaction between the buyer and the manufacturer occurs almost directly. Accordingly, to successfully run this business you need to have a good website, but more on that a little later. There are not many people willing to walk around apartments with a catalog in their hands and offer goods. This way of interacting with customers is called “direct sales,” but that’s not what we’re talking about now.

Dropshipping - advantages and disadvantages

Having understood the question of what dropshipping is, it is worth assessing what the pros and cons of this business idea are. Like any business, dropshipping has its own specifics, and for objective assessment it is necessary to clearly understand it:

• Work with the end consumer. The emphasis is placed on this circle of customers to be able to successfully compete with local sellers.
• There is no need to rent a retail space. You can even work at home, although experts recommend renting an office - this creates a working mood and has a beneficial effect on results.

Understanding these two key features, you can already fully understand all the advantages compared to offline trading, as well as all the pitfalls.

Benefits of dropshipping

Let's immediately look at the main advantages of dropshipping and try to figure out what attracts so many people:

• The most important advantage, because of which hundreds of people go to the Internet and look for what dropshipping is, is the low starting capital for starting their own business. And in severe cramped conditions you can do without it altogether.
• Competitive prices. The prices for such a product for the end consumer will be much lower than those of “offline” competitors, which is also a huge advantage.
• There is no need to keep a warehouse. This is a very big advantage of dropshipping at the start; it reduces costs due to the absence of renting premises and goods, which cost a lot of money. But successful dropshipping companies usually keep small warehouses with the most popular products.
• High profit. If you fix a good relationship with suppliers, then you can purchase goods at very competitive prices, accordingly, the profit will be high, and if you also take into account the absence of auxiliary costs, then the profit percentage becomes even greater.

All the advantages are visible immediately, many people’s eyes will immediately light up, but let’s first look at the other side of the coin.

Disadvantages of Dropshipping

Like any type of business, dropshipping has disadvantages that can significantly affect novice businessmen:

• Huge competition. Having learned what dropshipping is and all its advantages, people flocked to this business sector. Girls can truly appreciate the scale of the influx of such “businessmen”. Sellers “knock” for friends on each of them several times a week on social networks. various clothes making “collective orders”.
• There is no way to evaluate the product. We are primarily talking about working with foreign manufacturers. You will work only from photographs and reviews of other people, if you can find them. And Chinese “partners” can slip in an open marriage.

These are the two main disadvantages of dropshipping, discovery legal entity To list it as a minus is not serious. But many people neglect this, which is great stupidity. Yes, it’s not easy to track such businesses on the Internet, but gradually such dealers are being exposed.

Dropshipping: all the nuances and where to start

Having understood the question of what dropshipping is, we ask the question about further actions. If you have experience running a business, then most likely there are no problems with further actions will not arise. But for beginners this is a real crossroads, so it’s worth taking the following steps, which are fundamental to successful dropshipping:

• Market analysis. This is the first thing to do; you should pay attention to competition and niche occupancy. Soberly assess your strengths - whether you can cope with so many competitors, whether you can carve out a place in the sun for yourself. It’s also not worth poking your nose into completely empty niches; if they are empty, then there is no demand. The Internet is a free place for maneuvers; if you choose between an empty and a busy market, then the choice will certainly be in favor of the second. It is worth taking market analysis very seriously, since the next stage is creating a website. Creating your own selling tool requires certain costs; if you make the wrong choice, you will have to spend additional money on redesigning the site.
• The second step is creating an online store. Now I won’t describe anything in detail; more about this aspect below.
• Niche assessment and business testing. This stage should be done together with the search for suppliers, while simultaneously looking for more profitable offer and assessing the demand for the product offered.
• Supplier search. You have already decided on your market and potential client, if yes, then it’s time to look for reliable suppliers. The easiest way to do this is also on the Internet. Most often, suppliers are sought in China, where companies offer the most low prices. But it might be worth turning to local manufacturers. Of course, there are some enterprises with Soviet “hardening” and they can simply ignore you, but for the most part, not knowing what dropshipping is, they are interested in selling their products and working with regular customers.

These are the main stages of developing your dropshipping business, but let’s take a closer look at some of the previously mentioned details.

Is registration of a legal entity required?

Beginning businessmen believe that registering a legal entity is the tenth thing and can calmly wait. Of course, their fears are quite understandable and the logic of their reasoning is extremely clear. But sooner or later you will have to legalize your activities. European companies and domestic manufacturers will not work with you unless you are officially registered.

With Chinese companies everything is much simpler, but the chance that you will be deceived is much higher, so it is best to document all documents, payments and deliveries. Trading platforms where Chinese suppliers are located value their reputation very much. With the help of the management of such sites, you can influence your partner, but only if you have all the documents. Also, importing goods from China can become very difficult for individuals. It is planned to introduce duties on goods exceeding a certain amount. For different countries CIS amounts vary, for example, for Belarus the amount is approximately 20 euros.

Yes, registering your company, be it an individual entrepreneur or an LLC, is associated with certain time and financial costs. In addition, registration imposes certain responsibilities on you, but you also receive rights. Perhaps there are still more minuses than pluses, this is a necessity that cannot be avoided.

Where to find a reliable supplier and what to watch out for

Having figured out what dropshipping is, the need to register your company and other nuances, it remains main question- who should you buy the goods from? The gaze of many newcomers is directed in one direction - China. Let's look at which sites you can find a good supplier:

• Large wholesale. Such companies are the last to be approached. They are rarely exchanged for small wholesale. A novice businessman cannot bear large expenses. Such companies include the DealeXtreme website and Alibaba.
• Medium and small wholesale. A very interesting direction for dropshipping, because domestic companies are also actively working in this direction, organizing mass purchases from various manufacturers and sending them to companies. The fee is charged for postal services and it is small, but the volumes are huge. One striking example is Alpix.
• Retail and small wholesale. Aliexpress and that says it all. It is not profitable to place large orders here, but small wholesale and retail goods very profitable to purchase. True, the delivery time may be delayed and such companies should be the last resort.

The advantage of such platforms is the protection of buyers; those who have at least once ordered goods from Chinese sites understand perfectly well what they are talking about.

Are there any risks? Yes, they exist, but for the most part they are related to independent work with manufacturers. Here's what you should be wary of when doing dropshipping:

• One-day companies. This is the scourge of all businesses in general, but dropshipping is especially susceptible to it. Inexperience and legal illiteracy do their job, attracting a huge number of scammers. It is impossible to insure yourself, but you can minimize risks by working only with trusted manufacturers.
• Defective goods. This is mainly a problem associated with Chinese partners, but domestic manufacturers also suffer from defects. More often you come across counterfeits from China, your money will be returned or the product will be replaced, but all this will take about two months, and by this time you will have lost your client.
• Electronic fraud. Take your online security seriously: passwords for email and site admin, access to the payment system - all this should be securely stored.

This is the basic information for choosing your supplier. Everyone who is involved in dropshipping eventually finds their own manufacturers and approach to them. With the help of this material, it will be much easier to start your search.

Website as the main tool: everything about successful trading on the Internet

So we got to main topic and the difficulties of dropshipping - how to sell the product. The main tool for selling such goods is websites; there are three main ways to “open” your online store:

• Creating a website yourself from scratch. The cheapest option is to create it yourself using various CMS systems and create it using ready-made designers. In the first case, you will have to spend a lot of time, but as a result you will get exactly what you want. Costs are minimal - payment for hosting, approximately 5-10 dollars per month, purchase of a domain name, 3-10 dollars per year. This is the cheapest but longest way.
• Creating a website based on a “free” website builder. The word free is in quotation marks for a reason. In order to create a more or less decent website you will have to pay. The amounts are minimal, about 10-20 dollars a year, you don’t need to pay for hosting, some designers will even provide you with a domain name like kompaniya.ru for free. The disadvantages include: the appearance of the site is limited by the designer, the inability to implement CMS functionality. Often such designers offer services for initial website promotion.
• Order a ready-made website from a web studio. The same as the first option, only quickly and for money. Prices start from $300 and above, depending on the required functionality. Whether you are ready to spend that amount of money on creating a website is up to you to decide. As a rule, such studios offer online website promotion by necessary requests. This is very important for trading, and dropshipping in particular. But more on this a little later.
• Buying a website on a trading platform. This method combines price and results, but there is not always a good one in your region trading platform, occupying high places V search engines. If so, then it is best to pay attention to this option. For an amount of $300 or more you will receive: a website builder with additional tools, website hosting, and most importantly, a place in search results.

There are a lot of ways to create websites, everyone chooses according to their financial and capabilities. But just creating a website is half the battle. Our goal is to sell a product, and to sell it, it needs to be found.

Promoting a website on the Internet, what a dropshipper needs to know

Website promotion is the most voluminous and expensive part of the work, especially in the first stages. Again, there are several ways to promote your “store” on the Internet, let's look at them:

• Promotion using a web studio. In this option, all the work is done for you outside organization. And for this they take money, payment depends on the number of promoted queries, the popularity of these queries and many other factors. Prices for such services start on average from $300-500 per month. Infusions of these funds are constantly needed, but for a running business this is not a problem.
• Independent promotion. What should a novice dropshipper do? It's very easy to do it yourself. Write or buy unique content for your website, optimize it, improve usability. There is a huge amount of material on the Internet with which you can promote your website from scratch. It will take time, however, many times longer than with a web studio.

But it is worth remembering that the effect of SEO promotion does not occur immediately, but, at best, in the third month of working with the site. But there are other tools that allow you to get started instantly.

Other tools to attract clients

There are other ways to promote your product on the Internet. From a financial point of view, they may be more expensive, but a business built on dropshipping cannot refuse them:

• Contextual advertising. This is the main tool of many companies; now companies are abandoning SEO promotion altogether, directing the freed-up funds to contextual advertising. Why is it so popular, let's look at this question. Contextual advertising is advertising in search engines, built on the principle of “you pay per site visitor.” In a nutshell, you set up queries and visitors click on them, and you are charged per visitor. That is why contextual advertising so popular. Detailed information about such advertising can be found from the companies themselves that provide such a service, from Yandex and Google.
• Product promotion using landing pages. Landing is a one-page website created with the purpose of promoting and selling one specific product. Works best together with contextual advertising.
• SMM or social networks. Advertising products on social networks and searching for customers new trend, actively gaining popularity and effectiveness. You could come across VKontakte groups, specialized pages for selling goods. Remember at the beginning of the article we were talking about “knocking” girls selling goods - this is all SMM too. The method is effective primarily due to direct interaction with the client and receiving instant feedback.

There are a lot of tools for working with a website, but they require certain financial and time costs. This is why most dropshipping companies go out of business making the same mistakes. The website is your store, your face, and constantly investing money and time in it is a natural process.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked in detail at what dropshipping is, what the pros and cons of this type of business are, and whether it’s worth doing it at all. We also touched upon in detail the issue of the main sales tool - websites. After reading this article, you are now completely ready to take your first steps in this difficult matter.