Finally, you’ve decided which niche to start your drop shipping business. You have chosen to venture into wholesale clothing, but you may be wondering what steps to take from here. In this post, we’re going to answer your questions and lay out the exact steps you can take to bring your business to life.
But first a little background on drop shipping. Dropshipping is an eCommerce model that allows a seller sale products on their site without having to maintain a stock of the goods.
Here’s a three-step guide on how it works.
- A seller receives orders on their site.
- The seller replicates the same order with their dropship supplier.
- The dropshipping supplier now handles the order fulfillment by packaging the products and delivering to the buyer.
Everyone is happy, and the process is repeated.
For the seller, to get this merchandising wheel rolling, there are some steps you must take and this is what we’ll be talking about:
Choose a product
You’ve already done that by deciding to sell clothes, however, let’s dig a little deeper. Instead, of selling any cloth, brand yourself as the one-stop shopping destination for high-quality, environmental friendly female dresses.
Positioning your store in this manner differentiates it from the multitude of other online stores selling female clothes and makes marketing your store easier.
Research and sign up with reliable suppliers
This is an essential step that requires in-depth researching to discover reliable drop shippers for your store. You would have to decide whether to sell products from local drop shippers, overseas wholesale suppliers or a combination of both.
However, note that each route you choose will affect some things including, your pricing structure for the products, the shipment time to your customers, and much more.
To do your research, take advantage of the available local drop shipper directory, though you may be required to pay a fee before accessing the list. Google is also a good place to start, but you must be willing to dig in, to come up with a substantial list.
If you decide to drop ship with foreign suppliers then, studying the verified Aliexpress vendor list will throw up some interesting companies you can do business with.
Armed with this list, it’s time to start reaching out to the suppliers and going through your qualifying process to select the best-fit companies for your business.
Time to choose your e-commerce platform and set up your site
At this stage, you need a platform for your store. Most online stores are built with Shopify. It is the easiest to set up, a relatively small monthly fee and free first month, and many useful plugins to make running your store smooth.
To design your store choose from the many Shopify templates that are beautiful and responsive and customize same to reflect your branding ideas.
Use plugins and apps to automate most processes
Next, it’s time to automate most of the processes using apps and plugins. For instance, you can integrate Oberlo into your Shopify store, and it will handle everything for you, from automatically updating product listing information to sending order details to your supplier to fulfill.
Integrating these plugins eases the task of running your store and frees up your time to focus on other critical aspects of your business such as providing excellent customer service and driving traffic to your store.