Is a Dropshipping a Good Idea for You?

While we’re a proponent of WordPress magazine themes at MagPress.com, we realize that no one size fits all. Sometimes, other solutions must be tried to see if they’ll be a more practical fit, including outside of the WordPress platform. The same applies to the dropshipping business.

In this article, we look at whether dropshipping is a good idea for our readers. Over 22 percent of online sales in the U.S. dispatch via the dropshipping method, so that’s not small potatoes! For new operators, it represents one way to get into the physical goods space without the substantial investment that’s usually involved.

Let’s now look a bit deeper into this topic.

Why Might Dropshipping Be Better than Other Options?

Dropshipping allows someone interested in marketing certain products to do so without huge capital investment such as warehouse leases, rent, utilities, labor, and more.

Instead of purchasing the goods directly and holding it in your own warehouse, a dropshipping company holds goods that they purchase in their warehouse facility. They have the warehouse staff to pick, pack, and dispatch goods based on the orders received electronically from a website.

As the business owner offering a small range of products, you don’t have to do the heavy lifting.

What’s the Process?

Firstly, you need a website for someone to visit. Traffic must be driven to that e-commerce site, so the visitors may potentially make a purchase. Usually, paid advertising is required to drive traffic to your site unless you have an established brand already.

Secondly, new customer orders placed on your site are forwarded to the dropshipping company for dispatch.

Lastly, the dropshipping company completes the transaction by sending the ordered goods out on your behalf.

If there are any issues, then you must act as the customer service agent to deal with customer queries, complaints, and other matters. There are also occasional returns that are usually handled by the dropshipping company.

What Platform is Right for Your E-commerce Site?

As we mentioned in the introduction, a magazine site might not be ideal for the task. There are other options within WordPress, but they require considerable technical skill to get right and manage properly.

For someone just starting with their first e-commerce site and picking between which dropshipping company to work with, it’s best to choose a platform that’s primarily geared towards dropshipping and is already set-up to integrate with established dropshipping companies.

They aim to make their platform easy to use because getting confused is normal when starting. This is very reassuring for beginners who want to create a new small business for themselves but are worried about the technical side.

How Do You Get Started?

It’s a good idea to begin looking around for a reliable dropshipping company that stocks the type of goods that you’re interested in offering on your site.

Also, begin thinking about a website name and domain name (a dot com) for your site. Run a few domain name ‘Who-Is’ lookups to check if an idea for a name is registered yet. It may take a few tries to locate one that’s still available.

Dropshipping is open to anyone enterprising enough to give it a go. Is that you?