Drop shipping is a practice of order fulfillment where a manufacturer/distributor ships a product to a consumer on behalf of the retailer. As a retailer, you can offer a wide range of products to your customers and clients without ever having to stock any inventory. It is perhaps the biggest reason for the enormous popularity of drop shipping among new, small, home-based online businesses. The entire process of drop shipping is done with the three following steps:
Step 1– You receive an order from your customers or clients
Step 2-You forward the order to your China supplier
Step 3– Your China supplier in return, ship the product to your customer on behalf of your company
China sourcing is a time-consuming process but drop shipping eliminates wait time when products are shipped from the distributor or manufacturer to the retailer. In most of the cases, this can be a few weeks. With drop shipping, a retailer can start selling the goods the moment the item is published on the ecommerce website.
As a retailer, you don’t have to invest all your time and efforts in the store management. With so many automated solutions, you can complete the majority of tasks automatically and save ample time to focus on other valuable aspects of your business. Without your direct intervention, the element of your daily management routine can be surely be completed automatically.
It is advised by the professionals to start drop shipping from AliExpress initially if you’ve just started your business. It will help you to test the quality of the products and identifying product inspirations and usually there is no minimum order quantity required. You can directly connect with Chinese manufacturers to place orders, and use many payment methods to pay your Chinese supplier.
Drop shipping allows you to sell as many different items as you want, at no extra cost. If you have the time to list them on your site, you have the ability to sell them. here may be a minimum number of items required to meet per month to retain your drop shipper status. You only pay for what you sell. Drop shipping allows you to test new items without the risk of carrying obsolete inventory. Without the constraints of a physical inventory and the costs associated with it, drop shipping allows you to update your inventory quickly, easily, and cheaply.
Drop shipping is not an automatic path to success. It requires basic skills (at least) to manage an online store, including some technical knowledge like uploading products to shopping cart, cropping photos, writing unique product descriptions.