Drop shipping is the latest trend in retail commerce. You, the provider, set up a website and present your wares to the clients. They pick what they need and order. At this point, you contact the warehouse or manufacturer that you work with and place the order to be delivered directly to the customer’s door. The beauty of it? You never handle or are liable for stock at any point of the transaction.
If we’ve got piqued your interest and you feel that this is the right type of home-based business for you, then you should know that, just like any other business, it requires planning, some financial investment and a lot of time and dedication to make it work.
Let’s make a timeline of how you should go about setting up your drop shipping home-based business:
First Step – You start learning about drop shipping and about the online resources you can access to get in touch with manufacturers and distributors in order to establish business relations with them. Before you get involved, spend some time studying all the useful FAQ and Resources pages of these portals and get familiar with how business is done.
Some great places to start with are: www.dropship.com, www.dropshipsites.com, www.enrouteglobal.com. There are also lots of directories for drop shipping websites, where you can find your niche.
Second Step – After you are familiar enough with the ropes of the drop shipping activity, it’s time to take care of the practicalities of starting your own business. First of all, you should incorporate your business. It is easy and, depending on your preferred option (sole proprietorship, LLC or Inc), you will not have to file a lot of documents.
You should open checking accounts in the name of your business and keep them separate from your personal accounts. Every purchase you make (hosting, domain name, subscription to automated marketing tools) you will make using the name and the bank account of your business.
Third step – It is time to get really busy and build up your business. Do some research and choose a simple and easy-to-remember domain name. People find it hard to remember long website names, so make it as short, snappy and memorable as you can. After you have your domain name, you will need to find hosting for your website. These days, most internet hosting services are cheap and very reliable.
As for the web platform, WordPress is the top choice for everyone who wants to start a business from home. It helps you integrate a website, an online store and a blog in the same platform. In addition, this popular platform is search engine friendly and has an intuitive and simple back-end interface for web administration.
Fourth Step – Now it’s time to get your online store ready for business. Find and install a great looking WordPress theme to make your website an eye candy. Integrate an eCommerce platform on WordPress and start adding products.
You should be able to get good photos of the product from the manufacturer or distributor (they have all the interest to get sales, so they offer lots of marketing materials to resellers). Write an engaging description for each product and select the best image as the Featured photo.
Fifth Step – Start promoting the website through blogging, being active on the social media and other online marketing efforts to gain engagement and drive traffic to your website. If you’ve already learned your online marketing lessons, you know what you have to do to increase conversion: be genuine, offer value, share great content and keep in touch with your leads all the time.
Now, this is how you set up a drop shipping home-based business in just 5 easy steps!