How to Earn Money From Home: The Dropshipping Way

13 Sep, 20178 min read4 Comments

Dropshipping is taking the ecommerce world by storm. It cuts out the storage nightmare for entrepreneurs and online merchants. Using dropshipping means that when customers order products through your online store, they are then delivered to your customers directly from your suppliers. If you’re wondering how to make money online from home or want to start up your own dropshipping business, here are the core strategies you need to consider in order to succeed.

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Earn Money From Home With Dropshipping

What Is Dropshipping?

Today, more and more people are catching on to the idea of being their own bosses and achieving more freedom over their lifestyles. In order to do so, lots of people are turning to ecommerce. If you’re wondering how to make money on the internet, let us recommend trying dropshipping specifically. This business model is rapidly growing in popularity as it is used by some of the world’s most popular online marketplaces like Amazon.

Essentially, the way dropshipping works is that you import products onto your website from a digital marketplace like Oberlo Supply, and only once a customer purchases a product from your site do you place the order with the third party supplier. From there, this supplier sends the item directly to the customer. In essence, with dropshipping you never have to touch any merchandise yourself.

Benefits of Dropshipping

Lower starting capital: If you’re wondering how to make money online without investment, dropshipping is probably your best option. That’s because virtually anyone can start their own dropshipping ecommerce business without having to break the bank or get an expensive loan. You only purchase products after they’ve already been sold. What’s more is that because you manage your own profit margins, you can play the market and use branding and persuasive copy to drive up the retail value of your products.
It’s low risk: Every new business venture comes with its own risks, but dropshipping has fewer of them because you don’t have to stock any merchandise. If things don’t work out the way you thought they would, you are not stuck with loads of products you have to offload. This way, you can experiment with importing different products into your store based on market trends without having to actually buy and stock them somewhere only to learn the hard way that no one ends up wanting to purchase them.
Wide selection of products: You can sell a higher variety of merchandise through the dropshipping model because you don’t have to stock anything, and you can always swap out products quickly based on what is currently most likely to turn a profit.
You can make money from home: You don’t have to worry about running a warehouse or stocking your products, so you can literally manage your business from your bedroom or anywhere else in the world for that matter! Thus, you have more independence and flexibility.

Dropshipping Disclaimer

While there are lots of good reasons to work dropshipping into your business model, it’s important to note that it also requires dedicated to research and marketing. It’s more hands-off than traditional ecommerce business models, but it’s not hands-free. Therefore, it’s important not to get caught up in promises of get rich quick schemes to truly put in the effort necessary to learn how to make money from home with this system. Yet, for those who are self-starters with the drive to learn and grow by doing, dropshipping can have major payoffs.

If you’re unsure whether you can pull off starting your own business with dropshipping, take a look at how these entrepreneurs built an 800k t-shirt business all through the power of dropshipping.

How to Make Money Online From Home With Dropshipping

Hopefully, by now we’ve already sold you on the prospect of earning money from home with dropshipping, but now you are probably wondering just how to start a dropshipping business that will succeed. The following are some important steps for ensuring your success.

Set up Shop

Worried that you can’t create and design your own ecommerce store? Nowadays, this isn’t a problem! Shopify makes creating an online store easier than ever. They offer an array of user friendly, professional looking templates, along with plenty of accompanying apps that can make your business processes easier and less time consuming. With Shopify, you can open an online store for a fixed monthly fee, giving you the ability to plan and budget for the future, and it integrates directly with Oberlo, a must-have for any dropshipping site. Shopify will also optimize your site for mobile use. With so many consumers purchasing products on their mobile phones it’s important for your ecommerce site to be mobile-friendly.

Sell on Multiple Channels

In addition to creating a great store on Shopify, it’s important to implement multichannel selling into your dropshipping business plan. Multichannel selling refers to using multiple online platforms for making sales. Dropshippers who also take advantage of different social media channels and other sales platforms besides their websites will have multiple sources of commerce going at once. Further, using different sales channels allows you to harness more traffic, especially when you’re just getting started out and your website isn’t so well-known amongst your target audience. After all, more people are already using sites like eBay, Etsy, or even Pinterest and Instagram to make purchases than are currently buying from your site specifically. Siphon these users’ attention to your store! Customers are shopping in lots of different locations online, and your company needs to embrace multiple mediums in order to make sales. Doing so will increase your visibility and offer a different platform through which your customers can find you.

Choose Your Dropshipping Suppliers

So far we’ve covered your online storefront, i.e. the aspects of your business that the customer will see. This, of course, is highly important to your business model, but it is equally imperative to pay attention to how you will source your products and from whom. In other words, even though you can earn money from home, dropshipping is a process that involves multiple key players that can be located across different continents. Therefore, when dropshipping the best way to ensure that the entire ordering process runs smoothly is to take care in choosing your suppliers. Investigate and research the dropshipping suppliers you are planning to use. Are they reputable, and do they have a lot of other companies using them? Can you trust them to deliver on time and represent your business well? One of the benefits of sourcing your products from the Oberlo Supply Marketplace is that all suppliers go through a rigorous screening process and our staff have direct contact with them in the event that an issue should arise. Some ways to filter out the more reliable marketplace suppliers are as follows:

Buy from suppliers that have positive feedback. Always aim for a feedback score of around 95% to ensure a good service. Consider individual product feedback and any bad comments from customers to determine a suppliers suitability.
Carry out spot checks and test orders to assess the company’s timing, communication, and overall customer experience for yourself. You will be able to gauge if they are worth working with.
Choose products that are suitable for your brand and customers. Don’t always go for the cheapest product because there are numerous different sellers that have similar products. If one supplier is offering the same item for half the price, then chances are they have skimped on quality.
Genuine branded goods are extremely rare on dropshipping marketplaces so don’t be fooled by branded products because they could easily be counterfeit merchandise.

Come up With a Killer Marketing Strategy

The right marketing strategy is key for set your company apart from your competitors who might even be selling the same products from the same suppliers at similar prices. In many ways knowing how to make money online from home is synonymous with coming up with a killer marketing plan for promoting your store, providing useful content to your audience, and building your brand identity.

This, however, can be an intimidating point. Even if you don’t know exactly how to devise an effective strategy at the time you are reading this, you can easily learn the skills you need to become successful online, as there are countless articles, videos, and tutorials outlining how to market an online shop as an ecommerce entrepreneur.

In this day and age, there are also tons of different marketing channels to choose from. Facebook is probably one of the most common channels used in the dropshipping ecommerce industry, but today there are tons of options at your disposal. Instagram or even Snapchat, for example, hold plenty of promise in this realm as well.

Start a blog to run alongside your online business. You could write about your niche, products you sell, or give advice on how to run a successful dropshipping business straight from your home. The possibilities are endless and content like this is great for posting to social media.
Optimize your site for search engines using SEO. This will help your customers find your site easily and drive sales.
Send out frequent email marketing campaigns and use cart abandonment emails to encourage people to spend more with you. See here for more great email templates.

Deliver Impeccable Customer Service

Once your website is up and running, you’ve got a solid marketing strategy, and orders are flying off the virtual shelves of you online store, your part is done, right? Wrong. As a dropshipper, you have to work hard to create successful relationships with your customers.

Dropshipping handles all of your product demand, but you are 100% responsible for taking care of your customers. This means answering their queries, following up with late or missing deliveries, and general customer service. You will be the first point of contact for your customers, and treating them like gold is another key to the success of your ecommerce business. Bad customer service leads to a downturn in sales and can negatively impact your brand, both personally and professionally. What’s more is that there will likely be at least a couple times when dropshipping where there will be a customer issue that has more to do with a shortcoming on the part of your supplier than you, but it’s still crucial that you take responsibility for fixing the issue.

Connect with your customers by interacting with them on social media as well as making yourself available to them through email and phone as necessary.
Link to useful information and up-to-date news stories to enrich your customers’ experiences. Post often boost traffic and visibility to your website.
Offer a live chat feature on your website to assist customers while they shop. As your business grows, you may even want to consider getting a virtual assistant to aid you with this aspect of managing your business as part of your strategy to earn money from home.

How to Earn Money From Home: Conclusion

Starting any new company presents its own unique challenges, no matter how commercially minded or digitally savvy you are. Every new dropshipping entrepreneur needs a strong and coherent business strategy. Yet, if you put in the research and build a good plan of action, you can feasibly learn how to make money online without investment and from there, begin to earn money from home.

While dropshipping isn’t a business model that allows you to cut corners, it does give you some freedom with fewer risks to learn as you go and to adapt your store to meet the changing demands of your customers. As such, dropshipping offers you a viable option for anyone wondering how to make money on the internet. Just be sure to market your brand effectively and to keep customers at the heart of everything you do in order promote strong relationships and brand awareness that will stick. Put in the necessary time and effort, be patient, and success will be the reward.

Want to learn more?

Are you willing to give dropshipping a try? Which kinds of products will you sell? Let us know in the comments, below!

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Patrick Foster

Patrick loves to share engaging ecommerce content for entrepreneurs and business owners that helps them to grow their brands. You can connect with Patrick on Twitter.

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Jun 9, 2018