When you start a dropshipping store, you should look at it as starting a business. The store is your main deliverable, but if you think bigger, you’ll make better decisions for the long term. Think of yourself as a business owner—an entrepreneur.
A lot of people approach dropshipipng as simply a store…a tactic. They think that if you start a dropshipping store, then you just offer dropshipped products. That’s patently untrue and displays short-term thinking.
Dropshipping is just a way of fulfilling e-commerce orders. It’s a logistical strategy and doesn’t need to limit a business’s potential. When you start a dropshipping store, you’re opening up potential for any and all e-commerce strategies, like print on demand, merchandise, subscriptions, and even selling your own proprietary products.
Once you have a Shopify or WooCommerce store set up, the sky is the limit in terms of the products you offer.
Table of Contents
Set Up an Official Business
Make your dropshipping business legit by:
- Setting up a business (in the US)
- Setting up separate bank accounts
- Getting a business credit card
- Creating an official email address
- Getting business insurance
- And more…
When you get into dropshipping for the long haul (which is the only way to get into it), make sure you’re on the up and up in all areas of the business.
Focus on Your Audience, Not Your Fulfillment Method
When you think of your business as a business, instead of just as a dropshipping store, you can reframe your outlook.
Instead of focusing on dropshipping specifically, you can focus on your niche and work toward offering your target audience the products they want and need.
For example, if you’re in the pet niche, you could build a store that offers any or all of the following:
- Dropshipped products
- A few central wholesale products
- Print on demand gifts
- Resources like training (which could be an affiliate link)
- Memberships
Let’s look at each approach more in depth. And we’ll do so using examples within the dog niche.
Dropshipped Products
By now, you most likely know what a dropshipped product is. You sell a product online and a supplier fulfills the order and sends it directly to the end customer.
To find dog-related products to dropship, we can look at some of the best US suppliers:
Great dog products are available on AliExpress, Spocket. Salehoo, Wholesale2b, and other dropshipping suppliers.
The products are good and the prices are cheap. But a lot of people are selling these products, and shipping times can be 2-3 weeks to the US. But these are great staples to offer your customers.
Wholesale Products
In addition to being able to offer a wide variety of dog products through dropshipping, you can invest in several staple products for your store that you buy wholesale and fulfill yourself or through a dropship warehousing center like Flow Space.
While wholesale products require a higher up-front investment to buy in bulk, your margins will be higher as long as you can sell the products fast.
This is a great option for products you sell a lot of—it’s a way to increase your margins without adding infrastructure yourself. The products you choose to wholesale will depend on what moves best in your store. In our hypothetical dog store, it could be:
- Hot-selling dog toys
- Popular dog treats
- An amazing pet cleaning product
- And more
Print on Demand
Creating and offering unique products through print on demand can make your e-commerce business standout. In almost any niche, you can think of fun t-shirts, mugs, wall art, and other print on demand products that your customers will want. For the dog niche example, we may want to choose some products like this:
Now, you can’t go off and sell these exact products, but they give you an idea of the types of products you can create and sell through print on demand.
Resources
Your business can offer more than just physical products. You can offer resources that your target audience might like, and you can do so for free as a marketing tactic, or as an additional revenue stream.
In our dog niche example, we could offer information on dog training and dog behavior. This is possible through partnerships with experts, affiliate product links, private label rights content (PLR), or creating proprietary resources. In general, starting with affiliate or PLR content is the most efficient, and as you understand what your audience wants, you can expand to more time- and money-intensive approaches.
In our hypothetical pet store, we could offer links to a variety of affiliate products from MaxBounty (an affiliate network). For example, we can offer a $25 off coupon to our customers when they start with Rover, a dog walking/sitting marketplace. Every time someone signs up for Rover through our affiliate link, we get $20. Offering something like this would in no way compete with our e-commerce products, but would be very valuable to our target audience.
Make sure the resources you offer add value to your audience and don’t detract or distract from your core products.
Memberships
If it makes sense for your niche, you can offer a membership to your site. In general, people create an account on your site to purchase anyway, so you can wrap a membership structure around it.
Memberships are a great way to get recurring revenue, both from the memberships themselves and from purchases by loyal customers. The most common membership method is to have customers pay a monthly fee to access “member pricing” structures. For example, maybe they pay $10/month to become a member, and they get 10% off all orders from your store. This builds loyalty and gives the customer an incentive to purchase from you.
Shopify and many other dropshipping website platforms have the functionality built in to make this possible.
When you offer options from several of these methods, you give customers choices, you keep them coming back, you create new revenue streams for yourself, and build a better brand.
Think Bigger, Do Better
When you think bigger than just dropshipping, sky’s the limit for your business. Keep your target audience top of mind and do whatever makes sense to make them happy and keep them coming back.