Dropshipping

At first glance, it sounds brilliant, right? No need for warehousing. You don't have to pack the goods and have them ready by 4pm when your freight provider comes by to pick up the day's orders. All is well?

Unfortunately, it's not quite so rosy. Your supplier wants a piece of the pie, so you typically get a slightly lower profit margin. But that's the least of the challenges.

Challenges of dropshipping

The biggest challenge with dropshipping is that you either only have goods from one supplier or you have to pay shipping multiple times if your customers order goods from two different suppliers (or more).

Another challenge that isn't a challenge at all, of course, but something you should be aware of before you start dropshipping.

You need to be aware that your supplier knows almost everything about your business. The supplier knows what you sell most of and can therefore relatively easily "take over" that business themselves simply by setting up a webshop. (What the supplier doesn't know, of course, is how to get enough visitors to the webshop - but most people underestimate that discipline when they start a webshop). Just realize that you're putting all your eggs in one basket if you only use one supplier for dropshipping. If you use several, then you have the challenge of shipping.

So is dropshipping a bad idea?

-Absolutely not. Dropshipping has the huge advantage that it's cheap to start and you don't have to be in your warehouse daily. Especially for very expensive products such as white goods, this can be an advantage.

Webshop that can be used for dropshipping

Can Shoporama be used for dropshipping? You bet it can. You can create a supplier for each product. A supplier is assigned an email and when an order is placed with the supplier's products, Shoporama sends an email to the supplier with the order information. You can also create a user for the supplier so that he/she can access your online store and manage the order.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.