Preface
Whenever I open any classified pages, I would see a lot of business opportunity
advertisements. Almost all of those ads are old-world ones. They may not work anymore. To
give you an idea, most of the advertisements were on candle making, data entry jobs, MLM,
medical coding projects, and more. If you have browsed classified section or business
opportunity sites, you must have come across tons of such ideas.
On the other hand, the real and working business models are very expensive — like restaurant
franchising, apparel stores, software companies, and more. As corporates are taking the
proven business models to new levels, it has become difficult for common people to compete
with those giants.
So it was either people are staring at scam advertisements or business models they cannot
afford to start.
I wonder why would nobody down here ever talk about the best business model that I can
vouch for — Dropshipping Business Model. Maybe it‘s just that people are not aware of its
power yet.
I‘ll tell you why do I trust this model so much. Dropshipping is not entirely a new business
model, it is just another way of the supply chain method that exists for ages which is an
advancement of trading business model. As the trading business model will never go out of
fashion, why would a model that makes trading easy for amateurs and pioneers alike, go out
of scope. The rise of the E-Commerce industry has only made dropshipping a more powerful
model.
This book will help as a guide for anyone starting a dropshipping business newly or even for
pioneers to brush up their knowledge whenever required.
I have explained about different parts of the dropshipping business, like setting up a store and
selection of products. Of all the sections, I have explained the Marketing section in length
comparatively since this is the part that will bring you the money. Obviously, every section
covered in this book plays a crucial role in the dropshipping business, but Marketing is what
will take your business and products to the people and so make them buy from you.
This book is suitable for anybody looking to start a profitable business with low investments
like Entrepreneurs, IT Employees, Housewives, Students, Retired Citizens, Government
Employees, and anybody else.
I would require you to go through this book thoroughly with deep focus and wish you a
successful business journey ahead.
Thank You
I would like to thank my friend Pushpa Mudaliyar for proof-reading this book and helping me
to correct the mistakes, all my clients for trusting in us(Baapstore) and making us India‘s #1
Dropshipping Business Platform, and you the readers for trusting me to impart the
dropshipping business knowledge to you.
Table of Contents
Why should you start a Business...................................................................................................... 12
Understanding a Traditional Product Supply Chain .......................................................................... 14
Manufacturers ............................................................................................................................. 14
Distributors & Wholesalers .......................................................................................................... 14
Retailers ...................................................................................................................................... 14
Differences between distributors, wholesalers, and retailers ....................................................... 14
Interdependency ......................................................................................................................... 15
Changing Supply Chain Flow ............................................................................................................ 16
Introduction of Dropshipping .......................................................................................................... 17
History of Dropshipping ............................................................................................................... 17
Benefits of Dropshipping ................................................................................................................. 18
No Investment on Product Purchase ............................................................................................ 18
More Choices .............................................................................................................................. 18
Automation ................................................................................................................................. 18
Scalability .................................................................................................................................... 18
Disadvantages of Dropshipping ....................................................................................................... 20
On-time shipments ...................................................................................................................... 20
Delivering Right Products ............................................................................................................. 20
Returns Management .................................................................................................................. 20
Importance of Research .................................................................................................................. 21
What Products to Sell ...................................................................................................................... 22
Golden Rules of Finding a Product Niche ......................................................................................... 23
Audience Size .............................................................................................................................. 23
Knowledge............................................................................................................................... 23
Researched Data from Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner Tool ............................................... 23
Why am I convinced? ............................................................................................................... 25
High Profit ................................................................................................................................... 25
Long time Demand ...................................................................................................................... 26
Expertise Knowledge ................................................................................................................... 27
Tips on Gaining More Knowledge in your Product Category ..................................................... 29
Small & Less Weight Products ...................................................................................................... 30
Choose Products with Less Return Ratio ...................................................................................... 31
Common Reasons for Product Returns ..................................................................................... 32
Niche Products v/s Mass Products ................................................................................................... 33
When choosing a niche product can be good ............................................................................... 33
When is it not a good idea to choose niche products ................................................................... 33
Selling Mass Products .................................................................................................................. 33
Vendor Research ............................................................................................................................. 35
Profile Research........................................................................................................................... 35
Terms Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 36
Stock File Formats ....................................................................................................................... 36
Test Orders .................................................................................................................................. 36
Vendors to Avoid ......................................................................................................................... 36
Quick Pointers to Avoid Vendors.................................................................................................. 37
Competitor Research ....................................................................................................................... 38
Benefits of Competitor Research ................................................................................................. 38
Monitoring Competitors .............................................................................................................. 38
Let’s look into some of those tools and how they work. ............................................................... 39
Google Alerts ............................................................................................................................... 39
Google Keywords Planner ............................................................................................................ 40
Facebook Ads Library ................................................................................................................... 42
Selling Outlet ................................................................................................................................... 45
Selling through your Own E-Commerce Portal ................................................................................. 46
Advantages of Selling via Own Portal ........................................................................................... 46
No Commission........................................................................................................................ 46
Total Control ............................................................................................................................ 46
No Competition ....................................................................................................................... 46
High Profit ............................................................................................................................... 46
No Restriction on Images ......................................................................................................... 46
Own Policies ............................................................................................................................ 46
Category Architecture .............................................................................................................. 46
Disadvantages of Selling via Own Portal ....................................................................................... 47
Marketing ................................................................................................................................ 47
Technical Aspects .................................................................................................................... 47
How to Get Your Own E-Commerce Website ............................................................................... 47
Amateur Website..................................................................................................................... 47
Professional Website ............................................................................................................... 48
Getting a SaaS-Based Website ......................................................................................................... 51
Downsides of SaaS Platforms ....................................................................................................... 51
You Do Not Own A Store .......................................................................................................... 51
Expensive ................................................................................................................................ 51
Lack of Flexibility ..................................................................................................................... 51
Getting a Store Made by Dedicated Dropshipping Platforms (DDP) .................................................. 53
Advantages.................................................................................................................................. 53
Sourcing of Inventory............................................................................................................... 53
No Technical Issues .................................................................................................................. 53
Auto Cataloging ....................................................................................................................... 53
Maintenance by DDP ............................................................................................................... 54
Delivery and Returns Management .......................................................................................... 54
Sell on Marketplaces ....................................................................................................................... 55
Advantages of selling through marketplaces ................................................................................ 55
Ready Customer Database ....................................................................................................... 55
Marketing ................................................................................................................................ 55
Warehouse Facility .................................................................................................................. 55
Tools........................................................................................................................................ 55
Disadvantages of selling through marketplaces............................................................................ 56
Lack of Control ......................................................................................................................... 56
Competition from Marketplace ................................................................................................ 56
Marketplace Fee and Reconciliation ........................................................................................ 56
Risk of Account Closure............................................................................................................ 56
Selling via Social Platforms .............................................................................................................. 57
Advantages of Selling via Social Platforms.................................................................................... 57
Nil or Less Commission ............................................................................................................ 57
Huge Audience ........................................................................................................................ 57
Cheap & Effective Marketing Method ...................................................................................... 57
Viral Power .............................................................................................................................. 57
Disadvantages of Selling via Social Platforms ............................................................................... 57
Disorganized ............................................................................................................................ 57
Scam Fear ................................................................................................................................ 58
Negative Outlook ..................................................................................................................... 58
Customer Relationship .................................................................................................................... 59
Technology to the Rescue ............................................................................................................ 60
Some of the Use Cases of Such Apps ............................................................................................ 60
Auto Wishes ............................................................................................................................ 60
Purchase Reminder.................................................................................................................. 60
Auto Discounts for Incomplete Transactions ............................................................................ 60
Auto Suggestion of Related Items ............................................................................................ 60
Bot as a Personal Assistant....................................................................................................... 60
Honoring the Loyal Customers ................................................................................................. 61
Collecting Payments ........................................................................................................................ 62
Payment Options ......................................................................................................................... 62
Payment Gateway ....................................................................................................................... 62
Two Major Types of Payment Gateways .................................................................................. 63
Return & Refund Handling ............................................................................................................... 65
Common reasons for product returns .......................................................................................... 65
Measures to Reduce The Return Ratio ......................................................................................... 65
High-Quality Photos ................................................................................................................. 65
Some of the pointers while uploading your product photos ..................................................... 65
Optimized Product Descriptions ............................................................................................... 66
Provide All Policies Upfront...................................................................................................... 66
FAQs & Reviews ....................................................................................................................... 66
Quality Check Before Dispatching ............................................................................................ 66
Pack it Good ............................................................................................................................ 66
Remove High Return Products ................................................................................................. 67
Refund Policy ........................................................................................................................... 67
Marketing........................................................................................................................................ 68
Offline Marketing ............................................................................................................................ 69
Let us start looking into some of the available offline marketing options first. ............................. 69
Transport Marketing .................................................................................................................... 69
Sign & Banner Ads ....................................................................................................................... 69
Television & Radio Advertisements .............................................................................................. 69
Print Advertisements ................................................................................................................... 70
Flyers & Handouts ....................................................................................................................... 70
Online Marketing ............................................................................................................................ 71
Top Benefits of Online Marketing ................................................................................................ 71
Trackable ................................................................................................................................. 71
Budget-Friendly ....................................................................................................................... 71
Reaching Right Target .............................................................................................................. 71
Self Manageable ...................................................................................................................... 71
Global Marketing ..................................................................................................................... 71
A/B Experiments ...................................................................................................................... 72
24/7 Marketing ........................................................................................................................ 72
Automate your Entire Marketing Journey ................................................................................ 72
Omnichannel Targeting............................................................................................................ 72
ReTargeting Advertisements .................................................................................................... 72
Free Marketing ................................................................................................................................ 74
Social Media Optimization ............................................................................................................... 75
Benefits of Social Media Optimization ......................................................................................... 75
Lead Generation ...................................................................................................................... 75
Social Media Presence ............................................................................................................. 75
Direct Connect with the Audience ............................................................................................ 75
Guidelines on Social Media Optimization ..................................................................................... 75
Have a Strategy in Place ........................................................................................................... 75
Strong Profile........................................................................................................................... 76
Hashtags and Keywords ........................................................................................................... 76
Hashtags Usecases................................................................................................................... 76
Search Engine Optimization ............................................................................................................. 78
How to SEO Optimize Your E-Commerce Portal to Achieve Top Google Ranking .......................... 78
Important SEO Jargons ................................................................................................................ 78
On-Page SEO Optimization .......................................................................................................... 79
Keywords Research and Optimization ...................................................................................... 79
Optimization of the Site Content .............................................................................................. 81
Off-Page Optimization ................................................................................................................. 83
Backlinks Creation ................................................................................................................... 83
How to Create Backlinks .......................................................................................................... 84
Video Marketing .............................................................................................................................. 89
Video Making .............................................................................................................................. 89
Guidelines in Video Making ......................................................................................................... 89
Clear Objective ........................................................................................................................ 89
Work on the Script ................................................................................................................... 90
Convey it right ......................................................................................................................... 90
Discoverable Description ......................................................................................................... 90
Final Words ............................................................................................................................. 90
Video Marketing Distribution Platforms ....................................................................................... 91
Affiliate Marketing .......................................................................................................................... 92
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing ..................................................................................................... 92
No Expense .............................................................................................................................. 92
Natural Reach .......................................................................................................................... 92
Expanded Reach ...................................................................................................................... 92
How to get Affiliate Marketing Work ........................................................................................... 92
Email Marketing .............................................................................................................................. 94
Benefits of Email Marketing ......................................................................................................... 94
Reach All Your Subscribers At Once .......................................................................................... 94
Reaching Inbox ........................................................................................................................ 94
Categorization ......................................................................................................................... 94
Trackable ................................................................................................................................. 94
Low-Cost Global Reach ............................................................................................................ 94
Schedule Ahead ....................................................................................................................... 95
Disadvantages of Email Marketing ............................................................................................... 95
Things to Follow in Email Marketing ............................................................................................ 95
Manage Subscriber List ............................................................................................................ 95
Email Configurations ................................................................................................................ 95
Reach Inbox ............................................................................................................................. 96
Some of the things you can do to get high open rates are ............................................................ 96
Paid Marketing ................................................................................................................................ 97
Google Ads ...................................................................................................................................... 98
Why Advertise on Google ............................................................................................................ 98
Let’s see some of the important factors of Google Ads ................................................................ 99
Keywords................................................................................................................................. 99
CPC v/s CPM ............................................................................................................................ 99
Ad Copy Formats ..................................................................................................................... 99
Campaign Types..................................................................................................................... 100
Ad Relevancy and Quality Score ............................................................................................. 100
Facebook Ads ................................................................................................................................ 101
Why Advertise on Facebook ...................................................................................................... 101
Accurate & Related Audience................................................................................................. 101
Objectives.............................................................................................................................. 101
Trackable Option ................................................................................................................... 101
Large Audience ...................................................................................................................... 101
Marketing Techniques ................................................................................................................... 104
Coupon Code Generation & Distribution .................................................................................... 104
Exclusive Gift Vouchers .............................................................................................................. 104
Reward Users ............................................................................................................................ 105
Legal Requirements ....................................................................................................................... 106
Some of the legal things that may be needed ............................................................................ 106
Baapstore: The Shortcut to Success ............................................................................................... 107
Common Dropshipping Challenges That Sellers Face.................................................................. 108
Finding Vendors ..................................................................................................................... 108
Dropshipping Couriers ........................................................................................................... 108
Lack of Co-ordination ............................................................................................................. 108
Expensive .............................................................................................................................. 108
Success Ratio ......................................................................................................................... 108
Baapstore Advantages ............................................................................................................... 109
All Under One Roof ................................................................................................................ 109
Single Products at Wholesale Cost ......................................................................................... 109
Full Responsibility Is On Us .................................................................................................... 110
Lowest Investment ................................................................................................................ 110
Fastest Time to Launch Your Business .................................................................................... 110
No Need to Contact Vendors ................................................................................................. 111
Deliveries & Returns Management ........................................................................................ 111
Unlimited Free Deliveries ....................................................................................................... 111
Advanced E-Commerce Website ............................................................................................ 111
Get Direct Payments .............................................................................................................. 111
Unlimited Sales at No Extra Cost ............................................................................................ 111
Final Words ................................................................................................................................... 113
Special Discounts ........................................................................................................................... 114
Why should you start a Business
Let us be honest. Most of us cannot stop being jealous of the life of wealthy business owners.
Just imagine the life they live. They do not have to worry about EMIs, they do not have to go
work every day to survive. They can go on foreign tours anytime they want. They never have
to look for a price in the restaurant menu card. They do not depend on the corporation water.
They make their own rules.
But let‘s not just envy them, let‘s appreciate a fact that someone in their family took a bold
step of starting a business or risked buying lands when nobody thought that land price would
skyrocket making many of those middle-class people rich.
So when we know that starting a business generates wealth for us, why does not all of us start
a business and become rich.
Well, it is never an easy job to start a business. Particularly in Indian society where most of
us embrace the routine jobs that get us a regular monthly income, starting a business was not
only seen as a risky decision but broadly discouraged. A couple of my friends who are from a
well off business family and continuing their family business had to leave their business for a
few months and join some other companies for a bottom level executive job. It was a terrible
idea, why would someone leave their existing profit-making business and join somewhere
else as a starting level employee. Well, if you think of it in other terms, it might actually be a
good idea. They had to do that because nobody was willing to marry their daughters to these
business people. Parents in our society not only force their children to get a government job
or high paying private job but as well, wants their son-in-law to be employed with a good
monthly salary in a company known for job security. Leave alone parents, even finance banks
do not issue loans for business people. Our society is formed in a way that rather than trusting
the talent, we trust the nametag better. Even those young people who desire to start a
business, most do not make it.
Two things that stop people from starting their own business are fear and laziness. Among
different types of fear, fear of failure is the biggest one that holds people from starting their
business.
One worries of consequences if failed in business. In a society where many of us closely
monitor what other people are doing, we fear getting attached to the failure tag. You fail just
once and people see you as a failure in everything you do. A good example is that in the
Indian film industry when an actress‘s movie does not perform well commercially, she is
considered as unlucky and does not get another chance to perform.
Fortunately, unlike the film industry, where a female actor getting a second chance is in the
hands of cinema producers, in business, it is totally up to one‘s individual decision. Nobody
has the power to stop you from starting your own business. Let them say whatever they want,
but let‘s accept the fact, those people are not the ones who are going to feed you when
needed. If you research some of the most successful business people, most of them were
discouraged and even ridiculed on creating their own path, but it is their perseverance and
conviction they had on the business that had made them what they are today.
I have not failed. I‘ve just found 10,000 ways that won‘t work. — Thomas Edison
On the other perspective, we cannot wipe out all these fears as unnecessary ones.
Traditionally, starting a business is expensive and complicated. Most common business
models require one to have a good finance backup and multiple skills including the core skills
of the business, employee management, accounting knowledge, taxations and legal
procedures, negotiation skill, etc., it is definitely not for everyone.
To give you an idea, let‘s analyze the grocery business model which I believe is a very
important business type as it is an essential niche, it is competitive, it has decaying products,
it requires huge manpower and it is price sensitive. While running a grocery store may appeal
simple and attractive from the outside, it is an operation-heavy business model. You need
money to pay advance and rent a store, you should have negotiation skills to bargain
inventory from the wholesale vendor, you should know how to get the work done from
difficult employees, you should know how to dispose or make profits from the products that
decay quickly and you should know how to set a price to your products. You set high profit,
you lose customers. You set a low price, you lose profits. Not just grocery business, most
businesses require you to have all these skills or even more. This is why most people fear or
advise to not start a business.
It all boils down to one‘s self-confidence whether to start a business or to be safe working for
a monthly salary.
Anyone starting a business must be appreciated. Think of the positive aspects business brings
to society. Those who create a successful business create a lot of positive outcomes like,
creation of jobs, wealth generation, contributing to the economic development of a nation,
and uplifting the confidence of the society. These are some of the reasons why successful
business owners are proud of and have personal satisfaction.
But can‘t everyone just start a business without having all these traits? can‘t I just focus on
one skill and run a profitable business?
Yes, you definitely can. That‘s what makes Dropshipping business a unique model for
common people with less investment and resources to start with.
Understanding a Traditional Product
Supply Chain
Before moving into the Dropshipping business model, I would request you to understand how
the product supply chain works. Do not get overwhelmed by the use of such jargons, it is
very simple to understand the concept.
The products you buy from your local retail shop involves the work of the various type of
companies. Traditionally, getting a product manufactured and selling it to the end customers
require a whole lot of effort from various business houses in order to ensure that the goods
produced are successfully delivered and sold for profits every time.
Let‘s see the most common flow of such a product flow supply chain. Be known that it may
differ a little between business to business and we‘ll see only the most widely used supply
chain model for easy understanding.
Manufacturers
Manufacturers are the ones who produce the goods. They buy the raw materials from the
respective agents and make it into a finished product. For example, the apparel manufacturers
buy fabrics like polyesters and linen from sellers like Reliance and Aditya Birla to weave it
into a complete product. Manufacturers do not sell one by one to the end customers, they sell
in lots to wholesalers and distributors.
Distributors & Wholesalers
Distributors buy products from manufacturers in bulk and store the inventory to resell to the
wholesale dealers. Distributors have big warehouses for storage of the products and network
with the regional wholesalers to ensure their products reach all the places in their reach. Later
wholesalers distribute the same to their network of retailers.
Retailers
Retailers are the endpoints before taking a product to the end customers. Hence retail shops
are set up in public places like high streets and malls to make it easier for people to buy from
them.
Differences between distributors, wholesalers, and retailers
Retailers have to set up shops in shopping places like high streets and malls which makes
their investment in real estate very high.
Retailers mostly sell single pieces and so get immediate payment on sale making their
business less risky.
Wholesalers may not have to spend lavishly on real estate as they deal with business people
who focus on products and prices more than the look of their offices.
However, as the competition increases, wholesalers are providing credit periods to the
retailers to move more products from their godowns. If there is a delay or no payment, the
wholesaler has to bear the losses.
Interdependency
In this traditional supply chain flow, it is practically not possible to remove any of these
middlemen. Everyone depends on the other. Manufacturers usually deal with raw material
sellers and focus on what they produce, they cannot focus on sales or taking it to the end
customers. If a manufacturer wants to take the products directly to the end customers, they
need huge power to create retail stores in all parts of the country or region they target, and on
top of that, they need a good supply chain mechanism as well.
The same is the case with retailers. Most retailers cannot manufacture products themselves. If
you are going to manufacture something, you need to manufacture in huge quantities to
ensure that you are keeping the costs low. Hence if a retailer manufactures themselves, they
will end up with high costs and have to sell products at higher costs as well which will kill
their business.
The exception to this is the powerful businesses and small boutiques. The powerful
businesses like Reliance have tens of thousands of stores across the nation and as well have
all the raw materials and manufacturing capability in-house who can control the entire supply
chain single-handedly and still be successful. Boutiques on the other hand who design their
own stuff may find limited success except in exceptional cases. As both powerhouse
businesses and boutiques are rare cases, we‘ll rather focus on the regular business models
which guarantees a better success ratio.
Changing Supply Chain Flow
As people are buying everything online in this internet age, the flow of the supply chain itself
is changing.
The very reason for the current supply chain flow in traditional business is that people buy
from shops nearby their houses. As people are scattered, every type of business needs one
other to sustain in this business to sell to people in different geographies. A person staying in
Chennai Tnagar will not travel all the way to Chennai Washermanpet to buy a pair of
trousers, which is located miles apart. Though the shops in Washermanpet area may be
selling clothes at a lesser cost, traveling may have difficulties like the customer may not get
permission from his office to travel, he may not able to afford the fuel itself or just that he
may be too lazy to travel and so buy things locally. Because of this nature, different sizes of
retail stores coexist everywhere and all of them get regular sales from their local customers.
However, this model is changing due to increasing online sales.
When it comes online, literally, all the shops are located within your mobile phone at the
same distance and so there is no need to travel between one e-commerce website to another
one. If you do not find a required product in Amazon, you can search it right away on eBay
without moving anywhere. Online-only brands do not depend on physical shops anymore to
sell their products. This has given a whole new dimension for manufacturers to tap the end
customers directly. Assume that a shoe manufacturer launched an online-only shoe brand. To
sell online, he does not need any distributors, wholesalers, or retailers. He can produce and
sell on his own directly to the end customers. He does not even need to know about the
technicalities anymore as there are different type of service companies that makes the online
selling a cakewalk and marketplace platforms even provide huge customer base just by listing
products in their portals.
That is a big change.
Though it may not be practically possible for all the manufacturers to sell on their own as of
now, you will have to understand and realize that the supply chain is gradually changing.
On the other hand, retailers are also now producing and selling products on their own private
label brands. As the market has become very competitive, manufacturers have started taking
a lot of small contracts which have created a scope for retailers and e-tailers who are strong
on selling, to produce and sell products on their own brand name.
Dropshipping is one such supply chain model that‘s born out of the modernism of the everevolving retail industry.
Introduction of Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a retail fulfillment supply chain method that allows e-tailers to sell products
without actually investing upfront. In short, you will able to sell millions of goods that you do
not own, for a profit, on your own business name.
Dropshipping is the revolutionary business model created perfectly for a common man.
Traditional trading business, in general, requires some good investment since it involves
buying and selling goods which is mostly not possible for people with low investment
capacity. With the Dropshipping model, anyone can start a business with a very less
investment yet reap the benefits like a regular full-time trader.
Dropshipping is that magic business model that has all the revenue potential of full-time
business and requires fewer work hours of commitment from the dropship store owner that
makes it a proper side project for you to start with and once grows, it can be made a full-time
business with no risks. Dropshipping is an advancement of the retail business model. In a
dropshipping model, a retailer does not buy or store inventory upfront. Rather when he gets a
sale, he will pay the wholesale cost for the sold product and instruct the wholesale vendor to
ship products to his client on his behalf.
History of Dropshipping
Though the dropshipping model suits eCommerce businesses perfectly, it‘s not a new
business model. In fact, it exists for ages. Have you seen a neighbor aunty who sells healthy
oils and those magnetic beads printed on high-quality books, which can be delivered on the
order confirmation, that can cure your mom‘s knee pains miraculously? or electronic shop
owner in Delhi's Gaffar market who sends his staff to ‗warehouse‘ to get you your favorite
disc man?
The significance of dropshipping, however, was realized only when e-commerce portals like
Amazon and eBay have come into existence. Amazon is one of the biggest dropshipping
stores. They sell products to you that they do not own. Whenever you place an order,
Amazon alerts the product seller and he sends it to you on behalf of Amazon, of which,
Amazon takes a cut. A pretty good cut, I must say.
Benefits of Dropshipping
The reason why at least 33% of the e-commerce stores are using the dropshipping business
model is the unmatching benefits it has over the traditional e-commerce or retail business
model. There are a number of benefits that a dropship store owner enjoys.
No Investment on Product Purchase
In any trading business, you‘ll be investing the majority of your money on inventory. You
will have to stock up at least 100x more goods than your number of daily selling units. As
customers are spoilt for choices, you will have to stock up a variety of goods in order to
satisfy your customers. It‘s like though most South Indians prefer ordering dosa or idly, we
always ask waiters to read out the entire menu and after which we‘ll order the default option.
One can straight away order dosa, but the desire of looking out the variety to find if there is
something unique makes us go through all the choices first. I have also seen many customers,
women in particular, who go through hundreds of dresses spending hours of time and ending
up choosing just one dress. This happens not only while choosing bridal wear but for daily
wear too. Point is that, if you want to run a regular store, either online or offline, the
investment required is huge. That is where the Dropshipping business comes handy, you will
not even have to invest in a single product. All the products you sell will be sent directly to
your end customers from your dropship vendor and you have to only pay for the sold
products.
More Choices
Once a seller decided to try out dropshipping business, there comes a variety of choices of
products. As one does not have to invest in products and rather only sell the products of
dropship vendors, you are immediately going to get huge collections to resell. The best thing
is you can add products from different dropship vendors and not required to stick to one
vendor thus expanding your collections and variety of products in a much faster time than
traditional retailers.
Automation
As the sold products are not stocked in your place, the remaining work is not yours too. All
the packing, shipping, and handling of returns will be taken care of by your dropship vendor.
Packing, which is an otherwise messy job that requires courier bag, pasting tapes, weight
machine, ruler, etc., are ruled out in this model and it‘s the work of your dropship vendor
which saves you thousands of hours which can be utilized to the productive work like
creating business strategies, marketing ideas, etc.,
Scalability
Unlike a traditional retail business where the size of inventory is proportionate to the sales
and the size of the store, in dropshipping, scaling is much easier. As you add more vendors,
you will be adding more products to resell. The only expense you‘d make to increase your
collections is to spend time to look out for and discuss with new vendors. This results in
increased sales and profits.
Disadvantages of Dropshipping
While there are many advantages to the dropshipping business model, it is also important to
point out the disadvantages as well. I firmly believe that it is always better to research a
business properly, sum up all the ups and downs before coming to a conclusion if it is a
suitable model for you.
However, mostly all the downsides of this model start and end in the dropship vendor you
choose. That important it is to choose the right vendors. Here are some of the factors you can
use to evaluate your dropship vendor.
On-time shipments
It is of utmost importance to deliver the product to your customers as soon as possible. In
case if it is taking a long time, it is better to show the expected delivery date to your customer
which will keep them assured about the delivery.
Delivering Right Products
Chances are that your vendor may ship wrong or defective products. You should have a good
rapport with them or be able to cover the costs you‘ll incur because of such incidents. If it is
happening frequently, you may get disappointed customers.
Returns Management
Most dropship vendors will not take return products leaving you in the middle of the sea
when you get return requests and the e-commerce model generally has a more return ratio
than the traditional businesses because of its lack of touch and feel options.
The good thing is that you can resolve all these issues by choosing the right dropship vendor.
Before signing up with any vendor, discuss their terms and that should solve most problems
that may incur in the future.
Importance of Research
There is a lot of research one must put into before starting a business. It is also important that
you do not spend all your energy and time on researching only which may actually make you
tired to start a business at all. So while it‘s important to do research, it‘s equally important to
start a business at some point.
Research is an ever-going process and should happen even after starting the business. Your
research subject may change depending on the stage of your business, but should always
continue.
There are certain things that you need to have a thorough idea of and researched data possibly
when it comes to dropshipping business. You should know about the products you sell, the
vendors you deal with, and the shipping policies.
Proper market research will help you throughout your business journey. Market research
should not be underestimated ever, doing it properly will allow you to face any situations that
may arise in your business.
The research will give you a great insight into your own strengths and weaknesses, let you
know about your audience, discover your existing and potential competitors, and the products
that you would sell.
What Products to Sell
What‘s more important in a trading business than the selection of the product inventory itself.
You need products that sell and provide you with a good profit margin. As products are the
showpiece that your business would revolve around, you need to be really careful in selecting
the products you‘d like to sell.
When you start researching the products on the web, you will be quite amazed to see the
variety of products you can sell. There are millions of products to choose from and you may
even get stuck with the choices.
AliExpress is a great platform to find the different types of products available in the market.
Let me just give you a quick screenshot here:
A quick glance gives you a different product idea already that includes a heating cooling cup,
Halloween costumes, power drill, ring, sneakers, fancy watch, etc.,
As it‘s easy to get carried away by the overwhelming choices of products, I‘d advise you to
follow some guidelines in the shortlisting of the products.
Golden Rules of Finding a Product Niche
Audience Size
Ensure that the products you are willing to sell have a good audience base. If you do not have
a considerable audience size, then your efforts will not be fruitful. You can find the audience
size using both your market knowledge and online analytical tools.
Let‘s assume that I‘m shortlisting Linen Shirts for Men to sell online in India, I‘m going to
see if this has a good market.
Knowledge
I know that India has about 130+ crore population and found out that 52% of those are Males
which comes out to roughly 67 crores total addressable customers. As India is a hot country,
fabric like Linen that would absorb sweat and keep us cool will be a good product. With that
information, I‘m convinced on the first level. Now let me dig deeper with the help of free
Google tools.
Researched Data from Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner Tool
I see that it is not a great number considering that the total addressable market is about 67
crores whereas the search data shows only about 6000 to 22000 monthly searches.
Hence I‘m going to do comparative research now. I‘m going to find the number of searches
come out for ‗Men Shirts‘ which I‘m sure that most of us wear anyway.
That‘s not bad. I see 1,65,000 searches for Men Shirts and 22,000 searches out of that are for
Linen Shirts, which is roughly 12% and that is good.
Why am I convinced?
Though 1,65,000 is also not a great number when you know that the total addressable market
is 67 crore potential buyers, it is still good because most people search for products directly
on e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart. Not just that, not everyone will
search and buy. Most people click on the links they find through promotions, friends, and buy
via those methods too. But I‘m sure that many people buy shirts online as it‘s a common
item. With Linen Shirt having searches of about 12% of overall men shirts, I‘m convinced
that it has a good market size to cater to.
High Profit
You should have a good profit margin as you have to cover up the costs of marketing and
shipping as well. Most of my clients I interacted with directly talk about selling products at a
low cost. While it may be good for them, since, at Baapstore, we cover up all their delivery
and return costs, it‘s not a good idea in general.
While setting a profit, you have to ensure that you have included all the costs including
shipping costs, return costs(assume 30% returns), advertising costs, rentals, electricity, phone
costs, labor costs, etc., Obviously, you do not have to input all the costs in a single product.
Just work out on the number of products you expect to sell monthly and factor in all those
costs and get an average cost per product, then add the profit margin. If you set a profit and it
looks saleable, you are good to go. Else, dismiss the shortlisted product, and try finding other
products.
In this case, I am going to take an example product from Baapstore‘s product database to see
how much profit can be set.
I‘m taking a linen shirt from Baapstore‘s database and compare it with the same one on
Amazon.
You can see that Amazon‘s price is about 3 times costlier than the price provided in
Baapstore. It looks like a lot of profit can be made, anyway, let‘s also input all other costs and
find out what price we can sell the product at.
Linen Shirt wholesale cost: Rs.585
Delivery cost: Free (in case you are selling a product by Baapstore)
Let‘s add 80% margin to the wholesale cost: Rs.585+80% = Rs.1053
Reduce Amazon Commission from selling price: Rs.1053-17% = Rs.874
Profit = Rs.874-Rs.585=Rs.289
Assume that you will sell 40 products a day or 1200 products a month, your monthly profit
will be Rs.3,46,800.
As this product has a good scope and as well high-profit margin, this is a good product to
zero in and start selling.
Long time Demand
It‘s always easy to get lost in the current trends and lose the long term sight. To give you an
idea, in the COVID-19 period, most sellers were just focusing on selling the masks only.
Though it‘s a good idea to make some quick bucks, you need to ensure that you are able to
survive and make profits in business for years to come.
Now understanding that the selected product has good search volume, I‘m also going to find
out if the searches are temporary or if it a long term product.
I‘m using Google Trends to see the number of searches it has received over a period of 10
years from 2011 to 2020.
Google Trends Search for ‗Men's Linen Shirts‘ in India between 2011 to 2020
That‘s great, I can see that the product is always searched for.
So I confirm three things yet, I can see that this product has a good number of searches, good
profits and also it‘s always being searched for.
Expertise Knowledge
You cannot sell products without having any idea about it. Leave alone answering questions
to your customers, just even to be competitive and updated in the industry, you should either
choose a niche you are knowledgeable about or update yourself in the niche you choose.
Either way, you should have expertise in your niche.
If you do not have knowledge of your niche, I‘d recommend you to read a lot about the
respective product online. The best place to start is to search for the respective product on
marketplaces and read descriptions, FAQs, and reviews. This practice should give you a ton
of information about the products.
Let me try finding this information on Amazon.in.
I‘m pasting the FAQs screenshot below taken from one of the men linen shirt product page:
Here is the review section found on the same product page:
As you see both in the FAQs and reviews section, a lot of people are concerned about the fit,
material, and color of the shirt. It shows that the seller has not given all the required
information properly, it could be because of their lack of knowledge. As people do not touch
and feel products when they buy online, it‘s important that you should be knowledgeable
enough to give detailed information about your product which will help customers to make a
buying decision.
Tips on Gaining More Knowledge in your Product Category
You can try talking to the retail and wholesale vendors and ask all your queries on the
products to gain more knowledge of the product you sell.
Well, let me tell you a technique I‘d follow here. Assuming that I have no knowledge of the
linen shirts, I‘m going to get all the information from the wholesale sellers or manufacturers
themselves.
I‘m opening a b2b app like Indiamart in which I can find the b2b suppliers and using the
‗Post Requirement‘ option, I‘m posting my requirement.
I‘m pasting the responses I‘ve received from the suppliers for my previous requirement of
Ladies Palazzo Pants.
I have received messages and calls from about 10–12 suppliers. They enquired about my
requirements. After giving them the requirement I know about, like, the number of pieces
required, my budget, etc., I have started asking them about how their product is different
from others. This is a magic question as you will start getting some detailed responses, which
you shall use to ask more queries to other suppliers. After a while, you will be more informed
about the product you want to deal in which will give you more confidence to start your
business.
Small & Less Weight Products
As every physical product you sell online requires shipping, you need to ensure that the
product you choose is easy to ship, which is less in weight and size. The shipping cost of
order changes according to the weight of your shipment, hence, to avoid high shipping costs,
avoid bigger or heavyweight items.
All orders are measured by two types of weight calculations i.e, the actual weight and
volumetric weight. Actual weight, as the term suggests, is the actual weight of the shipment
itself when you weigh it on the weighing scale machine and volumetric weight is the weight
that is calculated after factoring in height, length, and width of the product divided by 4000 or
5000.
Here is the method to calculate the volumetric weight of your order. After packing your
order, measure all the sides of your shipment and use the following calculation:
(Length in cm * Height in cm * Width in cm) / 5000 or 4000 for EU Services.
The reason for courier companies to charge on the volumetric weight helps them to charge
the right pricing for each shipment. If they charge on actual weight only, orders that are less
weight but are bigger in size like big sized soft toys will be a loss for them.
As we have found the required product details for the products we have shortlisted, let‘s also
look at other options in finding a niche or product. There are many other ways to find and sell
products. Focus on what kind of products are trending and suitable for you to sell.
Choose Products with Less Return Ratio
The other important factor while choosing a product niche is the return ratio factor. As
customers do not try out the products when purchasing, chances are that they may not have
the right expectations while ordering the product and so is the high return ratio in online
purchases.
Return is a very costly affair. You will end up paying forward shipping charges, return
charges, and the cost of packing materials used. Keeping returns ratio low should be one of
your goals. While you cannot control all the returns that may happen due to various reasons,
you shall at least reduce it by dealing with the products that have less return ratio and by
providing all the product information.
To keep returns ratio low, you should list out all the reasons why a product might be returned
and classify those reasons into two heads i.e., Returns Under Control and Returns Out of
Control.
Common Reasons for Product Returns
Shipped wrong size, product not as described, defective product, the customer changed mind,
style not as expected, product no longer needed, ordered by mistake, shipped the wrong
product, the customer found a better product elsewhere, and late delivery of items.
If you take care of the reasons given under ‗Returns Under Control‘, you may reduce the
return ratio significantly.
But the product niche you choose itself will be a reason for the return ratio. If you are
choosing a product niche newly, then it‘s better to avoid size based products and delicate
ones like glass items.
To give you an instance, online channels in India sell Saree, in women‘s category, much
more than other products like Kurtis and Readymade suits. One big reason for the same is
that while sellers list more Sarees than other women's clothing items because it has no size
problem, buyers too prefer buying it since they do not have the hassle of ordering a product
that may be a wrong size. Hence, Sarees are listed and sold more than other products in its
category.
Niche Products v/s Mass Products
Most marketers immediately advise you to focus on niche products claiming mass products to
be competitive. This is not as simple as that. The downside of niche products is that you are
going to find a smaller audience demography to target. If you are in touch with relevant
customer groups already or you are a part of them, you may have nailed it with your niche
product selection.
When choosing a niche product can be good
Let us assume that you are running a watch service shop and found that there are a good
number of people who are ready to buy a certain type of watches, let‘s say old classy ones.
As the world is moving toward smartwatches, maybe the production of such old classy
watches are already declining. Sourcing and selling such watches to these people will be a
good profitable business because you already know what your customers want and since you
are in contact with them, your marketing expense would be lower. Selling will be
comparatively easy and so will you able to make some good profits.
When is it not a good idea to choose niche products
You do a lot of research and found that there is a great demand for smart devices for pet
animals. This may be really a great idea, you know because nobody else selling it. You‘d
jump out of your bed, create a website, contact the relevant dropship vendors, and load your
website with smart devices for pets. All good, but when it comes to selling, you do not know
where to look for buyers. Finding such buyers may be difficult or costly to try out. Though
you may have found a great product, if you cannot find buyers, all your energy and time
would be wasted.
Selling Mass Products
As in the case with niche products, selling mass products also has its own advantages and
disadvantages. The main advantage is that you will have a much bigger market and do not
have to spend a lot of time on finding the market. The big disadvantage is that there may be
already a lot of competitors who are selling at better prices than you can afford to.
It requires good effort from you to zero the products you‘d like to sell. You have to focus on
various other aspects apart from the profit scope of the products. Some of the factors to
consider are the trend of the products, demography you can target, competition level,
addressable market share, product life, and more.
There are a lot of product research tools available which you can find by searching on
Google. Those tools will help you to speed up the process of finding products easier to an
extent.
As a word of advice, do not depend totally on the tools. Focus on all the aspects of finding
products, mentioned earlier, and leverage the power of tools to automate whatever work is
monotonous.
After choosing the right products to sell, work out on a strategy whether you want to provide
more choices to your customers and let them choose the products they wish or to provide a
well researched lesser option thus making the work easier for your customers? Maybe your
customers may have the urge to see more products before purchasing your products or maybe
they are confused with a lot of options that they quit without buying anything. So deciding on
how many products you‘d list is also an important factor for the success of your business.
Vendor Research
While product research is important as it‘s the main part of business, vendors are equally or
even more important as they are the ones who are going to ship your orders and manage
returns. You do not have to risk by tying up with wrong vendors who cannot work efficiently
and with integrity. There are some commonly used methods to screen a supplier.
Profile Research
If the dropship vendor is already selling on some marketplace portals like AliExpress, look
out for their performance and reviews. Depending on the marketplace you research, you may
get valuable data like dispatch time, returns ratio, etc., these numbers will give you an idea
about the vendor.
Here is a screenshot of one of the randomly picked sellers on AliExpress.
You can see the details like- since when the seller is selling on AliExpress, their ratings with
time periods i.e., 1-month rating, 3 months rating, 6 months rating, and lifetime rating. You
can dig deeper and go through the reviews they have accumulated over time.
Terms Discussion
If you found a vendor who seems good and deals with the products you have shortlisted, try
contacting them. Discuss their terms on Whitelabel policy, returns policy, profit margin,
shipping costs, dispatch time, return ratio, and stock availability. Though you may not
convince them to sign an agreement unless you provide them good sales volume, discussing
these terms upfront will reduce any future confusion and miscommunication.
You can contact them by messaging on the respective website or by searching their
information in Google and establishing contact with them.
Stock File Formats
Make sure that you are getting all product data in an excel format with all the necessary data.
Most vendors may not have the expertise to provide product data in cataloged formats. The
formats they provide should be consistent as otherwise, it will be messy to read their data
every time you receive new catalog sheets.
Depending on the online outlet you sell, you need to upload all the products in certain
approved excel formats. If you are selling on a website made in WooCommerce, it accepts a
different product format sheets than the sheets accepted in Amazon. There are many product
sheet formats that are different for each platform like Amazon format, Woocommerce format,
Shopify format, Flipkart format, etc., format accepted in one platform may not be accepted in
other platforms.
The bulk format is important because if you are going to sell multiple products, listing those
products one by one will take a lot of man-hours which can be otherwise ignored by using the
bulk format sheets.
Test Orders
Make a test order to check your potential vendor‘s packaging material, dispatch and delivery
time, return mechanism, communication, etc., As your vendor will be sending shipments
directly to your end customers, this experience plays a huge role in customers deciding to buy
from you again.
Vendors to Avoid
If you do not get a vendor who cannot provide any of the following: Whitelabel shipment,
returns management, guaranteed pricing, catalog formats, daily stock-outs, etc., it‘s best to
avoid them.
Selling is just a start. If you are advertising your website and sell good products at reasonable
prices, you will definitely get sales. But that‘s not all. The real success is when the customer
returns to order other products on their own. That happens only with the trust. To build trust,
you will have to ensure that you are providing good returns and refund policies to your
customers. After buying from you, they should not feel lost in case they want to return the
products for some reason.
If your first sales happen as a result of advertisements, you cannot make a lot of profit from
that, practically. You should have a strategy to bring the customers back to your shop and
make them buy regularly from your portal. Recurring sales provide you a consistent income.
Hence, as you are in the dropshipping business and depending on the vendor for returns
management, you should not hesitate to avoid those vendors who are rigid, not
communicating properly, or not accepting your terms. Choose and work only with those
vendors who are flexible and whom you think will be helpful for you to build your successful
e-commerce business.
Quick Pointers to Avoid Vendors
It‘s best you avoid the vendors with the following traits.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Vendors with low ratings.
Vendors who do not take returns.
Vendors who cannot take responsibility for sending defective or wrong products.
Vendors who cannot able to provide you products at a competitive price.
Vendors who are pretty new and do not sound confident in their products.
Competitor Research
You do not want to sell products that a lot of sellers are already selling making it a very
difficult niche. There should always be more demand than supply. Otherwise, it will be
difficult to take new orders.
You have to monitor your competitors‘ business and strategies for two reasons- for your own
business development and to defend your business secrets from your competitors.
When I used to explain the importance of knowing competitors and how to research their
business, fast selling products, etc., I see that most business owners feel discomfort and resist
doing this kind of research. They do not see the merit in this process which maybe because
it‘s not easy and also most people do not want to spend time on something that may not
directly benefit them. Traditional retailers spend more time buying and selling products and
cannot come forward to doing other related tasks. Their mindset is tuned in such a way for
centuries and so whatever process they come across as new will find it difficult to adopt.
Benefits of Competitor Research
It lets you find the fast selling products.
You shall able to find the top-selling sellers in your product niche.
You can able to track the type of promotions they do to push their product sales.
You can track the number of sales they get on a certain timeframe.
You can see the reactions of customers.
You can see the gap in the market that you can fill to increase your product sales.
Monitoring Competitors
I believe that while it‘s absolutely necessary to know what your competitors are doing
differently than you, you should be conscious enough to not get so much involved in
monitoring them which may hurt the productive hours that can be otherwise well spent on
your own business constructively.
In this age where everything moves and changes faster, you, as a business owner, you have
more reasons to monitor what‘s happening around. Things changing fast, people adapt to
different things more quickly than one can imagine. Most funded startup companies are
incentivizing people to buy from them by providing extra discounts and cashback offers that
a normal mom and pop store cannot provide. The value of loyalty seems to be decreasing, as
well.
Fortunately, in the e-commerce dropshipping business, you have a lot of tools to find and
analyze your competitors‘ website, products, search keywords, successful ad campaigns, etc.,
which all can be used for the development of your business. Before starting a dropshipping
platform focusing on Indian products, I have helped hundreds of my American clients start
and run their dropshipping businesses successfully where I learned a lot of tricks and tools
that would keep our business ahead of the competitors.
Some of the tools I used were for finding out the competitor‘s fast-moving products, high
searched keywords, trending products, competitor ranking, ads placements and opportunities,
product profit scope, etc., Keeping yourself updated with all the important data will help your
business in many ways from sourcing the right product, partnering with the reliable suppliers
to delivering products quickly to your customers.
Let’s look into some of those tools and how they work.
Google Alerts
Like most other Google products, this is simple and free too. You can just enter the brand
names of your competitors or their product names and create alerts through their simple
interface.
As we are using Linen Shirt for Men in our examples, let me use the same example here and
going to set an alarm for Louis Philippe‘s Linen Shirts.
Google Alerts
After entering the keywords in Google Alerts, you shall set the frequency and time when
you‘d like to receive the alerts. You can set a time in a way that does not affect your business
i.e., time while traveling or early morning time.
Setting this Google Alerts will send you mail to your inbox directly whenever Google
indexes the keywords you have created the alerts for. Just ensure that you enter your
competitors‘ brand names with different spellings to be assured that you get alerts whenever
they add a new site page, got featured in newspapers, etc.,
Apart from Google Alerts, some of the alternative tools are BuzzSumo and BrandMention,
but those are paid ones which you shall use if your budget allows.
Google Keywords Planner
Google Keywords Planner is another powerful tool that will help you find the number of
searches your products are getting on different geographies and also the number of searches
your competitive brands are getting.
Below is the screenshot obtained by entering the keywords Louis Philippe Linen Shirts, Louis
Philippe, and Linen Shirts.
Google Keywords Planner
You can search for different keywords on Google Keywords Planner by following the below
method:
1. Visit https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/ and create an
account yourself. It will take you to the Google Adwords tool.
2. Search for the Keywords Planner within the Adwords Tool and navigate to it.
3. Enter the Competitor Brand keywords you would like to search i.e., Louis Philippe,
and select the destination country where you are trying to sell your products.
4. Click on Get Results and you will be finding various results like how many people
search the respective keywords on a monthly basis, Competition Level, and relevant
keywords.
You will not only see the required keyword and its results, but you will also see the other
related keywords. If you refine and repeat this process consistently, you will find a whole lot
of data that in itself will give you an idea about how famous your competitor is, what type of
keywords customers use in your niche and how they find the products, high/low competition
keywords and much more.
There are other tools like SpyFu, QuickSprout, SEMrush which all would help you to find the
keywords that your competitors use, their ranking on Google search engine, and other
relevant information.
When you start using the tools, you may be overwhelmed with all the data you would
explore. There cannot be much you‘d do about the data if you are unable to understand it, just
have a look at those.
Do not spend a lot of time on learning the tools from start to the end, just learn some basic
terminologies and start using the tool right away. You will understand the advanced level as
you go on using the tools.
Look out for the sections that seem interesting and relevant to you, that‘s where you have to
start digging for more data and learn more about the tools and use cases along the way.
Facebook Ads Library
Facebook has grown as a strong social platform that you cannot avoid if you are into
business. There are literally millions of users using the Facebook platform and their vast
array of products including Instagram and Whatsapp.
To put in numbers, 2.2 billion or 220 crore people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or
Messenger every day. That is about one-third of the total world population.
Almost every business has its presence on Facebook. The ones that do not have their presence
are almost losing out the business. It has become a force where not only is the presence
required, but businesses spending huge to show their post to the users of Facebook.
In an effort to increase its transparency, Facebook launched its Facebook Ads Library
platform which is a goldmine for the dropshipping sellers. Using this platform, you can just
select your competitor and find out all their active advertisement posts. This helps you to be
updated with what offers your competitor is providing and as well what are they pitching as
their top products to their customers.
Let me show you how to use this Facebook Ads Library platform.
1. Open Facebook Ads Library tool by visiting https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/.
2. Enter your competitor name in the search box and select their official page.
That‘s it. Now you will able to see all the advertisements they run actively, check the below
screenshot.
Not just the ads, you can see a wealth of valuable information like your competitors' page
creation date, total likes, total followers, Page History, location of page owners, etc.,
With such data, you will able to understand most things about your competitors' business and
their winning products.
Selling Outlet
Once you have done all your preliminary research and arranged a dropship vendor who will
take care of the inventory and delivery, the next step is to start selling the products.
When you decide to start selling the products, you will have to choose the retail outlets where
customers will place orders for your products. Till a few years back, it was a pretty straight
forward decision, you will rent a shop in the locality based on the finance capacity you have,
load inventory, appoint salesman and start the business. The difficulty in such a model was
that the required capital investment for just starting up the business was huge which cannot
be afforded by many.
But the scenario is pretty different now when it comes to online sales. For good reasons
though.
The upfront advance fee and monthly store rentals are off the table and there are various
online outlets to sell the inventory. You can either sell on traditional online marketplaces like
Amazon and eBay, sell on chat tools like Whatsapp, sell on social platforms like
Instagram/Facebook or get your own e-commerce website done and sell it directly through it.
Remember, apart from the advantages and disadvantages that every platform has, your choice
of platform should also depend on the customers you are targeting and the competition within
the platform for your product niche, mainly in e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon.
Here are some of the differences between the selling platforms that I can point out. While
most urban customers buy from the established online marketplaces, it is found that the
majority of the people in rural regions prefer buying through messaging tools like Whatsapp
via their known contacts. This is because of the low trust value in countries like India where
customers are extra cautious before completing the transaction.
Not just the behavior difference between urban and rural areas, there are some other
differences that also needed to be considered. Lifestyle products like Apparels get good sales
from the platforms made specifically for those categories. You cannot display onion and
designerwear clothes in the same way. If you are a vegetable seller, your store would be full
of baskets loaded with the veggies and fill most of your storage space with the inventory, if
you are a bridalwear store owner, you will be having a good spacing between your dresses to
ensure that each product gets the right visibility according to the design through mannequins,
lighting, furniture used, etc., you will find that gold jewelry shops are mostly lit in gold color
while fast-moving apparel stores are mostly lit in bright white. The outlet you choose to sell
your products has such a science behind it that you should consider while listing your
products.
Let us look at the different selling channels available for the e-commerce dropshipping
business.
Selling through your Own E-Commerce
Portal
I recommend selling your products on your own selling portal. If you are selling on your own
portal, you do not have to share the revenue with anybody and you can decide what you want
to sell and what not to. Your store, you are the boss. The downside would be that if you are a
new business, it may take some time for people to start trusting your brand. Your work on
marketing would be more here.
Advantages of Selling via Own Portal
No Commission
The best part of selling in your own portal is that you do not have to pay commission for any
marketplace.
Total Control
You own total control of your business. What to sell, whom to sell, how to promote, what
margin to set is all your decision. From the design of your website to the branded courier
cover you want to use is all your choice.
No Competition
Unlike marketplaces, your customers will only see your products when they visit your
website and you do not have to share space with your competitors.
High Profit
As only your products will be available on your website, you do not have to sell at dirt cheap.
You can have a good profit margin.
No Restriction on Images
The product images can be as per your requirement as there are no restrictions like
marketplaces where they have set out guidelines for the product images which may or may
not be suitable for all the products.
Own Policies
You set your own shipping and returns policy. As you are the owner of your e-commerce
store, nobody else will force you to follow any other rules. Whether you want to accept
returns or not, return eligibility and every other policy can be set by you as you are the boss
and you decide the rules.
Category Architecture
You can set your own category flow. There is no preset category hierarchy that you will have
to follow. Your imagination of how your customer would like to navigate your product
category is all up to you. Want to create one separate category for each of your silk saree?
that is very much possible. Thinking of showing different beads in different category types?
that is very much possible too.
Disadvantages of Selling via Own Portal
Marketing
Marketing has to be done by yourself. If you have a customer base already, convincing them
to buy from your portal should be easy though.
Technical Aspects
You should be able to take care of all your technical elements including website
development, hosting server, integrations of payment gateways, shipping APIs, etc.,
How to Get Your Own E-Commerce Website
You can get your e-commerce website done in many ways. There is a custom website that
can be done by website development companies, there are SaaS (Software as a Service) based
websites which is provided by SaaS companies like Shopify, and there are fully automatic
websites done by the dedicated dropshipping platform like Baapstore.
While the custom websites provide you an ownership control of your website in your hands,
finding the right website company and getting a job done from them is a herculean task.
The e-commerce application has thousands of features, there are some vital features, some
good to have features, and some namesake features that are not required to be deployed on
your website that in fact may degrade the performance of your website.
If you have technical knowledge on what are the important aspects of an e-commerce
website, how to test if the website is delivered correctly, you may get the website done. Your
only problem would be in finding the right website company. A company is made up of its
team. Finding a team with the right skills and a good attitude should be the priority.
Amateur Website
I have seen that most people would get their website done from their friends or cousins if
they are somewhere related to website development work. While this may save a few bucks
for them, it has huge downsides. One thing is you are giving the website to a ‗friend‘ and in
such relationships, things move slowly and unaccountable. As you may not be paying your
friend or at least not the market fees, practically your friend will not give high priority to your
work which will delay the web development process.
Most of the time in such cases, website work would just start and move nowhere. If the
website is somehow done in such situations, in maximum cases, it would never be
competitive. So I would suggest you to avoid getting your website work from your friend
unless you both are cofounding or you know that your friend has that skill and attitude to
complete the required work professionally.
The biggest risk in such cases is that if the website developed is not good, you may come to a
conclusion that selling through websites is not a good idea and you may forget to note that it
is actually the team you chose that is to be blamed and not the concept of selling through the
website itself.
When you are starting anything new and business in particular, you should be aware of what
is happening in and around, because, it is quite easy to get demotivated. If something is not
working right, rather than coming to a negative conclusion, it‘s better you put effort into
analyzing what went wrong and learning to fix it.
Professional Website
Unless you are a developer yourself or you have a technical cofounder or you know a reliable
person who can get the work done for you, this method of getting your website done from the
professional development company is the second-best option, next to getting a fully
automatic website done by dedicated dropshipping platforms.
You will have to spend the majority of your time finding the right team itself. It is even good
to do some due diligence before providing the contract to those companies. Try to find out
the previous websites they have created, try to learn the number of programmers they have
and if possible, speak to the developer who is in charge of getting your website done. As
there are companies that are founded with passion, there are some companies that have been
founded only because the owner could not find a job elsewhere. While there is no mistake in
that, you have to know if the team has the right technical capability in delivering the
performing website.
It‘s always good to know the team you work with upfront. Why do I say that finding the right
team is a herculean task is that most good developers get international clients easily who pay
them US dollars and it‘s not possible to get them to work for you as your offer may not match
their fees. That leaves you with the option of finding a good team from the left-outs only.
If you still found out a great team, then I would say, go ahead and get the website developed
by them and keep their contact for life. You are already seeing that technology is playing a
significant role everywhere and you can expect it to take over the world like never seen
before. Hence keeping in touch with the good technical team may be helpful in developing
more features on your website as and when required.
Things to Remember in Getting Website Done by Third-Party Development Companies
Requirement Discussion
In the website development industry, chances are very high that the client and company will
have a conflict midway which will disrupt the website development work at all. This is the
reason many payment gateway companies have classified the website development industry
as a high-risk business model. In order to avoid any such conflicts, you need to discuss all
your requirements, the payment, and delivery terms upfront. This will take more time than
just asking the company to start the work right away, but if you do this work right, getting the
website work done on later stages will be much easier.
Create milestones
Unlike physical products, you cannot touch and feel the website if the work completed is
satisfactory. It‘s better to create milestones for releasing the payments phase by phase based
on the development stage. If you do not have a milestone created with the percentage of work
to be completed in a certain timeframe, most development companies would just delay and
you may lose interest midway.
Feature Requirement
An e-commerce website may have thousands of features. You do not want to have all those
features and you should focus only on those features that are important for your customers.
For example, a marketplace like eBay has a multi-vendor feature that allows third-party
sellers to sell via their platform. As a single seller, you do not want to have this feature.
Getting only the required features will benefit in cost-saving, fast loading of the website, and
keeping it simple which will increase product visibility resulting in increased sales. Always
go for most required features only then making your site look junk.
Testing
If you know anybody working in an IT firm, you could talk to them to know the importance
of testing. If you do not test a product thoroughly, specifically the online products like the
website, it may lead to dissatisfied buyer experience.
Once you get a website, try testing out everything to ensure that it is working as required.
Some of the areas needed to be tested are customer registration page, email and mobile
communication alerts, add-to-cart functionality, payment gateway, page design & alignments,
mobile responsiveness(it‘s mandatory nowadays to develop every website with this feature to
ensure that it is looking fine irrespective of the device the end customer is browsing from),
and more. Try to imagine yourself from the shoes of your target customers and check if the
website is functioning as desired.
Support Contract
Websites are known for bugs. It may be working correctly when you get the website
delivered, but it may produce many unknown errors the next day. Hence, getting regular
support is very important. Website development work is not like getting it done once, it needs
continuous monitoring and fixes.
A properly working website may suddenly produce errors for many reasons, like server upgradation, lack of compatibility between the plugins or it could be anything else. You need to
have a team ready to fix whatever issues you come across. If you do not have a team and
could not fix the bugs that you may get, then whatever investment you have done in getting
the website developed is a huge waste. So while creating the contracts before starting the
partnership with the website company, make sure that you discuss the support contract too.
Cataloging
Getting a website that works well is not the end, it‘s just the starting step. Just like how a
physical showroom would look complete only after arranging all the products on racks, a
website should be filled with all the products. If you have very few products, it may be small
work. But if you have thousands of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) to upload, then you must
have a proper mechanism to upload all the products in bulk. This process also depends on the
agreement you made with the website company. Decide who will take care of product
uploading, if you are not computer savvy or do not have a team to do all these cataloging
work, then make sure your website company will take care of this part as well. The
recommended option is to get the right bulk export-import plugin developed from your
website development company.
Getting a SaaS-Based Website
SaaS, Software as a Service, is a model where you will get your e-commerce website on a
monthly rental basis. You will select a SaaS platform you want to get your website built on,
then choose a theme and start paying the monthly fees. As the SaaS platform is built for all
the clients who use the platform, you can expect it to be reasonably robust in site
performance and loading time.
The biggest advantage of the SaaS platform is that you do not have to deal with any
developers directly. You will subscribe to a platform and get the store setup done on your
own. As a business owner, if you don't want to focus on technicalities and just want to start
getting sales right away, this is a good option to start with.
It‘s like you sign up with a SaaS platform, browse their themes, and set up your store. You
then add products and make some basic configurations like bank setting, currency setting,
etc., With all the readily available libraries in SaaS platforms, going live is comparatively
quicker too.
Downsides of SaaS Platforms
You Do Not Own A Store
You have to keep paying every month and you will never own a store. If you do not pay
regularly, you will lose access to your own store that you have built and may lose your data
too including customer database and the order details.
When you are running a business, there are certain important things that you should be
confident of, of which, owning a store is the most important one. Unlike offline business,
here, customers cannot find your store in their neighborhood, and hence the only option they
can find your products is on the internet, and so losing the store means losing the business.
Running a business with such a big risk of losing your store even if you do not pay rental fee
for a month or two is not a smart decision at all.
Expensive
Further to that, many features- both small and big ones require you to pay extra for every
month making the otherwise attractive small fee of SaaS stores go really high. Things
become unaffordable when you found that the smallest of things like enabling COD (Cash on
Delivery) option or adding a color option requires you to pay dollars on a monthly basis.
It will not be a problem if you do not have to worry about the investments required, but
otherwise, adding monthly expenses like this will be a disaster for a startup business.
Lack of Flexibility
Once you started getting sales and wants to make any custom changes, you will be
disappointed to realize that you do not have access to most coding part and hence you cannot
implement what you imagine.
If you like your current store and just want to reduce empty white spaces between the
elements, still you will not able to do it, because SaaS platforms don‘t provide such access to
their users.
So it‘s better to use the Saas platform only if you do not really have any good developer
connections or dedicated dropshipping providers who take care of website development as
well.
Getting a Store Made by Dedicated
Dropshipping Platforms (DDP)
This is the best option for anybody to start their own e-commerce website business. I‘m
definitely not biased, but DDP will let sellers focus just on what matters the most for them the product sales and profits.
Dedicated dropshipping platforms are those that take full responsibility from sourcing of the
products to creating and managing the websites and technicalities like hosting, payment, and
shipping integrations to delivering the orders to your customers. Working with such
platforms makes the work so much easier for dropshipping sellers as you can focus just on
marketing & sales and not on any other aspects.
Though there are very few dedicated dropshipping platforms across the world, this is the best
option you should choose if you are planning to sell products through your own e-commerce
website. At Baapstore, a dedicated dropshipping platform, we provide fully automated sites
to our clients.
Advantages
Choosing a DDP based website has many advantages over other options. It will let you just
focus on building your business and increase sales rather than making you to bang your head
on things you do not know about. This is not just for non-technical people, even technically
sound people like web developers will find it good to have a team that will take care of all
their technical challenges.
Sourcing of Inventory
In regular dropshipping business, a seller has to go through multiple platforms and
communicate with many vendors to see if they can support the dropshipping business model.
This process itself will take a lot of time. However, with the DDP platform, all the products
made available are ready for dropshipping purposes. You do not have to scout for the
products, all these work will be taken care of by DDP platforms.
You can go through their product library and choose any products just like that. No other due
diligence would be required, the only work involved would be is for you to just glance at the
product information and catalog to decide if you want to sell or not.
No Technical Issues
Working with a DDP partner, you do not have to worry about the technical challenges of
your dropshipping e-commerce website. All the functionality of the website, application
features, server configurations, the performance of your website, payment, and shipping
integrations will all be developed and managed by the DDP platform themselves.
Auto Cataloging
Loading of the products, category creations, real-time stock sync, etc., all will be taken care
of by the DDP platform. With a seamless platform like Baapstore, managing products and
catalogs becomes even easier as all the stocks will be automatically updated.
Maintenance by DDP
When you get more sales, server addition and performance tuning will also be taken care of
by the DDP platforms like Baapstore. All your focus and energy shall be utilized only for the
development of your business.
Delivery and Returns Management
Unlike other platforms where a seller has to work with each vendor separately and take care
of the responsibility for any issue in delivery or returns, here, it is totally taken care of by the
DDP platform itself for its clients.
All these unique advantages of dropshipping business models are available in DDP based ecommerce store only.
Sell on Marketplaces
While this is the best option to consider if you want to start getting sales right away, there are
a lot of things that make me wonder if selling through the marketplace is really a good option
for everybody, at all. Read further to understand the advantages and downsides of selling
through marketplaces to make the right decision.
Advantages of selling through marketplaces
Ready Customer Database
As leading marketplaces are popular and focused on getting new customers tirelessly, you
can leverage this database of theirs. Today, customers are flocking to marketplaces looking
for choices in everything they buy. Finding those customers on your own may require some
good work and hence this is one of the biggest advantages of selling via marketplaces. If you
have the right products at the right costs that customers search for, this in itself will start
getting you good opening sales.
Marketing
Marketing usually requires detailed planning, time, and money in some cases. As
marketplaces will take care of the marketing of their portals, you can focus only on your
product and sales. The reach of marketplaces goes even to those remote places which would
be tough for any other businesses to reach as the structure and model of marketplaces is built
in such a way where it makes sense for them to reach each and every household across the
country.
Warehouse Facility
As marketplaces are evolved, their warehouses have become advanced too. Many
marketplaces like Amazon have their own fulfillment centers which will help you automate
the order processing to an extent. Unlike earlier times, warehouses today are so much
advanced in technology, in the storage of the inventory, temperature sensitivity, to robots that
pick up the items quickly which will fasten the process of delivering orders to the end
customers. By selling on marketplaces, you can make use of such fulfillment centers without
paying any upfront costs.
Tools
Another advantage of using the marketplace to sell your products is the tools they provide.
There are tools to discover the trending products, find a gap where there is good demand for
the products but fewer suppliers, research the competitors‘ fast selling products & price
ranges, and more. With such tools, understanding customers and providing respective
products has become much easier than ever. With all the data that marketplaces collect these
days, you will as well be able to use those data to channelize your sourcing technique
accordingly which will get you more orders eventually.
Disadvantages of selling through marketplaces
Lack of Control
The biggest problem in marketplaces is the lack of control a seller has. Marketplaces decide
what products to be shown at the top of the page and what should be the price a seller can
potentially sell at.
Competition from Marketplace
The recent problems that are starting to surface in marketplaces are a huge disappointment or
you can say betrayal for the sellers. As the power shift happens where people start trusting
the portal they buy from more than the seller themselves, marketplaces start taking advantage
of it and start producing a lot of their own private-label goods.
Think of it, if you buy frequently online, a marketplace knows a lot more about you than
yourself. They know your budget, your preferences, your buying habits, and more. With all
these data, whatever products marketplaces launched were all runaway hits. The seller who is
selling products in the same niche as the marketplace itself would find it difficult to compete
and sustain.
Marketplace Fee and Reconciliation
Amazon charges commissions up to the upwards of 20% which is really a huge fee that
sellers have to bear. This kind of margins does not make any justice to the sellers who put so
many efforts from sourcing the products to keeping the customers of marketplace satisfied.
Probably, only the direct manufacturers who may able to produce goods at a low cost may
sustain.
Risk of Account Closure
A quick research on Google will show that many seller accounts in marketplaces that had a
good standing and daily high volume sales were closed abruptly with no valid reasons. It
could be that a seller violated any of the policies of a marketplace. The problem is that
marketplaces do not give a valid reason in many such account closures which makes more
and more sellers doubt the intention of marketplaces closing top sellers‘ accounts in their
platforms.
Selling via Social Platforms
Social tools like Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook are the new avenues for retailers to sell their
products. As social media apps have the most engaging users, selling them their favorite
products at a reasonable price is working well.
Advantages of Selling via Social Platforms
Nil or Less Commission
As social media platforms are not e-commerce platforms and making most of their monies
through advertisement placements, they do not depend on the commission from the sales
happen via their platforms yet. This is a great advantage for e-commerce sellers since they do
not have to pay a huge commission to these platforms.
I believe though social platforms may charge a fee in the near future, it will be nowhere near
to what the current e-commerce platforms charge. This is also because the most established ecommerce marketplace takes a lot more responsibility on every item sold through them
comparing to the social media sites which just acts as a platform to connect sellers and
buyers.
Huge Audience
As social media apps boast billions of users, it is a no brainer to use those platforms for
getting new sales. As sellers can target millions of users and do not have to share a huge
commission with the social platforms, it‘s a perfect place for sellers to sell to otherwise
inaccessible customers.
Cheap & Effective Marketing Method
With the costs to advertise in the paper and electronic mediums increasing, it is much cheaper
to target potential customers in social media apps. As social media apps have some robust
tools to track the number of customers reached, spending on customer wise, set daily and
monthly budget, target customers based on various factors like age, interests, regions, etc., it
is a good idea to market and sell in the same platform as entire customer journey will happen
without having to transfer the user between different portals.
Viral Power
As you would have seen that, users of social media platforms are very expressive and do not
shy away from complaining or appreciating their experience. If your product and services are
really worthy, you would get an immediate response which would be very loud and visible
that will increase the viral power of your posts which would turn into sales.
Disadvantages of Selling via Social Platforms
Disorganized
Unlike e-commerce platforms, listing on social media platforms is not organized. As it‘s still
evolving, social media platforms have the responsibility to show products in organized ways
and as well to keep it friendly as their regular user interface to ensure the engagement levels
are not dropped.
Scam Fear
As sellers do not have to submit their tax or business registration certifications and do not
have to get their products validated with the respective brand companies, it has created a
loophole for many scammers to deceive users in such platforms to make quick money. Such a
loophole has created fear in the mind of users to buy from social media platforms which do
not have any guarantee that the product will be delivered at all or no policy like Amazon‘s Ato-Z guarantee in case anything goes wrong.
Negative Outlook
As most businesses are realizing, people are more vocal about their bad experiences than
good experiences. Not just that, you can see that even those who do not have any experience
with the store at all still bash them by going through the bad reviews left by other users
without even verifying if those reviews made are real or fake ones. This attitude has made
sure that negative experiences spread much faster than the positive ones and also has led to
more hatred speeches and creates a negative outlook for almost any business you think of.
Such a scenario has put many businesses under pressure and they had to employ a team
dedicatedly for managing their social media presence which increases the cost of running the
business at all.
Whether you like it or not, social media has become a popular thing that is favorite for many
of your potential customers and hence this cannot be avoided. You will have to find a way to
push your products in social media apps and still keeping customers happy.
Customer Relationship
Maintaining a good customer relationship is of utmost importance for any business. A real
business succeeds only when you keep getting your customers back to buy from you, time
and again. If your customer is happy, the word of mouth advertisement will get you huge
benefits in your business. Amazon has grown to such an empire that has proven how
important customer service is and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, never once miss the
chance to acknowledge the same. Such a customer-obsessed company is Amazon that you
will find a lot of surprisingly happy stories from their customers which have built their trust
over the years which is all being converted into sales.
Keeping happy customers improvise the trust of your business which results in increased
sales. When a giant like Amazon keeps customers as a core of their business, there is no
reason any other business should think otherwise.
Growing up in my teen, I have seen customers flock my dad‘s all-products store where they
would keep coming back mainly for the personal touch he had with every one of them. The
fact that he was quick in adapting to the trend changes, providing every item possible noting
down customer requirements, and worked tirelessly are different stories. The main thing I
would like to point here is the relationship between them. It was not like some random
customer steps in, pays, and gets the required item. It definitely was not that robotic at all. It
was more like a friendly atmosphere, you would find a lot of smiling faces and pleasant
conversations between them. That is how most of the successful shops in India were built, on
a personal touch. Not just in the B2B business model, even in B2C stores, you would find a
lot of customers attending the shopkeeper‘s personal functions and vice versa.
Though you see that the world is getting more organized and accountable businesses
everywhere, there are still some x-factors that are not achieved by the big corporate stores, of
which, one important thing is the personal touch.
The reason why most organized supermarkets are finding it difficult to compete with the
small grocery shops is the relationship built already. Local grocery store owners know the
names of their customers and preferences. Customers can just visit their nearby grocery store
anytime and buy stuff without worrying if they have money or not. Whether we have a bank
account or not, but almost every one of us in India has an account in local grocery stores and
tea shops, isn‘t. Not just that, if your grocer does not have the stuff you asked for, he‘ll note it
down right away and make sure that it is available the next time you visit his shop or he‘d
even give you a call once he stocked up the item.
―The deeper the bond between customer and service or product provider, the harder it is to
break, and, over time, the more satisfying the relationship becomes for both parties.‖ — Ed
Fuller, American Educator and Author.
Today most shops have lost that charm. You can see such stores very few and far. Though
stores across are implementing a lot of loyalty programs, the personal touch is gone.
Technology to the Rescue
Understanding the importance of adding a personal touch in business, so many app
development companies are trying their best to bring it in today‘s businesses and as a result,
there are a lot of options available today. Whether any of it works as equal as the personal
touch is a different question, but as a business owner, one should not miss testing and using
the apt tools in their businesses.
Just like many other things, e-commerce is solving challenges that physical stores are finding
it difficult anymore due to globalization and changing customer habits. The personal touch in
e-commerce dropshipping business can be provided effectively with use of all the big data,
artificial intelligence, and bots.
If you implement the systems right, your app will work as your customers' personal assistants
without you having to pay any salary for such app-based bots.
Some of the Use Cases of Such Apps
Auto Wishes
If you implement the data collection and apps correctly, your store will automatically send a
wish mails to your customers for their birthdays or any special events.
Purchase Reminder
Imagine that your customer is adding a blue color t-shirt to his cart, but do not complete the
purchase for some reason. Your app will send out a mailer to your customer reminding them
to complete the purchase.
Auto Discounts for Incomplete Transactions
Not bought still? it will automatically provide a little extra discount to lure your customers
into completing the transaction.
Auto Suggestion of Related Items
Oh, still not bought, maybe your customer is not looking for that item but chances are that
she was maybe interested in something else related to that item. What could it be? color,
style, size? your app will decide that using it‘s artificial intelligence by going through the
customer‘s browse history, previous purchases, upcoming functions, bio and provide relevant
product options to buy from.
Bot as a Personal Assistant
Not just that, your app can be your customer‘s personal support executive too. Have you
observed while chatting with your Amazon customer support where the app immediately asks
you to select the orders you have a query on, select the reasons in the next screen, and then
providing the automated solution right there? that solves most of your customer queries
without having to deploy a work resource.
Honoring the Loyal Customers
A well-designed e-commerce store can trigger extra discounts or custom offers for the
customers who are more loyal to your store with repeated purchases for the long term.
Providing such custom discounts or offers will keep the customers engaged to the platform
resulting in more sales. While it‘s not fully possible in regular brick and mortar store to track
all of the customer‘s purchase and behavior, the online store uses a vast of data and providing
this kind of exclusive offers increases the pride among end customers which will enable them
to share the store in their social media outlets too.
Technology as such is great for dropship business owners. As you already have dropship
vendors like us who will take care of your inventory, product deliveries, and returns, your
other work like marketing and support can be handled automatically by such bots which will
leave you with more time on building marketing strategy thus helping you to increase sales
consistently.
The best part is that you do not have to build everything on your own, there are a lot of lowcost apps which can be integrated into your e-commerce website that will solve the personal
touch problem to an extent and some of these solutions can even excite your customers to
keep coming back to purchase from you.
Collecting Payments
According to Wikipedia, the typical shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers
varies between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91%. It is claimed that the bestoptimized checkout process has an abandonment rate of 20%.
Shopping Cart Abandonment is when a potential customer shortlisted and added the required
products to his cart, but dropped out at the end screen while making a payment.
Lack of payment options has been cited as one of the top reasons for the high abandoned cart
ratio. Assume how much revenue can be made from the lost purchase should you have all the
required setups implemented properly. While there are many other reasons for a cart dropout,
let‘s discuss the payment option in this space as relevant to the topic.
E-Commerce sites get payments for the sold products in two methods largely i.e., online
payment and cod (cash on delivery).
Payment Options
As e-commerce dropshipping is all about getting more sales, remember- more sales equal
more profits, you need to ensure that you do not have to miss a single sale because of the
reasons you could have controlled.
Offering multiple payment options is one such important factor when it comes to encouraging
customers to pay on your website. There are vast payment options like debit card, credit card,
wallet payment option, UPI, bank transfer, and cash on delivery.
It‘s better to offer all these payment options as you do not know which payment option would
your customer use to make the payment.
Payment Gateway
It‘s very difficult or let‘s say, impossible for startups to provide all the payment options on
their own. Just think of the mess you‘d be in when you try to connect with the bank people to
collect payment on your website using their gateway. Banks would first require you to get
permission from their senior authorities through applications and then needed to work on
your website by collaborating with your developer to get the payment gateway on your
website. This may take months depending on the banks you work with. Assume that you
want to do it with each and every bank if you wanted to have a separate gateway for each
bank, you will literally be tearing yourself apart for such a decision.
The other option, though maybe a little costly, would be to work with the third party payment
gateways. With payment gateway companies, you do not need to have an account in each
bank you want to integrate on your website.
Payment gateways would already be connected with all the banks for debit card payments,
credit card, UPI, Neft transfer, wallet, and any other options available. Hence integrating the
right payment gateway will let you collect payments from almost all the available methods
making the work of collecting payments from different sources easy for you thus ensuring
that customers are not dropped because of this reason.
Two Major Types of Payment Gateways
Off-Site Payment Collection
This is once the customer reaches the checkout page and click on the confirm or proceed
button, the website will be redirected to the respective payment gateway page in which
customers will make a payment for the respective order.
This option suit startups the most as one do not have to do all the required setups and get the
work done in a few minutes. This would be the fastest way to get payment options integrated
and collect payments quickly.
The biggest advantage of using this off-site payment gateway option is that you do not have
to worry about security in collecting payments from your end customers. Payment gateway
companies must be already following all the regulations required while collecting payments
and should anything go wrong, they will be in the responsible end. Your customers will also
see all the security certificates in the respective payment gateway page which assures them
that they are paying in the trustable site only.
The downside would be that redirecting from your site to the payment gateway site will not
look branded as customers can see that they are actually being redirected to another site for
making a payment. If customers leave midway for attending a call or something, they may
have forgotten your transaction altogether when they come back and this could increase the
abandoned cart ratio.
On-Site Payment Collection
This kind of solution is usually integrated by large companies since this requires much more
work comparatively.
Apart from the efforts required, the e-commerce companies that collect payments on-site has
to bear more responsibility as well. Should anything go wrong, it should be handled by ecommerce companies themselves which is an increased burden.
The biggest advantage in connecting off-site payment options and collecting the payment
within the site itself, without letting the user redirected to a third-party portal, may increase
the conversion rate of successful purchases. Though it may be small, every single purchase
count.
While this will be the preferred option for anybody, the cost and time required to get this
work done demotivates many and make them integrate the off-site payment option only.
Payment Gateway Choices
Fortunately, there are a good number of options available for a dropshipping commerce
owner to choose the right payment gateways based on their requirement.
You can decide on which payment gateway to be integrated into your website based on
various factors like account activation duration, settlement period, percentage of commission
taken by payment gateway companies in each sale, their terms and conditions, how do they
process refunds, their features like auto-reminder for abandoned carts, chargeback ratio,
payment failure ratio, customer support and more.
Look into all the above-mentioned factors and as well give preference to the ones that have
connections with the maximum banks and payment options. Your goal is to maximize
purchase conversions on your website and choosing the right payment gateway would help
you to do that.
Some of the top payment gateway companies are RazorPay, Amazon Pay, PayU, Instamojo,
Paypal, Stripe, etc.,
Return & Refund Handling
As explained earlier, managing returns is a very important factor in the dropshipping ecommerce business. If you do not manage it properly, you will end up losing more money
than you make.
The problem with every return transaction is that you will pay for two way shipping costs on
a transaction that you do not make any money on. The return shipping costs would usually be
higher and takes more time to reach the source address.
Common reasons for product returns
Wrong Size
Product Not as Described
Defective Product
The Customer Changed Mind
Style Not as Expected
Product No Longer Needed
Ordered by Mistake
Shipped Wrong Product
The Customer Found a Better Product Elsewhere and
Late Order Delivery
Despite that the product returns have the potential to kill the profit at all, many sellers would
overlook this and do not give the required importance which will hurt their business badly.
Measures to Reduce The Return Ratio
High-Quality Photos
Photos will be the first and important communicating point that will convey your products to
your buyers. Most buyers do not even read descriptions while ordering the products. Even in
such cases if the buyer returns the product, the loss is for sellers only. Hence make sure that
you follow proper guidelines when you are uploading the product photos.
Some of the pointers while uploading your product photos
Make sure your photo contains only the products that you will ship, do not add any other
products in the photo. For example, if you are selling a t-shirt, ensure your photo contains
only the t-shirt photo and it does not contain any extra items like jackets or watches.
The photos should be of high quality and zoomable. If you are selling cloth-based products,
ensure that your buyer can zoom in and check the texture as well. You should not let your
buyer order half-hearted, they should clearly be able to see the exact product photos.
Do not overly edit the product. Chances are that a seller would edit the products overly in
photoshop in order to increase his sales. Doing this will only disappoint your buyers and
increase the product return ratio if it does not match the product in hand.
If you are uploading a model photo, make sure that you are using the right sized model to
ensure that your product is looking right. If you use a model that‘s smaller than the product
she wears, the product would look like a loose fit which may not be the right information that
you want to convey to your buyers.
Optimized Product Descriptions
Describe everything you know about your product. Include the sizes, colors, height, weight,
material, and everything else that would keep your buyer make an informed decision whether
to buy or ignore your product. If you are using a model for the product photo, give
information about the height, weight, and other related dimensions of the model which will
give a comparative understanding of the product to your potential customers. If you are
selling a product that requires your customers to know how to use, make sure to include the
guide book on the product page itself.
Provide All Policies Upfront
Whether the product is eligible for returns and refunds or not, make sure you disclose all the
terms upfront. Customers are very conscious about the return policies and if you do not
include it in your product page, more customers will not convert though they may be
interested in buying the product.
FAQs & Reviews
Ensure that your product page has both FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and Reviews
placed in prominent positions.
A seller may not know if he has covered all the doubts in the product description section that
a buyer may have. The FAQs section will equip the buyer to ask the right questions before
placing an order. It‘s better to wait for the answer and avoid the product if it is not suitable
rather than ordering the product and returning it.
Having the customer-generated reviews and rating section in the dropshipping e-commerce
website plays a significant role in helping the potential buyer understanding how the product
is performing or what to expect in it. If your product has high ratings left by your previous
buyers, it will increase the sales of your products resulting in more profit. If it has a poor
rating, it will help both your buyer to avoid buying it resulting in a lesser return ratio and
provide you with information that helps you either to avoid manufacturing or trading the
respective product or even better, to improvise the factors that buyers criticize most.
Quality Check Before Dispatching
If you create a process where a person packs the product should check for the damages or any
other issues while packing the products, you will able to avoid unnecessary returns that may
happen due to internal issues. If shipped, such defective products will anyway be returned to
you, hence this process will ensure that your reputation is not spoilt.
Pack it Good
If you are shipping a garment, check whether if it has wrinkles or if you ship delicate items
like glassware, add more waste papers or thermocol sheets inside the package to reduce the
chance of damages during the transit stage. Both the outer package and inner package should
be done neatly in a way that will keep your customer satisfied. Unless you are selling lowcost products or known for selling products at low prices, this is a costly risk if you do not
pack well. You will be amazed to know that companies like Amazon and Zomato capture
reviews and ratings for the packages too which makes this point more important.
Remove High Return Products
Do you find any product or category that is getting more returns than other categories? it‘s
better you analyze and fix the issue or to avoid that certain product or the category.
Refund Policy
Writing a clear refund policy will increase your customers‘ trust to buy from you and to take
a buying step with little more confidence. You should write a policy that should clearly
mention different situations and how the refunds will be processed in every situation. Make
sure that you write policies in a way that genuinely provides refunds to genuine cases and
protect yourself from situations where some customers will take advantage of it. E-commerce
stores are easy scapegoats for the shady people who intentionally make use of the policies
made for genuine customers to make some quick bucks by involving in some fraudulent
activities. Though big players suffer too because of such customers, it is the smaller and new
e-commerce store that loses a lot on such occasions.
Marketing
Marketing is the most important part of any business that happens before sales. More
marketing gets you more sales. Sellers should not shy away from marketing their products.
As the world is getting more competitive and more sellers, one should not stop working on
their marketing strategies and execution plans. Unless you are into a high demand low supply
business where customers hunt down for your products, you should never leave marketing
ever.
Marketing is not costly or difficult at all, it just requires a good strategy and implementation.
Marketing can be classified into two broad categories as offline and online marketing. We
will look into both and provide more insights into online or digital marketing as that is easier,
cost-effective, trackable, and the most relevant option today.
Offline Marketing
Let us start looking into some of the available offline marketing options
first.
Transport Marketing
Sign & Banner Ads
TV & Radio Ads
Paper Ads
Flyers & Handouts
Transport Marketing
Advertisement banners that are running through transportation vehicles like buses, autos,
cars, trains, and airplanes are called transport marketing.
Transportation marketing is useful when you want to target people in different regions as
transportation marketing will be cost-effective and moves to different places making your ad
boards visible on different regions at the same cost.
The type of transportation marketing includes pasting of ad boards behind the auto, inside the
bus behind the driver seat, sides of the car and it comes in different sizes and shapes.
You need to work out on whom you want to target, what size of boards you want to use, the
cost of each ad placements on different types of vehicles, and your budget. You should use
these metrics to strategize and plan your advertisements accordingly.
Sign & Banner Ads
This type of promotion is more useful if you are targeting the audience in specific locations.
The biggest advantage of such hoarding advertisements would be that your advertisements
will be available for many days depending on your contract period and you can place it in a
bigger size as well as communicating your advertisements clearly.
This kind of ad would be more useful for retail stores and new brand launches. If you would
want to increase your store exposure or provide discounts to your customers, you would be
most probably targeting the people residing near your shop which will provide you the
maximum benefits as most small and medium shops get sales from their nearby customers
only.
Television & Radio Advertisements
This will be more beneficial for a bigger business when you want to target a broader
customer base including those set of customers who cannot be reached through any other
mediums.
Additionally, studies have shown that 60 percent of consumers are likely to make a purchase
after viewing an advertisement on TV compared to only slightly over 40 percent for viewing
ads online or over social media.
As setting up a TV Channel costs more for satellite licenses and producing programs, the
competition between channels is way less which gives lesser options for the audience to
choose between channels to watch and which has also made the work easier for you while
choosing the channel to advertise your business.
The success rate in TV Adverts is more comparatively but takes a huge budget to deploy it.
Print Advertisements
Paper advertisement is one other effective channel to reach larger and more loyal customers.
Comparing to TV advertisements, newspaper advertisement costs are much more affordable.
The big benefit of advertising through newspapers is that you will get a lot of custom made
packages and suggestions based on your requirements and budget. The newspaper team will
as well guide you on creating adverts that will target your required customer base and
produce a high return over investment.
Within the newspaper, you have various options like classified ads, banner ads, or press
releases. The press release will not come under the advertisement directly as you cannot pay
and get it published. Press release requires something content worthy for the newspapers to
consider it. But if you know how to make use of it, you can create such a story and publish it.
Doing it right will increase your brand value and reach the right customers.
Classified advertisements will be good for service-based businesses, for business
opportunities, and for staff requirements of blue-collar jobs. The banner advertisements can
be used for product promotions or discounts offering that will produce immediate value for
the advertisements.
Flyers & Handouts
This type of advertisement is more used by institutes, colleges, or local businesses of smaller
size. Pamphlet advertisement works best if you could give exclusive offers for the pamphlet
readers as some stores provide extra discounts if customers take the pamphlets to the stores.
The advantage of a pamphlet advertisement is that you shall deliver it to the customers' house
directly through your executive or circulate through the newspaper agencies. You can also
provide it directly to people in crowded places through your executives or through third-party
agents.
The disadvantage would be that pamphlets are expensive since it has a very short life. You do
not know how many pamphlets are properly reached to the customers or how many people
would immediately throw or crush the pamphlets right away without even noticing it which
may be a loss for you.
Online Marketing
Online marketing is a type of marketing done on the internet through websites and mobile
applications. Online Marketing includes a vast range of marketing options as it has more
different channels and tracking methods that let people confidently prefer digital marketing
over offline marketing which cannot provide sufficient data to understand if the
advertisement is working or not.
The benefits of online marketing far exceed offline marketing if your audience can be
targeted in online marketing itself.
Top Benefits of Online Marketing
Trackable
Today almost all your online advertisements can be tracked for the performance. You can
track the number of people your advertisement is reached to, the number of people clicked on
your ads, the number of leads you generated, the number of conversions that happened, to the
value of the conversion you received through the online advertisements.
Budget-Friendly
Unlike offline marketing options, you can set a very flexible budget in online marketing. To
put it simply, you‘d know that Facebook and Google are much bigger than the local
newspapers combined, yet, you can start with just as low as 100rs for advertising on
Facebook and Google. As you would be able to see results, you shall increase your budget
accordingly.
Reaching Right Target
If you are advertising your product on televisions, you would not able to select the age or
gender of your audience which will even show your advertisements to the audience you do
not need. When it comes to digital marketing, you can able to select your target on the basis
of geography, gender, age, marital status, personal interests, and more.
Self Manageable
Online marketing platforms have made it so simple for anybody to start creating a campaign
and make it live themselves. Managing, pausing, editing, or stopping the adverts is all made
easy for anybody to use the online services. It equips the online stores to run and test the
campaign themselves without having to depend on any other engineers or third party
advertisement agencies.
Global Marketing
Have you ever imagined advertising your products to the people of other countries without
ever leaving your house or having to talk to any advertisement executives? Advertising in
other countries is as easy as targeting customers in your own country or city. The cost may
differ based on the geography you target, but pretty much everything else would remain the
same. If you are a leather shoe producer working in some part of India and your product is
more suitable for the GCC countries, you can run an advertisement targeting GCC countries
only showing your products.
A/B Experiments
The other beautiful feature of online marketing is the A/B experiment feature. You can bang
your head to know if the advertisement keywords you used and the images are good to
produce results or not. But unless you run an advertisement, nobody can tell you accurately if
your advert will get a good response or not. In such situations, you can run multiple
advertisement creatives and continue running the one that is getting more positive responses.
This would ensure that you run only the successful ads and save you a lot of money by
stopping you from running campaigns that may not produce the expected results.
24/7 Marketing
Are you targeting customers who are working in night shifts only? you got it. Online
marketing tools allow you to run advertisements based on a schedule. You shall set the timer
for advertisements and so the ads will stop running during the time you do not want it to
which saves you a lot of money. Should you require, you shall run adverts 24 hours without
any breaks. If you are running adverts continuously or during the specific time when nobody
else would, you may able to target customers who are not explored by other advertisers thus
getting you to extract some unique benefits.
Automate your Entire Marketing Journey
You can automate almost all your online advertisement tasks. You can configure tools in a
way that content is dynamically created based on the user interest and demography, auto
switch on and off your campaign based on your configuration, pass the leads to various tools
automatically, and more. Once you created the auto advertisements, you can just later login to
look at how your ads are performing and you can decide whether you would want to turn it
off or keep it running.
Omnichannel Targeting
You can target customers either on Facebook, Google search engine, or through video
marketing on Youtube or on Twitter or through mailing or in the blogs they read. Almost all
the websites and apps are connected to some or other advertising platforms and creating and
running advertisements on those platforms would show your ads on various other portals as
well. This way your potential customers would keep viewing your ads and chances of
converting them for sales are higher.
ReTargeting Advertisements
This is one of the most powerful options when it comes to online advertisements. We have
already seen abandoned checkout or dropped out customers and how it would affect your
business. What if there is a mechanism that will automatically send mailers, messages, and
reminders to the people who have shown interest in the products on your website but didn‘t
convert. How would it be if you are showing exactly the same items to your customers,
maybe with a little more discount? Your customer would at some point end up buying the
products if it is really needed. Retargeting advertisements not only can be served on mailers,
but it can also be shown on social media sites, search engines, and the partnering websites
and blogs as well pushing the products in all possible ways.
The best part when it comes to online marketing is not only that you can set your budgets
very low, but can make free advertisements as well on various portals.
Let‘s see both free and paid marketing and find which one would be the most suitable for
your business and budget.
Free Marketing
There are a lot of free marketing options like search engine optimization, social media
optimization, email marketing, classified site posting, posting on Facebook groups,
submitting your business on business directories, affiliate marketing, etc.,
The free marketing could become very powerful if you are using it correctly as your posts
may go viral. If a post goes viral, you may get thousands or lacs of views for no cost.
Unless you have money to pay for a marketing company or spend on paid digital
advertisements, it‘s best you should focus on getting free marketing and the only investment
would be your time and efforts. If you can able to do it right, you can see the increase in your
product sales.
Social Media Optimization
Social Media Optimization aka SMO is the process of leveraging social media networks to
make your content go viral. Optimizing the posts right will get more engagements in the form
of hearts, likes, comments, and visits to your website.
Benefits of Social Media Optimization
Lead Generation
You will able to generate leads from social media platforms to your website. Generation of
potential leads is one of the major reasons why businesses use social media networks and
other marketing tools. With the right funnel setup, you should able to convert the lead into
sales.
Social Media Presence
Most buyers today check the brand‘s page to see how active they are. This is particularly true
if buyers are about to buy from new sellers. People believe that brands‘ social media pages
will have some engagement from their past buyers or some activity that could either increase
or decrease the confidence of buying from a particular brand.
Direct Connect with the Audience
Most people find it easier to communicate to brand in their favorite social media platforms.
It‘s not that buyers do not want to connect with brands directly over the phone or their site.
One thing is that buyers are so accustomed to communicating using the channels they are
used to and another thing is that most e-commerce stores do not have an easy option to
contact their customer care support. Even the most customer-obsessed platform like Amazon
makes it really difficult to contact their human customer support executives.
Have you noticed that whenever you tried to contact customer support through the Amazon
app, they will put a lot of hurdles making you choose from the preset options related to the
problem you may face? only thing is that most times those options won‘t solve your problem
and their intention is to stop you from reaching their support. Why would they do that? it
could be that they wanted to avoid unnecessary customer calls which could have been
resolved only when a customer looks at their account itself, but this may also put the
customers who are genuinely in need of support, irritated. That‘s why so many customers
prefer contacting the brands on social platforms as they can able to connect directly without
any hurdles in between.
Obviously, when your customers are on social media platforms, you do not want to lag
behind your competitors and miss out on the social media optimization process, isn‘t?
Guidelines on Social Media Optimization
Have a Strategy in Place
The first thing to do in the social media optimization process is to create your strategy.
Without a proper strategy, you will be stuck on how to project your brand. You can create
your social media brand either for branding purposes or sales purposes or for both.
Decide on how you are going to act whenever a buyer posts any negative reviews. As social
media platforms are mostly filled with hate speeches, chances are more where a buyer may
leave a negative review despite the mistake on their end. How would you handle such
situations? Are you going to talk fact blaming your buyer with proofs or are you going to
apologize and ask them to raise a ticket in an internal support system?
My advice would be that you should quickly apologize even if there is no mistake on your
end, then refer their issue tickets and inform them that you have checked on your internal
systems and your team is working in a correct way and it could be a small misunderstanding
from the buyer end. You can ask them to contact you through your support system directly
for a faster response. Remember, this method will work well only if you are genuinely
solving your buyer‘s issues.
Not just in a negative scenario, you need such a plan for almost every scenario. Are you
going to talk about the trending topics that may involve religions and politics? or you‘ll better
mind only business and be professional.
Layout your do‘s and dont‘s for social media outlets and follow that religiously. Most times it
may be tempting to go out of your books, but stick to it whatever the scenario is to ensure that
your social media presence is only helping your brand get more sales. Remember, you are
doing all these work only to increase your sales and there should not be any problem with the
objective at all.
Strong Profile
When your customers browse your social media pages and posts, most probably they also
would be interested in knowing about the business owners and anybody related to the
business.
Make sure that you and your team have a complete profile with a positive outlook that creates
a warm feel. If anybody pings you directly, do not hesitate to pingback to them and solve
their problem if any.
Today responding via social media get big brownie points as you can see that from media
channels to government ministers, everyone is doing that.
Hashtags and Keywords
Keywords may be useful for search engine optimization majorly, but using the right
keywords as hashtags may get you more people visiting your social media page and posts.
The hashtag is an important feature of social media platforms. If users want to search
something specifically, they will most probably use the hashtag(#) as otherwise they may get
a lot of results which may be irrelevant to them.
Hashtags Usecases
Let‘s say that you are selling some unique products, like, t-shirts made for big sized people.
Then you should use hashtags like #plussizetshirts or #xxxltshirts. This will bring all those
plus-sized people who are looking for t-shirts using those hashtags to your post.
Do not just stop after making one post, you have to keep making regular posts with the right
hashtags. As social media platforms provide various filter options including the time-based
search filter, buyers would mostly make use of such options if they are genuinely looking to
buy trendy products. Frequently creating new posts will push your posts as the latest ones.
If you are lucky, maybe your post would go viral if the hashtag you use goes viral. When you
are in business, everything is business, you should be always looking out for the
opportunities.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization exists for decades and is one of the best marketing methods that
the world goes after for a long time now. The benefits that a business gets from ranking at the
top in Google is invaluable. You will get a lot of free traffic and sales for literally free of cost.
It‘s that when people search for something in Google, they will be presented with all the
relevant websites and the one that has the best SEO done will get the top position. The topranked website will get the majority of the clicks aka visitors.
Hence, the objective of the Search Engine Optimization process is to get your website
optimized for achieving top-rank in search engines like Google, for the keywords relevant to
your business. As Google is the top most used search engine by far, all the SEO techniques
are mostly made for Google in particular and it only makes sense. You do not want to put all
your efforts into platforms that nobody visits, isn‘t?
People use Google because they want the right results for whatever they search for and
Google mostly satisfies their demand which is why most people keep using Google forever
and they are not interested to try any other platforms. The second-ranked text-based search
engine Bing is not so good based on my experiments. The results I got in Bing were not so
relevant or not the best results available and hence the Google holding the top position.
In other words, SEO is all about understanding and gaming Google‘s algorithms using the
reverse engineering process. Google, on the other hand, keep changing or bettering their
algorithm and so that people do not master it as otherwise people who mastered the concept
and has a bigger team to work on the SEO process will get top positions for every keyword
related to their business. As not every such optimized result would be relevant to what people
search for, people would stop using Google at all if they keep getting irrelevant results. That
is why Google is always bettering their algorithms and SEO is always getting more
challenging. But because of the invaluable benefits that businesses will achieve, one should
never stop doing the SEO work.
How to SEO Optimize Your E-Commerce Portal to Achieve Top Google
Ranking
Search engine optimization techniques are broadly broken down into two types for the
easiness of understanding and implementation, majorly as On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
Before getting into the types of SEO and how to optimize it, let‘s understand the important
jargon to understand the process better.
Important SEO Jargons
SEO Keywords: Keywords are the words and phrases that people type in the search engine
portals when they wanted to find something. Hence it is important that the keywords people
use should be relevant to your website to get Google to show your website for the relevant
keyword searches.
Crawling: This is the process when Google bot goes through all the newly added or modified
pages on the internet looking out for the information for the purpose of indexing in their huge
servers.
Indexing: Google indexes and stores almost every website page they visit in a systematic
format in order for them to fetch and show the relevant page result when required.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page is the page that is loaded with the search results that a
Google user will see after entering the keyword in the Google search page.
Let‘s get into types of SEO and how to optimize those to attain top search engine results.
On-Page SEO Optimization
When you optimize your website pages according to the Google standards for the keywords
you want to rank for, it is what called on-page SEO optimization. There is some systematic
process that will help one to achieve good on-page SEO optimization.
Keywords Research and Optimization
There are two types of keywords mainly i.e., short and long-tail keywords. While short-tail
keywords are what most users will type on Google and that most companies would look to go
for, it will also be more competitive. Getting ranking for short-tail keywords is a very
difficult task and if you could able to achieve it, it may take a long time. The best
recommendation would be is to focus on getting the site ranked for a long-tail keyword.
Short-tail keywords are those that are just one or two words like ‗sarees‘, ‗buy sarees‘, etc.,
and long-tail keywords are those that have more words in a search query like ‗where to find a
best Kanchipuram silk saree online in Mumbai‘.
Though long-tail keywords get much lesser search traffic only, it will be easier to achieve top
ranking pretty easily comparatively. It‘s not that competitors will avoid long-tail keywords at
all, it is because the competition itself will be lesser for long-tail keywords. For example, the
short-tail keyword ‗sarees‘ is relevant to all the websites that sell all types of sarees both
online and offline from all part of the world, whereas the long-tail search keyword ‗where to
find a best Kanchipuram silk saree online in Mumbai‘ is relevant only to those vendors who
are based in ‗Mumbai‘ and sell ‗Kanchipuram saree‘ ‗online‘. Do the math and come to a
conclusion about the number of competitors this long-tail keyword would have eliminated.
If you are focusing on long-tail keywords, it is not that you won‘t get ranking for the shorttail keywords. It is that the more long-tail keywords you are optimizing for may lead to
getting top ranking for the short-tail keywords too. So rather than trying to reaching the top
ranking for short-tail keywords straight away and lose time and money, it is best to target
long-tail keywords initially and gradually build traffic to your website.
Keywords Research
As you are aware of the meaning of keywords and the different types of keywords, you
should now be ready to do the keywords research in order to find out what type of keywords
are buyers looking for in Google search engine to choose the right keywords for SEO
optimization.
Though you may be having a good understanding of your business and products, it‘s always
best to use the systematic method for such tasks in order to find the right keywords and the
accurate search numbers those keywords get. Chances are high that you will find a lot of
keywords that your buyers use to search for, hence you should zero down to about 10
keywords from the lot that should be used for keywords optimization. There is a systematic
process in choosing the keywords itself i.e., find the search volume, search volume for a
certain period, and a competition level.
Though there are many keywords research tools for finding the right keywords, Google
Keywords Planner is the best as we anyway are targeting to rank high on Google only and so
this would be the best option.
Google Keyword Planner
Login to Keyword Planner by following the below steps:
1. Visit https://ads.google.com/.
2. Click on sign in and log in using your Gmail account.
3. Click on the ‗Search‘ button in the top and enter the ‗Keyword Planner‘ text and select the
respective tool from the dropdown list that is being shown.
Let‘s assume that we are going to sell ‗Bhagalpuri Silk Sarees‘ and focus on researching the
relevant keywords and related data to shortlist the best keywords for optimization.
In the ‗Discover New Keywords‘ section, enter the ‗Bhagalpuri Silk Sarees‘, and select the
country where you are selling the product, let‘s assume India for this example.
You can see that many relevant keywords are pulled for the searched term. Shortlist the
keywords that have a high number of ‗Avg. Monthly Searches‘ and also look out for the
graph that you see next to the ‗Avg. Monthly Searches‘ number. If it is looks increasing or
flat, it‘s good to go. If it‘s looking like decreasing, then you shall ignore those keywords or
drill down more to see if they will have an increase in demand.
Tip: As you are shortlisting the keywords for the purpose of SEO optimization, you shall
ignore the ‗Competition‘ numbers given in the Keywords Planner as it is for the purpose of
running ads in Google Adwords and not for the SEO purpose.
Keywords Competition Analysis
Once you have shortlisted the keywords using the number of searches and the graph, check
out the real-time competition by using the competition analysis tools like Spyfu and Moz or
directly inputting the keywords in the Google search engine.
Understanding the competition level before finalizing the keywords for optimization is very
important. You do not have to keep working on something that does not produce you any
results. In fact, if at all possible, the competition analysis together with keywords research
may show you the fortune keywords that have good search numbers yet less competition
which may help you to reach the top of the Google search engine in a shorter period.
Optimization of the Site Content
Once you have shortlisted the keywords, next is to put it to the good use. As Google loves
content more than anything, your website should be having good and more content. The
content should be having the shortlisted keywords in it‘s heading, paragraphs, and footer in
the right density that would inform Google what the site is about and as well not scream
demanding the attention.
You can write content on the website to explain your products and services with keywords
and also create blogs and have forums built on your website that helps you to write lengthy
content and as well get user-generated content which is more respected by Google.
Some of the Pointers you should follow when writing SEO content
Content-Length
If you are writing blogs, make sure it has about 2000 words at least as Google loves lengthy
content than the shorter versions.
Keywords in URL & Headings
Make sure that you include keywords in page URL and as well in headings wherever
required.
Keywords Density Ratio
There is no right percentage for the same, but keep target keywords in between the range of
1–2% of the overall content or blog.
Keyword Variations
Do not just focus on the main keywords as it is, use some variation keywords as well which
will make the article sound more natural yet get related searches in Google.
Avoid Duplicate Content
As much as Google likes new content, it totally hates duplicate content and may even
penalize web pages for doing so. Hence do not copy the content that is already existing. In
case you have the need to create duplicate content, make sure to create a canonical URL for
the new content page.
Branded URLs
Most platforms you use for the dropship e-commerce website creation will generate some
random characters in the URL section, it‘s always better to make a meaningful URL with
keywords rather than leaving it out with some confusing characters. This will also help your
buyers to easily remember the page URL if required in the future.
Optimization of Images
Whatever images you are adding in the site, make sure that those images contain the titles,
tags, and as well as Alt tags. In case your images are not loading in the front end when
consumers‘ internet is slow, he may at least able to see the description of the images that you
would add via Alt tags.
Don’t Overdo the On-Page Optimization
Over optimizing the content with keywords in your website would both make it ugly for your
potential customers and as well may harm your e-commerce business as Google is known to
punish those sites that overdo with the keywords on-page optimization techniques.
With that, on-page optimization is broadly covered. You should always refer to the Google
algorithm changes by following the SEO blog sites like Moz to keep yourself updated with
the news and implement the same in your website.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-Page SEO Optimization attributes to all the activities that are to be done in websites and
apps other than on your website. The main purpose of off-page SEO optimization is to build
some high-quality links back to your site, which is called backlinks.
As informed earlier, Google always wants to rank only the most relevant website to the user
queries in its search platform. In order to find the relevancy of a website, according to
Google, they have about 200 factors that will be used to measure the relevancy of the ecommerce website based on the queries user made and the sites will get ranked accordingly.
These factors include both on-page and off-page factors like the quality of your content,
keywords used, the density of the keywords used, number of backlinks, trust value of the
backlinks, heading tags and URLs, loading speed of your site, number of requests passed
between the server and the site, content structure, etc.,
Of all these efforts made by the search engine to determine the relevant sites based on the
search query, the important thing that Google loves is the backlink, the ones that come from
most trusted or authority sites as per Google.
Backlinks Creation
Backlinks are the core of off-page SEO and it should be done properly in a way that Google
loves. A backlink is a link to your website that is created on other websites that are not
connected to your website.
Why Google Trusts Backlinks
Google uses the real-life strategy to determine the relevancy and trust value of the websites.
For example, if you are looking for a general physician in your neighborhood and when most
people refer one particular doctor, you‘d be mostly visiting that doctor because of the
maximum recommendation received. Recommendations will come mostly if the doctor is
providing good services. If someone enquires about the doctor‘s location, the physical
address of the business will be shared, but when it comes to online, people would share the
links of particular websites as a recommendation, isn‘t it?
Let‘s say you are writing a blog about the types of drones available. You will include links to
the websites where people can buy drones. This online recommendations or hyperlinks are
called as the backlinks. When you get the recommendation for that particular doctor from
your most trusted source, let‘s say, your other doctor friend who has expertise in a field and
has no monetary benefits in referring, you will trust that particular doctor even more.
Hyperlinks created from such trusted sources are called Authority backlinks which have even
more value.
Types of Backlinks
Natural Backlinks
These are the backlinks that are created by others to your website without you are putting in
any kind of effort in doing so. For example, if you are the only one selling denim pants at
wholesale costs, then people would automatically refer your website in their blogs and
directories. Naturally created backlinks have the best values according to Google.
Manually Created Backlinks
SEO is all about trying to game the Google algorithms in ranking your website at top of the
SERP. Hence there is nothing wrong with doing any activities that will bring your website at
top-ranking in SERP without spamming anyone or Google. It‘s good to have natural links,
but that may take some time initially and you do not have to wait for it to happen. As a
business owner, you should do your bits to increase the revenues of your business in
whatever legal and accepted ways possible.
Tip: I recommend creating backlinks, but not via the black hat methods. Blackhat methods
are those shortcut methods that will get your website ranked quickly, but also put down your
website with a penalty from Google when they find it out, which would eventually happen
sooner than you’d imagine.
How to Create Backlinks
You can create backlinks through multiple methods, either by manually adding content or by
buying a link or by becoming a trusted player in your niche that will get you backlinks
naturally from other sources.
Let‘s see some of the methods of creating your backlinks:
Provide Great Service
There is no match when you are selling quality products and actually treating your customers
so well that they would love to talk and write about you. You may get backlinks from
different sources including blogs, newspaper sites, forums, and other authoritative sites as
well. This is the best type you should focus on if you are focused on staying in business for
long.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is about writing content on other websites thereby creating something worthy
for the other site users to read and getting one or two backlinks to your website as a goodwill
gesture. This is beneficial for both the parties involved, such as the site where you write the
content because they are providing some worthy information to their site users and benefit to
you because you have earned a backlink aka recommendation, in the eyes of Google.
You can write guest blogs on various sites of different types. Find a niche that is relevant to
your business but not a direct competitor and offer to write on their website for a backlink.
For example, if you are selling pants, find a website that sells fashion tops and offer them to
write blogs that help their users to understand tops and bottoms styles. You can also write
guest blogs on article sites, news sites, and other related sites.
Ensure that your guest blogs are of good quality that will never let the third party site owners
remove it from their website.
Create Shareable Content with Insights
Create valuable content on your website that has well-researched data and the insights which
will be important to the people in your niche. This will let people refer to your content when
they write anything related to your content and may get you natural backlinks.
Once you have written such content, it‘s best you reach out to the experts in your industry
and ask them to review your content. This will create a warm feel and if they like it, they will
share it with their followers too which will have a multitude effect and you‘ll keep getting
more and more backlinks. The simple secret is to put efforts and create content that makes
people proud to share it in their circle.
Answer the Questions
Users today are proactive and ask a lot of questions before making a decision to purchase a
product or hire a service. You can find the questions people asked in public portals like
Yahoo Answers or Quora that are relevant to your business niche and answer them genuinely
with a backlink to your business.
Platforms like Quora are very helpful for the business owners to get the target customers to
their websites without spending anything. The only required thing is that your answer should
satisfy the question and it should be interesting enough for people to upvote your answers.
More upvotes drive more visits to your website.
Below is the screenshot of a business that uses Quora to get customers to their website where
they sell their leather shoes.
It will create both SEO value and as well directly bring the leads to your website which may
convert to a sale since the captured lead may be an interested party as we got the lead driven
from a page where they were trying to get or read answers available for their questions that is
related to your niche.
Link Building through Press Release
Press Release is an important type of advertising, not just for the link building, but to position
your brand image itself.
The press release is not a straight forward advertisement method where you‘ll pay and get
your product advertised. It is more challenging and requires a proper strategy and
implementation to get it done right. Publications will write
According to Wikipedia, a press release is an official statement delivered to members of the
news media for the purpose of providing information, an official statement, or making an
announcement.
As you note here, publications will issue your content only if it is worthy enough to get
published. So rather than thinking of advertising your product, you may try creating events
like a product launch, announcement, etc., If your news is not organic or trustworthy, the
paper audience may see it as an advertisement that affects the trust of the newspapers itself.
Hence newspapers will not publish any content just like that and also do not charge you
anything as they cannot guarantee a print.
Below is the screenshot that‘s taken from Yourstory (a platform that talks about the
businesses and entrepreneurs in India), you can see that they have clearly communicated that
they will not take money for publishing of the stories.
However, the benefits of the Press Release far outweigh the efforts required to put in.
Benefits of Press Release
1. Backlink- Increased Traffic to your website: The backlink you gain from top media
companies does not only get you a high-value backlink, but you will also find a lot of
people visiting your website immediately. Imagine a top-level newspaper website
covering your story and providing a link back to your website, you may see very high
inbound traffic in such scenarios.
2. Instant Branding: Press releases are known for creating trust value as well. You will
find that your customers‘ perception towards your brand improvises instantly and a lot
of new people who may not have known your brand will come to know about it.
3. Increased Sales: As more people visit your website, you may get more sales too.
More leads mean more business.
4. Build Relationships: With a press release, you may get inquiries from other
journalists too who are covering your niche. You shall build a good relationship with
all the journalists to cover your future events or to provide your feedback when they
write anything related to your industry. It‘s a free press coverage that has immense
value.
5. Project Yourself as an Industry Expert: As not everyone would appear on paper,
you shall also project yourself as an industry expert. The goal is not just to focus on
getting short time sales, but you should create trust in a way that you get sales for a
longer-term and so you can use these options as fundamental steps for your future
business as well.
Other Backlink Building Methods
Apart from the ones provided above, there are also many other link building methods. But I‘ll
not project them as important options because if you do not do it right, those link building
activity will backfire and may make Google punish your website by pushing down your
website results or deindexing the website itself which is a kind of risk that you‘d never want
to take.
The Other Link Building Options Are as Follow:
Image Submissions
Directory Submissions
Link Submissions
Forum Submissions
Blog Comment Submissions
Video Submissions
Video Marketing
Video Making
Marketing your products or website through the video channels is called video marketing. As
people are becoming lazy to read and internet costs are dropped significantly, people look for
most things in the video format since it‘s easy for them to watch and hear rather than sit and
read. Youtube is the second largest search engine, just behind Google, the parent company.
Not just Youtube, today there are various video streaming platforms like TikTok, IG Video,
Facebook Videos, and more.
Image from Neil Patel‘s website
By video marketing, we are effectively talking about two things i.e., making a video and
marketing it on various platforms.
When I say about video marketing, it is not that you have to spend huge money on video
making or you will have to do it like a professional director. Your video can be either too
complicated or can be a very simple one, there are no regulations for such things. You just
need to ensure that your point is conveyed correctly to the viewers or let's say your target
audience.
Guidelines in Video Making
I have made a few pointers that are good to follow before you start making the video. It‘s all
not mandatory, but just that if you follow it, you‘ll mostly end up making good videos.
Clear Objective
We all get overwhelmed when it‘s about making videos. Rather than just start making videos
right away, work on your objectives first. Decide on the goals that the videos should fulfill
and work out on what your audience wants to watch. Except for the rare cases, most probably
you are not going to make millions in making videos. Hence, find out what you achieve in
practical terms, whether you want to introduce your website to the audience who is looking
for an alternative shopping outlet? or you‘d like to cover a unique product that‘s not available
anywhere else and sell it via your description link? Whatever it is, just make sure, you are
putting your objective in paper first. When you write down things, you will get a clearer
perspective.
Work on the Script
Well, scripts are required not just for the featured movies. From the call center employee who
sells an insurance package to software business analyst who would sell projects worth million
dollars create and follow the script at a certain point in time. Writing a script will help you to
achieve your objective in a systematic way as you will decide on what to talk, how many
characters to involve in a video, and more. Again, the script does not have to be like movielike, you can keep it very simple as well based on your budget.
Convey it right
After preparing the objective and script, ensure that you make videos in the same way as
conceived. Writing down objectives and preparing the right scripts itself will complete the
majority of your video message, just shooting video properly to convey the message will
make it complete.
It‘s important that if it is not coming off well, it may create negative marketing. You can
check thousands of real-time bloopers in Tik Tok who think their videos have come out great,
but the reality is that people just want to watch those videos just for trolling and fun. So I
would suggest you be extra careful here.
Discoverable Description
As we have already seen about SEO and the importance of having the right keywords, you
should implement that wherever possible. Remember I said that Youtube is the second most
used search engine platform? Youtube crawls video through the content provided in title,
description, tags, and other information. Hence make sure that you are using the right
keywords that you want to target and as well appropriate to the video. Certainly, you do not
want to have keywords that are different from the content in the video which will make the
audience dissatisfied and dislike your video. Not just Youtube, almost all the video platforms
provide you an option to enter the title and detail about what is in the video which will be
used for the fetching purpose based on the query the user input.
Final Words
Make videos in a systematic way to reduce mistakes and try to keep it to the point. But not be
too much worried about the nuances in making. As you are an e-commerce business and not a
movie production company, people would not mind if the quality of your video making is not
equal to the top production companies. All they are focused on is the content you deliver and
how genuine the video is. Just focus on that and it should help the business to get more views,
leads, and conversions.
Video Marketing Distribution Platforms
There are video distribution platforms like Youtube, TikTok, IG Videos, Facebook Videos,
Snapchat, Whatsapp Status, etc.,
The best suggestion is to make videos separately for each of the platforms based on their
audience and their expectations. Of course, you will have to stick to your business objective,
but you should feel free to make small edits according to the video platforms. For example,
while Youtube videos can be hours longer, TikTok videos would be shorter ones. So you
shall plan about creating longer format videos for Youtube explaining about your website and
products, unique selling points, and more. For Tiktok, you should keep it very short as
TikTok allows smaller videos only, and their audience‘s expectation levels are set for such
durations only.
Focus on distributing your videos to all the video platforms, you do not have to miss any
platform as sharing takes a much lesser time only comparing to making the video itself.
Affiliate Marketing
It is a type of marketing that lets people share your products with their followers. For every
successful purchase through the link shared, the affiliate marketer gets a commission.
Everyone who registers for affiliate marketing on your website shall be called Affiliate
Marketers and they will get unique links assigned for them whenever they share any content
from your website which will help us to identify and track the sales received from different
affiliate marketers.
Affiliate Marketing is a powerful tool that will let many people talk and share about your
business, for a profit. If your products are good and you are able to tap the right affiliate
marketers, you will find some significant results through this type of marketing.
The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing is that you will share commission only when a sale
happened successfully and not otherwise making it a safe marketing bet for you and
something to not avoid.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
No Expense
As it is an incentive-based, you will pay commission only for the successful sales and so no
expense for you otherwise.
Natural Reach
If your products are good, you will see that many affiliate marketers would share your
products without any efforts from your end.
Expanded Reach
As professional affiliate marketers may already have a customer base, you will experience a
good number of people visiting your website and buying from you.
How to get Affiliate Marketing Work
Affiliate Marketing can be usually done by integrating the affiliate marketing tool on your
website. Either your e-commerce website will already have the affiliate tool or you may need
to either custom code it or get it integrated from the available library of tools. If you have
taken your e-commerce store from SaaS platform, you need to request their customer support
or check at their app platform to see if the required tools are available or if you have taken the
e-commerce website from a third party website company, you should get this done along with
your e-commerce website and well-integrated into it.
If you have taken a dropshipping e-commerce website from the DDP platforms like
Baapstore, many marketing tools including affiliate marketing tools are pre-integrated
without any extra payments.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is about sending marketing emails to your targeted customers or subscriber
lists.
If implemented right, Email Marketing is still the best marketing method in getting sales and
conversions. But it is not as simple as it sounds. There are a lot of regulations that you should
follow.
Email marketing helps you to announce your new product offerings, discounts, important
announcements, and anything else that is worthy to know about for your mail subscribers.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Reach All Your Subscribers At Once
You may have thousands or lacs of subscribers in your mailing list. You shall shoot a mail to
all of them at once to reach them. Unlike other marketing options, here you can be assured
that the mail is delivered to the entire list.
Reaching Inbox
If you are running advertisements on other platforms, you may not be assured of the number
of people watch or skip the ads. In the email marketing method, if done right, you can be
assured that your marketing emails have successfully reached the inbox of all your
subscribers.
Categorization
You can categorize your mail subscribers in different lists. For example, if you are selling
both men‘s and women‘s fashion wear, you can categorize the women subscribers in
women‘s list and men subscribers in men‘s list. This will effectively help you to send emails
only to the relevant customer base thus making people interested in your emails whenever
they hear from you.
Trackable
You can track a lot of data in your email marketing campaigns that will help you to
understand if your email campaigns are reaching successfully or if it requires a correction.
You can track how many people are opening your emails, how many times each of them
opened the emails, how many clicks you receive for the links in your email, how many
people are unsubscribing, etc., you can see these activities based on different timeframes and
also based on sent campaigns which will help you to get a clear picture of what is working
and what is not.
Low-Cost Global Reach
Unlike most other platforms, including Facebook and Google, the cost of sending emails to
people across the world is the same. You can send emails to people in India, or Nigeria, or
even the USA, you will find that you are paying same to reach people of different countries
which has given you the power to think of mailing advertisements in scale without having to
worry about the boundary restrictions or dollar conversions.
Schedule Ahead
Mail marketing tools also allow you to schedule your email marketing for future deliveries.
You do not have to be present every time to shoot a mail, you can strategically create and
schedule emails for certain days of the week, or target event dates, etc., you can plan it well
ahead in your spare time.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Though the advantages of email marketing are vast, the disadvantages are terrifying. As spam
mails make up to 45% of all emails sent or 14.5 billion emails globally per day, there are
stricter measures laid out for you to comply as otherwise, the consequences will be bad.
There is a law, CAN-SPAM Act, that was enacted back in 2003 and sets national standards
on commercial email. Not just that, email platforms like Gmail has a lot of factors that will
determine if an email should be sent to spam.
If your mail is not complying with all the policies, your mails may go to the spam folder. If it
goes to the spam folder, almost nobody will open your mail. You may send emails to millions
of people, but the open rate will be dirt low if it is not reaching their inbox.
You may be sending emails to the interested people only and good content only, but still,
your emails may get trapped into the spam folder because of the huge spam emails that others
are sending.
Things to Follow in Email Marketing
Manage Subscriber List
Send emails only to the people who have genuinely shown interest in your products. You can
do that by integrating subscription form on your website. People who are interested in
hearing from you will fill your subscription form and will be added to your mailing list. This
way you will be sending emails only to interested people and not spam unknown people.
Email Configurations
As many shady email marketers lure people into scams by duping themselves as some other
organization or people, there are systematic methods that will help yourself to verify your
identity every time emails are sent. This will help in restricting other people to use your
domain name to send emails and gives you the required authentication to reach the inbox of
your subscribers, it‘s something like a gate pass. You can configure your mail addresses with
DKIM, SPF, and DMARC keys. If you are not from a technical background, it‘s better you
hire a professional to get this work done for you.
Reach Inbox
While it‘s simple to start your email marketing campaign right away, the challenge is that you
should always maintain a good open rate. If you do not get a good open rate, your mail
marketing would be of less use, and more than that, chances are that your mails may be
considered as spam as well. Hence you have to do everything to make sure that your mail
goes to the inbox only.
Some of the things you can do to get high open rates are
1. Avoid using spam trap words like Free, Lottery, Win, etc., Gmail does not like these
words.
2. Send mailers only to the people who have subscribed to you and not to others or to the mail
addresses database you bought from 3rd party company.
3. Maintain that you send emails at the same time every time you send, especially if you are
sending newsletters.
4. Do not spam, send mails only if it is required.
5. Keep your subject and the content inside engaging.
6. Include an unsubscription button in all the mails you send giving the user an option to
unsubscribe from your mailers. If you do not keep this option, the user may have to click the
unsubscribe button provided by the Gmail which will be dangerous.
Email Marketing can be used both as a Free and a Paid marketing tool, depending on your
requirements. However, as most email platforms provide a free option as well, I have listed it
under the free marketing option.
Paid Marketing
If you do not want to build your marketing slowly and more interested in seeing immediate
results, you shall focus on running paid advertisements. Online paid advertisements are not
that expensive. You shall start running paid advertisement campaigns from as low as Rs.100.
While there are hundreds of advertisement platforms across different countries, we‘ll focus
on two major dominant players in the industry that shares the maximum market shareFacebook Ads and Google Ads. Both platforms have their own advantages and you should
focus on running advertisements on both the platforms strategically.
Google Ads
Google Ads are more of a search and niche-based ads that will be displayed on Google search
engine, Youtube, and their partner websites.
Google launched its advertising platform in 2000 and rebranded in 2018 from Google
Adwords to Google Ads thus making it a point that it‘s no more going to be just words based
advertisements but going to be more than that like photo ads, video ads, etc.,
Why Advertise on Google
1. Google search engine is receiving billions of search queries every month and you will
have to be present whenever anybody searches about your niche.
2. According to Google, advertisers make $8 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads.
You do not want to miss advertising on such a platform.
3. If you do not use Google for advertisements, you are just making it easy for your
competitors since they will take advertisement spots for your niche and may as well
pay low if there are no competitors for the bidding keywords or spots.
4. Google Ads sends only those leads that search for your keywords or show your ads on
other websites that are relevant to your business.
This is how Google Ads works. As you know Google is the most used search engine for all
types of search queries. Now, whenever someone types anything related to your business or
let‘s say, whenever anybody types any keywords in the Google search engine and if those
keywords match your campaign keywords, then your ads will be triggered for them. Only
those people that are looking for your kind of products or services will be driven to your
website. Other types of ads are video and photo ads which shall be placed in 3rd party sites
that are related to your business niche. For example, if you are selling Italian marbles, your
ads will be most probably shown on a website related to marbles, interior designing, and
other cross niches, in your geography.
Google Ads has a platform in the same name which helps one to create, manage, run, or stop
advertisement campaigns.
Google Ads Dashboard
Let’s see some of the important factors of Google Ads
Keywords
Keywords you research and shortlist in the Google Ads tool are the campaign keywords that
whenever someone searches those words on Google, your advertisements will be triggered.
There are 3 types of keywords match type as Broad, Phrase, and
Exact.
Broad Keywords
Broad keyword type is the default option. This is useful only when you have more budget
since your ads will be triggered whenever someone searches anything that is related to your
keywords. For instance, let‘s assume that you have set your keyword as ‗laptop Bengaluru‘,
your ads will be shown for all the keywords like ‗movies in Bengaluru‘, ‗laptop repair‘, etc.,
Phrase Keywords
Here, your ads will be triggered whenever phrase match appears i.e. if your keyword is ‗shirts
online‘, your ads will be shown whenever someone types your selected keyword or searching
your keywords with some other words in before or after your keywords. Your ads will be
triggered for the keywords like ‗best shirts online India‘ and other related searches with either
the phrase keywords or phrase keywords in the middle.
Exact Match Type
In such cases, your ads will be triggered only when a user enters the same keywords as
provided, as otherwise your ads will not be triggered at all.
You will have to look into all types of keyword matches, your budget, etc., and then decide
on the match type to use. My suggestion would be phrase match as you will not spend a lot
on unnecessary searches or you will not face issues like ads not served due to fewer searches,
you will always get a decent search relevant to your business.
CPC v/s CPM
Though there are other types of bidding available, these two are the top bidding methods.
CPC is the cost per click, whenever someone clicks your advertisement, you will be charged
and CPM is the cost per impression, you will be charged whenever your advertisement gets a
thousand impressions, it does not matter whether someone clicks it or not.
Ad Copy Formats
You can run your advertisements on multiple formats like text-only ads, image ads, video
ads, shopping ads, and a few more. You shall decide which one works best for you and create
your creative accordingly.
Campaign Types
You can create different types of campaign objectives type i.e., to generate more sales, to get
more leads, app promotions, directing traffic to your website, or reach. All types of
campaigns have their own advantages and you shall use suitable ones based on your objective
in particular cases. If you want to increase views to your blog, you should select website
visitors and if you are interested in collecting leads for your marketing activity, you should
choose the leads type.
Ad Relevancy and Quality Score
As with Google‘s core objective, they want their users to find the right content only almost
always. Hence Google maintains a quality score on keywords and as well on your ads copy.
To receive a good quality score, make sure that your ads creative match your website content
only and you are targeting the right audience. Better the quality score, the cheaper the price
you‘ll pay for advertisements.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are different from how Google Ads works in its user target method itself. In
Facebook, you will not target users based on keywords or search inquiries, but based on
various other aspects like the geography, age, marital status, interests, etc.,
With such rich targeting options, reaching customers from any part of the world has become
easy. Unlike Google, here, customers do not even have to search for your products. You
decide whom to show your ads. Google may look the best option when you realize that in
Google Ads, you are serving ads only to those people who ask about it and whereas in
Facebook, you are serving ads even to those who do not know about your brand or the
product you sell, but still, you shall able to reach them if you know your potential audience
demographics.
Why Advertise on Facebook
Accurate & Related Audience
Facebook provides you a lot of data about users that will help you target the right audience
for your business. With such an advanced targeting option, you will able to get a faster
response at a cheaper price. It‘s like if you are selling clothes for newborn babies, you can
target only the new parents or you shall expand and target people based on their marital status
and age.
Objectives
As Google Ads, you will be able to set the goal types for your advertisement campaigns.
Some of the types of campaigns you shall run are Brand Awareness, Reach, Post
Engagement, App Downloads, Lead Generation, Video Views, Messenger Messages, Catalog
Sales, and more. Facebook gives different treatment for every type of campaign you set. If
you set reach campaign type, your ad will be served to maximum people and if you set post
engagement, your ads will be majorly served only to those people who would usually engage
with the posts. Hence, you will have to choose the right goal type for your advertisements. I
would recommend you to spend time on understanding the objective you‘d like to achieve
through the advertisements and set it accordingly.
Trackable Option
Facebook provides you vast data based on the results you receive from your campaigns, this
data is different from user data. This results-based data will help you to analyze your high
performing ads, number of clicks you receive, number of people your ads reached to, the
amount you spent, etc., using this results-based data along with the user data that you have
targeted will get you a clear picture to either continue running your ads as it is or to fine-tune
your ads or to stop it and create a different ad with different creatives if the current ads are
not working good.
Large Audience
As Facebook has a vast audience in its platform, you can reach a lot of people just by running
your ad on this one platform. As most of your target people would already be on Facebook
anyway, if you have planned to advertise your business, Facebook is one unavoidable option.
Advertising your product on Facebook is very important. Facebook has a very strong user
base that takes action. If you are launching a product or you‘d like to popularise your website,
you can advertise those on Facebook and millions of people may see your advertisement
which would results in traction or sales of your products through your website.
Facebook Ads Dashboard
There are various other things to be learned in Google and Facebook Ads, I‘d suggest you
browse or take a self-learning course to learn and master these Google and Facebook Ads
tools. If you master these, it will be helpful in whatever business you do as the world is going
online for most of the things and you should be knowledgeable with those tools that rule the
advertising space as you do not want to be left behind your business competitors.
Note: If you learn to advertise on any one of these ads platforms- either on Facebook or
Google, you will find it easy to advertise on another one also since most of the terms and
features will be similar.
Marketing Techniques
You can decide to advertise using free marketing options or paid marketing options, using
Google or Facebook, but there are some common marketing techniques that I would like to
share with you which I believe will help you to reach a wider audience and make them take
action towards buying your products.
Let’s see some of those options now.
Coupon Code Generation & Distribution
Have you seen that a lot of companies provide coupon codes to claim extra discounts when
buying from their portal?
Coupon Code gives an exclusive feeling to shoppers. Why? when they enter a coupon code
and claim extra discounts and offers, they know that they are getting extra benefits because
they are using the coupon against those who pay full as coupon codes may not be available
for everybody. This kind of feeling makes one shop more.
Flexibility. You can create and run coupon codes with many different kinds of
configurations, such as, restrict coupon codes only to the first hundred customers, a one-time
use per customer, flat or percentage discounts, works only on certain days of the week or only
till the certain day, and more other conditions can be set. Though you can use all these
conditions, buyers will not see any complication in using the same, they simply would enter
the coupon code on your website to claim discounts irrespective of whether your coupon code
has many conditions or simple ones.
Performance Tracking. If you are running advertisements on different channels, like,
newspapers, autos, buses, and Facebook, then you can create different coupons for every
channel, such as, FB20 for Facebook, Auto20 for Auto promotions, NP20 for newspapers,
etc., this will let you see how many purchases are done through each advertisement sources.
As offline advertisements do not have many tracking options like online advertisements, you
can make use of such coupon usage tracking techniques to evaluate the performance of your
advertisements.
Exclusive Gift Vouchers
You can provide gift vouchers to people on their special days like birthdays, wedding
anniversary, etc., providing such special day discounts will make them buy from you rather
than from your competitors.
The idea is that most people would anyway spend on buying stuff for their special days and if
you provide them exclusive vouchers that save them money and inform them via mail from
over a month, it may only benefit them to buy from you provided you have good quality
items to keep them satisfied.
Reward Users
Everybody loves surprise rewards. Surprise your buyers who are buying from you
consistently with some unannounced discounts or some other benefits like immediate
cashback offers.
Google Pay got a wild success in India in a very short time and one of their important
strategies was to reward users with immediate cashback offers. Users will be presented with a
scratch card every time they make a transaction in Google Pay and if lucky, they get a
cashback. During the initial days, most users were rewarded with big cashback amounts, and
then it‘s slowly reduced, both the frequency of rewards and cashback amount. Yet, it did not
reduce the user base as they made it a habit to check rewards for every transaction. Though
their chances of getting rewards are reduced, they still getting even one or two rewards now
and then keeps them engaged and loyal to Google Pay.
You can plan your own rewards that will increase your customer base and keep them buying
from you.
Legal Requirements
Getting whatever legal work required done for your business is highly recommended, as you
do not want to get any notices or meet the authorities for any such issues.
Fortunately, when you are starting up an e-commerce business, there are not many things
required. In fact, no certificate is required to start your proprietorship business. If at all
anything is needed, you just need to get some basic certificates which are available for a low
cost with less process.
Some of the legal things that may be needed
1. GST Certificate: You do not need a GST certificate till you reach a certain level of
revenue, yet, I‘d recommend it because you can claim ITC in every purchase you
make for your business which would result in more savings in the form of GST
refunds.
2. Registration Certificate: If you are starting a business as proprietor, you do not need
to get any certificates and if at all required, you need to get an MSME certificate for
the purpose of opening a current account in a bank. If you want to register your firm
as a private limited company, you need to obtain certain certificates, but there is no
law that mandates you to run your business as a company only. It‘s absolutely your
choice.
3. Import Export Code: This is mandatory if you are planning to sell your products to
other countries, otherwise you can ignore it.
4. Keep Stamps Ready: Whether a registered company or unregistered proprietorship,
you‘d need stamp seal in some unavoidable cases.
5. Brand Registration: It‘s advisable to register your brand name as you do not want to
lose your name to somebody else when your business picks up. Brand registrations
are not just for the product level branding, you can register a brand name for your
website domain name too.
I have covered the widely required certificates only, depending on your region and the local
laws, you should check with a law consultancy firm while starting your business.
Baapstore: The Shortcut to Success
Disclaimer: I’m the founder of Baapstore.com, but I write about it without any bias for you to
decide how you want to proceed with your e-commerce business.
Let me give you a little bit of information about me and the reason for starting this business
to give you clarity about our intentions.
Before starting Baapstore, I was selling thousands of goods in eBay India, helped eBay with
their TA program, and helped hundreds of Americans to set up and run their dropshipping
services successfully as a part of my digital marketing services.
When Amazon launched its business in India, I was curious to leverage its platform to
increase my product sales. While starting to list my products, I found that it was not as easy
as eBay and a lot of standards need to be followed from photographing of the products to the
cataloging. It took me hours to list just a few products following their guidelines. The funny
part was that Amazon kept changing its guidelines and if you do not edit your listing
accordingly, your product listings will be removed. Amazon still continues changing its
guidelines for years and it will keep going on.
Following such a frequently changing process was getting more difficult every day as I ended
up spending most of my time just modifying catalogs itself. That‘s when I realized that if it is
difficult for me, who‘s experienced in computers and online marketing, it‘s going to be
terrible for those who do not have any kind of experience in online sales. So I thought that
rather than focusing on product sales, why do not I focus on the much bigger problem and
help those thousands of people who would find it difficult to sell their products online. That‘s
how the idea of Baapstore was started.
Adding to that, online buyers care only about receiving the product and do not mind where it
is shipped from and so I was wondering why does every online seller needs to maintain
stocks and warehouses separately? rather why can‘t there be a central warehouse that ships
orders on the instruction from online sellers? That is a win-win method for every party
involved and in fact, more benefit for the sellers as they do not have to worry about shipping,
deadstock loses, etc.,
That‘s how Baapstore was born and helping thousands of online sellers today.
About Baapstore, it is a dedicated dropshipping platform that is focused on helping dropship
sellers with everything required to run a successful e-commerce business, from the
dropshipping inventory, website management, delivery services, and providing all other
required services under one roof.
Well, you can run your own dropshipping business without having to work with Baapstore,
by following all the points mentioned above and still be successful, but that will be a long
process with huge investment commitment.
At Baapstore, we have done most of the work for you, you just need to enroll with us and
start your dropshipping e-commerce business right away with ready products and all the
required tools.
Common Dropshipping Challenges That Sellers Face
Remember that challenges are made to be broken and if you are focused on your work and
objective, there is no challenge that cannot be won over.
However, let me quote some of the difficulties I found people have when they do the
dropshipping business on their own.
Finding Vendors
The biggest challenge in dropshipping business is finding vendors. Well finding itself will not
be a difficult challenge, the thing is you should find those vendors who are genuine and be
supportive to grow your business.
Dropshipping Couriers
Requesting vendors to ship products on your business name may look harsh at times. It‘s like
vendor invested and stocked up the products, they take care of shipping and returns, yet need
to print your business name in the couriers they sent, well this is going to be a challenge.
Most vendors, even if they let you resell their products, will not hide their names in the
courier covers. Adding their name in the courier cover will get them the branding and might
even direct recurring sales from your customers.
Lack of Co-ordination
You need the right co-ordination from your vendors, your website development company,
hosting company, courier companies, and supporting staff. Any mistake from any of these
people will put your business name at stake. Based on what I have seen before starting
Baapstore, you will find these companies make consistent mistakes, the worst is rather than
taking ownership, they will just pass the blame to one other.
Expensive
Though dropshipping is the most economical and high profitable business to start, if you are
doing it on your own, you will see that expenses are skyrocketing unknowingly.
For example, courier companies provide you price slabs based on the order weight which
may look economical, but may charge you much more than their printed rates in the name of
‗weight mistake‘. This happens so frequently that it would make one wonder if these
companies are doing it intentionally to make more profit. Well, in some cases, yes, they do, at
least those courier aggregator companies that operate in the middle between the courier
companies and the e-commerce owners.
Success Ratio
I have seen time and again that people who do everything on their own is actually having a
less success ratio. The best example would be startup investments that happen everywhere. If
you note, investors invest majorly in a company with multiple founders than on one with
single founders, because they know that people cannot do everything on their own. It is not
impossible, it‘s just that it will be much tougher.
I just want you to understand that the challenges given above are not to terrify you, but it‘s
just what I‘m seeing in the market. I have seen a lot of people who start a business with high
motivation would struggle and loses their confidence somewhere in the midway if things do
not go as they expect. And most probably, things will not go as one expects, that is what
business is all about. You do not know what challenges you face next, but you should know
one thing, any challenges can be passed through and there is a life beyond the challenges you
see. Perseverance is the key here.
Baapstore Advantages
There are some really great advantages if one chooses to work with Baapstore. Let me
explain to you some of the benefits of working with us.
All Under One Roof
Unlike western counterparts, Baapstore is a full-fledged dedicated dropshipping platform that
provides almost all the services that are required for an e-commerce dropshipping business.
At Baapstore, we take care of building your website, maintaining the servers, integration of
payment gateways, sourcing of the inventory, loading of the products, processing of your
orders, delivery of the products, and returns management. You do not have to go through
different companies as everything is on us.
Single Products at Wholesale Cost
Nobody else would provide you products at a wholesale cost if you want it to be dropshipped
in single quantities. At Baapstore, we have fixed this for you. We can dropship you even a
single product at a wholesale cost.
How do we able to achieve this? We are not just an aggregation platform, we have mostly
stocked up products for dropshipping purposes and have exclusive deals with our vendors
and shipping companies. Hence we are able to provide even single products at wholesale
cost.
Let me paste the same product example that I have used previously in this book, please check
it below.
Even if you subtract the costs like Amazon commission and other indirect expenses, if any,
still you will end up making at least a 60% markup profit margin, which is much higher than
what many retailers would get.
Full Responsibility Is On Us
As a dedicated dropshipping service, we take complete responsibility if anything goes wrong
either in your website, servers, or orders and it is on us to fix it for you. You do not have to
go to multiple companies. If you find any issue, all that you have to do is just contact our
support and we‘ll fix any issue you face in the shortest timeframe.
Lowest Investment
We are providing multiple readymade subscription plans for you to choose the one that works
best for you. All our plans are priced lowest in the industry. If you do the dropshipping
business on your own, you will end up at least spending 10–30 times more pay than what you
are paying us.
We are able to afford our services at such a low price because we have created the solutions
for thousands of dropshipping sellers together and so we do have the cost-benefit by doing so
which we are passing to you.
Fastest Time to Launch Your Business
The other significant advantage is that if you start your dropshipping business with us, you
will go live within 7 working days with thousands of products pre-loaded on your website.
This is the shortest timeframe provided by any company with a vast range of products and
services that we provide.
No Need to Contact Vendors
You do not have to spend thousands of hours looking for the vendors and in discussing with
them regarding their policies, prices, etc.,
All the products that are loaded in our Baapstore platform are in a ready to dropship state. If
anything goes wrong, we‘ll fix it for you and you do not have to contact anybody else, be it a
vendor, a courier company or anybody else. Whatever it is, we will co-ordinate totally and fix
it up from our end.
Deliveries & Returns Management
All the deliveries will be taken care of by us and so is the returns management. The packing
materials, packaging, and handling all will be done by us. If the item is not delivered or if the
customer wants to return the item, we‘ll take care. We expect our resellers to only focus on
running their business and getting sales.
Unlimited Free Deliveries
You may get ten sales a day or thousand sales a day, we never charge you for deliveries. All
the delivery costs are on us. Assuming that an average shipping cost is Rs.75, if you even
achieve 1000 sales a month, that is 75,000rs you are saving with us, just on deliveries.
Advanced E-Commerce Website
We provide advanced e-commerce websites to our resellers who choose our website based
plans. The website will be managed by us and resellers do not have to bang their head on
technical issues. The website will be loaded with all the required features like product
addition option, coupon code generator, gift voucher generator, category addition, etc.,
You will also get training from us on how to use the website admin end in case you would
like to change something or operate on your own.
Get Direct Payments
As we‘ll be connecting your bank account directly in the website we build for you, the
payments that you get from retail customers will directly be credited to your bank account.
We do not take any kind of commission from that.
Unlimited Sales at No Extra Cost
There is no limit on how many sales you get, as you get more sales, we‘ll keep fine-tuning
your website to accommodate more sales without any extra charges. As all our client
websites are hosted in the cloud server, your website is capable of handling any volume of
sales.
Final Words
1. Dropshipping is the best business model to start at low-cost because without investing
anything on inventory, you can resell products worth crores at a retail profit margin.
This is a luxurious opportunity that retailers never had earlier, all thanks to the
Internet and improving supply chain management systems.
2. If you are deciding on starting a dropshipping business, Baapstore is the best choice.
While you will be paying just a few thousand as a subscription fee, your earnings will
be in lacs. Even your savings in delivery fees alone would be in lacs if you do the
math.
Hence starting your dropshipping business with Baapstore is the best option.
You can do your due diligence, research all the options, and come to a conclusion on how
you want to start your e-commerce dropshipping business.
Thank you for making it through the end of the book. I hope whatever information was
shared is useful in some way for your business growth leading you to live a happy and
comfortable life.
If you would like to connect with me or discuss something, feel free to ping me on Facebook
or by email.
Special Discounts
If you have completed reading this book, I‘m sure you should be having good knowledge of
the dropshipping business model and so would like to offer you something to kickstart your
dropshipping business.
Offer: Get a 5% extra discount on any of our dropshipping plans provided at baapstore.com.
How to Claim: You can just send a mail to contact@baapstore.com or contact us through
methods provided at baapstore.com saying that you have completed reading this book and
demand for a special discount. I assure you that it will be immediately approved by my team.