What is the biggest concern for a newly established retail business? Not many will be acquainted with this, but a handsome capital and warehousing a huge stock of goods in your inventory eventually turn out to be the major concerns. Moreover, if it’s an online store, shipping of products only adds up to your trouble.

Dropshipping is a relatively newer concept and business model in the e-commerce scenario. Through drop shipping, the owner of the new business buys a product from another seller (retailer as well as a wholesaler) and gets it shipped directly to the customer. One important factor while framing such structure is that the dropshipper doesn’t have physical possession of the good at any point of time.

What is Dropshipping?

Despite being a relatively newer concept, dropshipping is getting extremely popular. This is a process in which a person partners with a dropshipping client and lists all the product from the client’s product portfolio. Once a buyer makes the order, the dropshipper purchases the product from the client and gets it delivered directly to the buyer’s address.

Dropshippers do not require a very high amount of capital to be invested and the risk involved is also very low. Moreover, it is easier to set and scale up. This is because it does not require a lot of manual stuffs to be done and the set-up process is spread on a short lifespan.

Benefits of Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a pretty beneficial business setup. In fact, most people choose dropshipping owing to some convenience that they bring along. There are certain factors that could excite you up to give it a try:

• Setting up a new business requires a huge capital. But dropshipping almost kills this notion. The good thing about this business structure is that it requires very little capital or manpower to set up.
• The most notable benefit of getting started with a new drop shipping business is that they do not require warehousing. The inventory size of the entire business setup could be zero and still a good amount of profit could be made. As a result, the cost of warehousing or maintaining the inventory is nil or negligible.
• If you are doing business in the field of dropshipping, you can always be in the good books of your consumers. As opposed to traditional e-commerce, where many products cannot be listed at once owing to the fact that they require a big inventory, dropshipping will offer a wider range of products across all ranges and the business does not require any backlogs or inventories.
• Dropshipping won’t bind you down to one fixed location. In fact, in most cases, it isn’t a physical business. It can be carried out from any location you are in. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection.

How to start a dropshipping business?

Starting a new business isn’t a sip from your favourite coffee at Starbucks. Instead, for some business, the entire process will burn you down in terms of energy and excitement until the entire process is completed. But when you are looking to set up a dropshipping e-commerce, the process becomes quite simple.

• Find a supplier. This is the biggest step towards setting up your new business. You need to explore a few suppliers with whom you can partner and set it up. Make sure to partner with a supplier with huge variety and good on-time delivery ratio.
• Sign up with Shopify: You don’t need a huge budget or web development skills to create an online dropshipping store. You can do so easily with Shopify. Simply go to shopify.com and add your store name to get it going. You will get a free trial for 14 days.
• Install Oberlo app: Once you are done with creating your store at Shopify, search for Oberlo app and install it. This app will assist you in listing a wide range of products with just a few clicks. Using Oberlo, you can add thousands of products from Oberlo Supply and Aliexpress, and start shipping directly to your customers on order.
• Choose your niche: This is important. Choose a niche where you can market your products well. Once you are done with installing the app, you need to choose a niche of products that you think will be the best one to suit the demand. You can now import the products from AliExpress directly to your Shopify store and start your business.

Yes! It’s that simple.

Setting up an online business has never been this easy. And guess what, this entire process will incur almost zero investment.

How? You can install Oberlo on your Shopify store for free. You can create a store at Shopify with a free trial of 14 days, while you can keep using Oberlo without any cost. Note that the free Oberlo account limits you to 500 product and 50 orders per month, which is pretty good for a newbie. Once your business starts getting some traction, you can upgrade to a paid plan.

Overall, in the current scenario, there couldn’t be anything better than getting your first business on track with almost zero investment, zero hindrance, zero risk and zero bindings.