Drop-shipping is a new and attractive business model that enables an individual to earn money by disrupting the supply chain. It is a type of retail business where the seller accepts the orders of the customers of the items that they do not have stock. The retailer then places the order from the manufacturer or another retailer and then directly then provides the shipment to the customers.
How does drop-shipping work?
The first and foremost thing that a retailer should have for drop-shipping is a website that should display the products that the retailer wants to sell. Further, the website should contain shipping policies, delivery or return. Creating an e-commerce website is cheaper but one needs to be careful that they list only the products which can be shipped.
Nigerians are earning a fortune by drop-shipping
Nigeria is battling with a high rate of unemployment and in the midst of it, drop-shipping has provided a ray of hope to Nigerians. Most of the people of Nigeria prefer drop-shipping fashion accessories to make money. For instance, Cart Deals founded by Oladunni Ayorinde dropships fashion clothing and accessories and the company has earned a fortune by engaging in this business. When engaging in drop-shipping, it is important to have professional couriers for shipping the ePacket carefully to the customers. When engaging in a drop-shipping business, one needs to ensure that the products that they are selling are good at quality and are available at good pricing. Further, it needs to be ensured that products which are ordered by the customer reach them safely in a short span of time.
What is required for drop-shipping?
For establishing a successful business in drop-shipping, it is necessary to have a website first especially when you are running a business in the middle of a pandemic. On the website, you need to list all the products that you can ship easily using a fast courier service like GATI. Secondly, all the policies should be listed properly to avoid any sort of ugly quarrel with the customer. Next, all the prices on the website should be reasonable to ensure that the pricing is competitive.
Secondly, the website should have a professional domain and logo. Both the domain and logo will show the customers that your business is trustworthy and reliable. If you have narrowed down a niche, you should ensure that the domain name resonates with your niche.
Thirdly, marketing will play a very important role in fetching customers for your dropshipping business. This would also be a domain where you will be investing most of your budget. Through marketing, you should aim for traffic for your websites. Before investing money in gaining paid traffic, it would be a wise idea to experiment with SEO for gaining organic traffic first.
The popularity of drop-shipping is rising across the globe
The last five-year data on Google has revealed that drop-shipping has become one of the most searched terms in Google and it is staying strong. In fact, it is evaluated that the drop-shipping industry will touch the $557.9 billion market size by 2025. Further 27% of the online retailers use drop-shipping to earn money. Previously, AliExpress played a huge role in dropshipping. However, as its popularity it has increased, the users have started engaging with the wholesalers directly to get their products at a much cheaper rate. Additionally, not all the drop-shipping websites are doing well which might give the impression that it is dead. The key to the drop-shipping industry is to keep the customer first. The drop-shipping industry that managed to keep its customers as a priority is still surviving.
Nigerians have a huge potential to earn via drop-shipping
Nigeria is one of the largest economies of Africa and its GDP is growing at a tremendous rate. Additionally, it has a population of close to 200 million which is used and recently, the e-commerce market has started flourishing in it making the country a perfect marketplace for entrepreneurs who want to engage online. Currently, the drop-shipping market in Africa is seeing annual growth of 10% making it one of the most lucrative businesses.
