Starting a business online can be daunting because of the vast number that are already operating. Competition is stiff. If you want to corner a market you’ll need better deals than anyone else and a consistent way to deliver to customers that keeps them coming back. One of the most efficient online shop models is Dropshipping. Once you start a dropshipping business, the low overhead and operating costs will keep your profits high. But to stand out and succeed you’ll need a proper website.
What is Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is the most efficient means of online retail. Rather than ordering from a pre-existing inventory, the customer orders goods which come directly from the manufacturer. Their order is processed through you. Once it is, you buy the merchandise directly from the producer and have it shipped to the customer directly. No warehouses, no waiting. As soon as its made and packaged, it’s on its way to the customer. This allows for cheaper rates as there’s no shelving cost integrated to the final price.
Tools for Dropshipping Stores:
1. Project Management/Task Management Tools
Any business needs proper organization to keep tasks from getting out of hand. A scheduling or task management program fits for this. The most effective way to visualize these schedules is through a Gantt Chart, a business standard method for setting milestone-based schedules.
GanttPRO is an online Gantt chart maker with various options for users to adjust to making their own detailed Gantt charst. This allows team members and multiple orders to be tracked simultaneously in an easy to follow visual way. Tom’s Planner and TeamWork are also good tools which offer free, browser-based Gantt Chart visualizations.
2. Ecommerce Website Tools
Buying and selling online requires a high degree of safety. Strangers will be trusting you with their precious money, and you will be entrusting that to manufacturers – many of them may be foreign. You’ll need a quick and efficient way to handle digital cash transactions.
Shopify as a service gives you all the set-up you need to create an online store of custom goods so you can set your prices and adjust them as you go to match the flow of demand that your business meets. It is a subscription service, so if you need something free to start with, you can use WooCommerce, or integrated tools on certain sales-based platforms.
3. Web Hosting
In order to run an online store, you need an online presence. Web hosting is required to start any website. These services will not just list your website, they will help promote it with their own built in or installable tools to make it more popular down the line.
WordPress is very popular because it is free, but it also comes with a lot of extensions and add-ons which make the process of developing and designing a web page easy. It also comes with WooCommerce as an option. Shopify, on the other hand, includes web hosting for free with its paid service.
4. Order Processing
It will be up to you to handle the processing of orders directly with manufacturers. This isn’t like buying from an online store. You have to make the request through their platform on what you need them to make and where it will ship to directly.
Services like AliExpress are best utilized with their origin websites like AliBaba, which itself is a dropshipping magnate. Or you can use other tools. Oberlo is available on Shopify to simplify the connection and setup, but Dropified is the most popular option being designed for all levels of dropshipping professionals.
5. Market Research
Any good business which moves any kind of product needs to know where the market is going and what goods are popular in the here and now. How do you know what to put on your storefront that people will buy? You could do manual research, which takes a ton of time, or use a tool.
Google Trends is free and utilizes Google’s search rankings to see what keywords are popular over a period of time. This acts as a metric to gauge the general interest a certain product is seeing. More specific tools like Sell The Trend are built for dropshipping to measure the current flow of goods from manufacturers as well as average prices they can sell for.
6. Presentation
Looks count for a lot online. People have limited time and will click off of a website that doesn’t look professional or real. There’s an eye for quality that can be hard to miss. If you don’t know how to make a website look good, you can use a tool to stand out without being confusing.
Glorify is an app which helps you create product images based on much simpler data. Just input the basic product image and it can help generate a background, shadow and lighting effects and other touch-ups to make it stand out from the plain white background shots other websites are stuck using.
7. E-Mailing
Emails are the way we talk and communicate with strangers. If you want to start a promotion to get as much attention on your store as you want, marketing is the way to go and emails are always available.
Services like Klaviyo give you free access to send up to 500 emails a month, which fill in the name fields for you to up to 250 contacts, with other business plan options to allow even higher rates of sending. You can also get an email for your store custom made with Zoho Mail.
8. Ad Making Tools
You need to advertise your business to let people know that it’s the place they should go to shop. Text ads and email ads are one thing, but producing video ads gives you a new level of production that people will pay attention to. OBS gives you an easy recording option and DaVinci gives you access to simple video editing tools. Niche tools like Quik let you film and edit all from your phone, while online image tools like Canva let you create blog-friendly images for free.
9. Customer Tracking
Customers will reach your website from all sorts of places. Are your ads being effective, or is traffic coming from somewhere else? You’ll want to know where to put your priorities and what improvements to make. Google Analytics can give you a general overview on who’s visiting your website and from where, but Hotjar goes way more in depth, and has its own free version.
10. AI Driven Marketing
Artificial Intelligence is being used for more and more applications in our world. It’s becoming commonplace and business friendly as it advances. Dropshipping can also utilize AI to perform a number of tasks, such as marketing. No need to hire a copywriter or rack your brain thinking of clever sale lines.
Jasper is a market writing tool that takes your input of key words and phrases and mixes them into text which has been cultivated through tens of thousands of reads from the most popular selling sources so your product descriptions and landing pages are as good as the pros.
11. Social Media
Social Media is the new public square where discussions are held and where news is shared. You’ll want your store to make the rounds in this space somehow. Twitter and Facebook are just platforms, but there are tools which make posting to them for business purposes much easier.
Buffer lets you pre-write and schedule posts automatically for a handful of popular platforms. Facebook has its own tool which also works on Instagram. You can also leverage influencers, personality-driven creators on social media, to promote your business and connect to them via a freelance service like Heepsy, or find contacts on Social Blade based on their engagement numbers.
12. Competitor Research
You are not the first person to think dropshipping is a good idea. It’s a very wide and active market with a lot of competition. If you want to stand out you’ll need to know what your competitors are up to.
Commerce Inspector provides information on any store, including your own, so the relative traffic and popularity of their items can be inspected. You can track most popular items, and even track some of their SEO content to see what they’re doing which you are not.
13. SEO Tools
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the factor that determines your placement on a search page based on algorithms and recent traffic to the web page. Higher rankings means more visibility, and more natural growth as you become the top result for what people search.
Ahrefs is very popular, which comes with paid plans and a business-first focus on improving the ranking of stores and sellers. If you’re struggling to create SEO content, you can use Keyword Finder to see what people are searching to include into your website, or use SurferSEO to help make your current content better.
14. Business Tools
If your business takes off in a huge way, it may become too much for just you to handle. When you start expanding you might look to hiring a team to help split up the work and share the profit. Or you could be starting with a team but wondering how you’ll manage them while also managing and hand-making your business.
Toggl gives you an entry-level free option for team management, as does Todoist, which helps you set up schedules and assign tasks to individuals relating to each product that you plan on selling.
