Are you considering starting a dropshipping webshop? Learn how to choose a niche, find suppliers, and set up an effective dropshipping solution. Scale easily with Shipmondo.
What is dropshipping – and how do you get started successfully?
Dropshipping is a business model where you sell products online without holding any inventory yourself. Instead, orders are shipped directly from your supplier(s) or manufacturer to the customer. This means you can operate a business without investing in inventory, significantly reducing your fixed costs and risk.
How dropshipping works
When a customer buys a product from your webshop, the process is as follows:
1: The order is automatically sent to your supplier, depending on your webshop system and setup.
2: The supplier packs and ships the product directly to the customer.
3: You handle marketing, sales, and customer service – retaining the difference between the selling price and purchase price, typically covering shipping costs as well.
It sounds simple – and it can be with the right setup. However, to scale effectively, it’s important to choose the right tools.
Pros and cons of dropshipping
Advantages:
- Lower capital requirements: No large inventory investments.
- Wider product range: Ability to offer many products without holding stock.
- Scalability: Easily scale up or down according to demand.
- Risk minimization: Reduced risk of excess stock and obsolete products.
Disadvantages:
- Quality control: Harder to ensure supplier product quality meets your business standards.
- Delivery time and customer experience: Risk of poorer customer experience if suppliers deliver slowly or unprofessionally.
- Integration complexity: Often requires complex setups between systems (ERP, PIM, integrations) to efficiently manage orders, inventory data, and supplier updates.
- Economics: Smaller profit margins compared to selling your own inventory.
- Branding: More challenging to build brand value when you don’t control the entire customer experience.
Many webshop owners begin with dropshipping, bringing logistics in-house later once the business is validated. Other businesses use dropshipping to offer products from suppliers as accessories or complementary products to their core range.
Dropshipping products - what can you sell?
Thousands of products are suitable for dropshipping, including clothing, accessories, home products, and tech gadgets. The key is to find a niche with high demand and limited competition.
Use tools such as Google Trends, Meta Ads, or TikTok Shop to spot trends and test your idea with a simple webshop, for instance in Shopify or WooCommerce.
Many businesses use dropshipping as a supplement if they already have a limited inventory of their own products. In such cases, it makes sense to select products within the same category to boost sales of your own goods.
How to start a dropshipping webshop?
If you’re considering starting a dropshipping webshop, a structured approach is essential. Dropshipping might seem simple on the surface, but a professional setup requires the right tools, a scalable platform, and solid partnerships.
Steps to start your dropshipping webshop:
Choose your niche: Find a niche with high demand, low return rates, and limited competition. Use tools like Google Trends and market analysis to validate your choice.
Find reliable suppliers: Your suppliers should offer fast shipping, high-quality products, and stable inventory. This is crucial for customer satisfaction and your brand reputation.
Set up your webshop: Choose a flexible platform like Shopify or WooCommerce that scales easily. Ensure your webshop integrates seamlessly with necessary systems for payment, shipping, and customer service.
Plan logistics and shipping: Even though you don’t handle products yourself, ensure your checkout process is smooth. Shipmondo’s Delivery Checkout allows you to offer flexible delivery options and a user-friendly purchasing experience.
Focus on marketing and scaling: Dropshipping requires strong digital marketing. Use advertising platforms such as Meta Ads, Google Shopping, and TikTok Shop to drive growth. Regularly analyze and optimize your campaigns.
By starting your dropshipping webshop strategically, you can minimize risks, build a strong brand, and lay the groundwork for future growth.
How Shipmondo simplifies dropshipping
Shipmondo is ideal for businesses that work with dropshipping and want to streamline their operations. Shipmondo helps you effectively manage orders, set up a user-friendly checkout with flexible shipping options, and get an overview of your shipping data – all from one platform.
With Shipmondo, you can:
Consolidate your shipping management across multiple carriers if you have negotiated shipping agreements.
Use our Delivery Checkout for a customer-friendly checkout – set your own shipping rates and let customers choose between your carrier options.
Manage orders across multiple sales channels and maintain a unified workflow. Handle both your own products and dropshipping items, book freight, manage payments, and automatically send tracking information to customers. When an order is dropshipped, you can mark it as “Delivered by third-party”, completing the order without creating a shipping label. You can also set rules to identify these orders during import.
Utilize our analytics tools, displaying sales data, key metrics such as products per shipment, countries shipped to, and return data.
Use our return portal for smooth, hassle-free returns.
Benefit from our extensive integrations with webshop systems and payment gateways.
Scale effortlessly when you reach your first 100, 1,000, or 10,000 orders. Shipmondo professionalizes your dropshipping business, ensuring efficient, scalable operations – whether you’re starting out or already established.
Ready to start dropshipping? Create a free account and experience how Shipmondo helps you ship more using fewer resources.