Today the increasing number of people are seeking the ways to get financial independence and freedom. One of those ways is drop shipping. But what does it exactly mean to drop ship?

Office clerks and employees are sick of their everyday work, which deprives them of living a full life, and ready to jump at the opportunity to try out drop shipping. Unlike the majority of online business models, drop shipping doesn’t require a huge amount of money to invest in. People don’t need to put all their savings on the line and have their future hanging in the balance. A laptop and Internet connection are the only necessary things. Looks great, doesn’t it? Or shady? Let’s work it out!

How does drop shipping work?

To cut a long story short, drop shipping is a secure path for a retail business. Usually retailers buy products in advance, which implies having warehouses to store them, hiring people and renting offices to manage your sales. In other words, this traditional model requires a considerable amount of money to start and maintain it. Not to mention that if your business fails, you will experience serious financial problems.

Drop shipping, on the other hand, allows almost everyone to run their own business without being at risk. Your suppliers take on the responsibility of storing and shipping goods. You just need to add their products to your online store. Customers pay you money for the items they’d like to buy, you redirect the orders to your suppliers and they send those items to the buyers on your behalf. That’s how drop shipping works. It’s obvious that the sum of money to start it is affordable almost for everyone. You avoid the main obstacle which prevents from opening a business – the risk of having financial problems.

How to get the ball rolling

So, it’s clear how drop shipping works, but it’s still vague how to start it. Actually, it also doesn’t seem to be hard. The whole process boils down to two steps:

1. Setting up your online store. There is no problem to build your own site nowadays. You’ve got 2 options to choose from:

• Shopify
• WordPress

Both of them don’t require any deep knowledge of computing. Shopify is a chargeable platform for creating online shops. WordPress is a content management system which in combination with WooCommerce allows you to design your store. The first one lets you use your store only within the platform for monthly payment, but you can’t change a hosting provider, for example in the case of discovering a cheaper one. The second option is free and doesn’t limit your website ownership rights.

2. Finding reliable suppliers. That’s a vital detail of being successful in drop shipping. As it was mentioned, suppliers set you free from storing and shipping goods, but if your customers aren’t pleased with products’ quality, delivery time, etc., you’re going to be the accountable person who’s supposed to sort it out. Therefore, you’re walking a tightrope by working with questionable partners. Fortunately, there are some tools that help you solve that problem:

• Oberlo app (for your Shopify shop)
• Alidropship WooCommerce plugin (for your WordPress site)

Oberlo is an app which helps you find and add goods to your Shopify shop for monthly charge. The Alidropship plugin integrates your WooCommerce drop shipping store with AliExpress, where you can easily find dozens of suppliers.

Does drop shipping mean success?

Although it’s clear that drop shipping is not some shady scheme, – it’s a result of the retail business development, – many people may think drop shipping means easy money. That’s not true. Drop shipping has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s a highly competitive business field. Your success depends on many things such as a right marketing strategy, your site’s design and convenience, choice of items to sell, etc. But even if you make a mistake running your store, you’ll be able to fix it painlessly. Drop shipping doesn’t mean 100% success, it means you won’t fail.