If you ask somebody what nowadays the most available way to make money is, they are likely to answer that it’s starting an online store. But how did we get here?
The world today looks significantly different than it looked 50,40 or even 5 years ago. Many things you’ve got used to and take for granted weren’t so in the past.
Getting cold and cutting a finger doesn’t look like something worth being worried nowadays. However, if you were a typical human being living in 1928, such problems could turn out to cost you your life. The mortality rate from the diseases which you can cure in a couple of days now was extremely high at the time. It happened due to the fact that the world hadn’t discovered such thing as penicillin yet – something that now seems to have always been existing. Who knows how our life could look like if Alexander Fleming hadn’t invented this antibiotic by accident? Fortunately, he did, and you can enjoy eating ice cream or getting soaked in the rain without the risk of kicking the bucket from getting cold.
Source: ITWeb
Similarly, you won’t astonish anybody by starting an online store without inventory today, although about 25 years ago such your decision would cause laughter. You must own something before selling it. That was the well-established thought, the law. Nobody brought it into question.
Almost nobody.
There have always been some people in our history who made progress keep on going. The rules were changing. The appearance of the companies such as Amazon, eBay, Alibaba Group proved the possibility of making money online with minimum investment. This trend was shaping the new reality and resulted in the invention of dropshipping.
This business model opened up new opportunities for businesses to evolve. Since then, retail companies didn’t have to buy products in advance and invest heavily in the infrastructure to store and deliver them. Their suppliers took on this burden. To return the favor, retailers had to promote the goods and ensure the stable flow of orders.
However, it remained challenging for ordinary people to start an online store and adopt the dropshipping model. Problems related to running the store and managing the orders scared entrepreneurs. Only a few of them decided to give it a shot. There were some young entrepreneurs among them who deserve a closer look.
Source: Doofinder
The first steps to start an online store
In 2015 they started building their first online drop shipping store. Although there are some solutions for creating e-commerce websites easily and fast, they make their choice in favor of setting up the store based on WordPress. Why? Firstly, using these e-commerce platforms for building online shops costs a quite sensitive sum of money, whereas WordPress is free. Secondly, they restrict your ownership of the site, while the importance of being independent in business is hard to downplay. And finally, the entrepreneurs have been already participating in AliExpress affiliate program and developed a solution to create websites for that purpose with WordPress. Their experience with AliExpress helps them solve one of the most challenging problems of dropshipping – searching for suppliers. Indeed, your business partner has to offer low prices and decent quality at the same time.
And where could you find such one? This question disturbs many newcomers. But isn’t it reasonable to look for the supplier on the e-commerce platform which contains offers with the lowest prices – on AliExpress? For those entrepreneurs, it looks so.
However, it seems to be risky to deal with someone you don’t know. The future of your venture depends on the reliability of your business partners. What if some problems come up? You’re going to be in charge of handle it – not the suppliers.
The businessmen believe that if you search carefully, pay attention to the supplier’s statistic, you won’t fail. While learning about the experience of other drop shipping stores founders, the young business owners decide to increase their chances to succeed by choosing the products according to the following rules:
- Take a narrow niche;
- Select only the most popular products in the niche;
- Import products with wholesale prices that don’t exceed $20;
- Mark up the products at twice the initial cost;
- Sell goods with free worldwide shipping only.
Then they go about building their online store. And come up against a new challenge. What do you need to manage the efficient dropshipping process from AliExpress? You find an item suitable to sell in your online shop. And what next? You manually copy the whole information about it to your site. Then find the other one. And do the manual work again. A bit time-consuming? Sure, but if you have enough patience, you can put up with it. Ok, what if some info changes on the AliExpress side? You have to keep monitoring your suppliers constantly and make all the changes on your website? No, that’s totally unsuitable!
Source: Pishon Design Studio
The solution for your online store
The businessmen clearly understand they need a tool which will sort this problem out. It takes them up to 3-4 months to build their first online store and develop the first version of the software that automatically imports products from AliExpress to your shop along with their images, descriptions, etc. and updates the info. While running the store, they share their experience with other e-commerce entrepreneurs on the most famous forums on the Internet. From the very beginning, the e-commerce world watches online how the young store’s owners successfully overcome new challenges and perfect their software. The best advertisement for any product, isn’t it? It’s not surprising that the audience of their dropshipping journey starts being interested in getting this software.
Source: the Beijinger
Eventually, this software evolves into what we know now as Alidropship plugin, which allows you to create an online store in the blink of an eye and run it effortlessly. Problems which posed difficulties for smooth and efficient dropshipping from AliExpress in the past can be solved and automated with this plugin. From marking up your products to fulfilling the orders.
Today the creators of Alidropship plugin to continue working on improving their product and developing new software, which allows dozens of people around the globe start their online stores as easy as buying a ticket to the cinema.
