selling other people's products online?
I suppose we all want things that yield far more in terms of results than the effort required. I wouldn't say there isn't a lot of work to be done by selling other people's things online.
However, when compared to generating and managing your own product, the commercial process is far more streamlined.
The best thing you can do as a brand is to sell products under your own brand name. It is better if the products that you sell have your brand name or logo, but if you don't have that option, you can dropship products with someone else's brand.
Downsides of selling other people’s products
The downside is that you are promoting someone else's brand rather than your own. When people receive the product, and they continue using it, they're always gonna remember that brand, but they may not remember the store that they bought it from. Kudos! With your search for ways to earn money selling other people's items online, you've already taken a big step toward figuring out how to make money online! With so much internet hype and so many people failing online, how can one determine which company model is truly successful?
First and foremost, you are secure with the concept of selling other people's offers online: it is not only a very newcomer friendly technique to make money online, but it has also been demonstrated in success by thousands of online marketers with amazing, genuine revenue outcomes.
I'll show you how to make money with other people's items in online business in detail in the following sections. You will also receive some additional advice and alerts that will assist you in making a seamless transition into this business.
Here's a quick rundown of what you won't have to worry about if you use a wise approach of selling other people's stuff online:
No own product to design and maintain, no product brand building to deal with, no online shop to deal with, no item storage to deal with, no shipping to deal with, no customer support to deal with, no technological issues to deal with, no additional employees required
Each of these time and money-consuming activities are unnecessary when selling other people's items. But, in detail, how does this lean, newbie-friendly business operate?
When you're not involved in any of the jobs listed above, how do you bridge the gap between the product owner/supplier and the person buying the products?
What's the deal with
High competition:
Overly optimistic entrepreneurs will always focus entirely on the "low overhead" part of the equation, ignoring the strong data presented above.
While starting a drop shipping firm, it requires relatively little money, there is a lot of harsh competition, with the most popular markets suffering more than others.
Essentially, the larger a firm is, the lower its markups can be in order to give the best prices.
To make matters worse, your suppliers are unlikely to offer you an exclusive contract.
That means that your products could be sold by a variety of competitors. If you're just starting out as a small business, your competitors with years of expertise will be able to undercut your costs because they have the resources you don't.
That indicates that if a potential consumer can get the same thing for less money from someone else, why should they buy from you?
The supply chain is unpredictable:
If customers complain about product quality, shipment speed, or return policies in traditional e-commerce, you can address the issues directly.
Store owners in dropshipping are more or less at the mercy of the supplier, but you're the one who needs to deal directly with your customers.
Dropshippers are essentially caught, with no choice except to hope that the supplier resolves the issues while also assuring the consumer about something they can't control.
Furthermore, communication is delayed as the dropshipper switches back and forth between the customer and the supplier. When someone responds slowly, all communication comes to a halt, and problems take longer to resolve.
And if they're loud about it, including on social media, those negative reviews might derail your business before it even gets off the ground.
Difficult to build your brand
Dropshippers, like ghostwriters and songwriters, must accept that credit for their work is given to someone else.
If the thing you're offering is truly outstanding, your buyers will be so focused on the brand that they will completely forget about the purchasing experience.
After all, the logo on the box isn't yours.
Legal issues
If you're selling drop shipping products that have someone else's branding, first of all, you can get into trouble because maybe they might have a trademark or a copyright on that product.
So, you should avoid selling products like those that already have branding, because someone might just file a legal case against you or ask you to pay them back.
This happens a lot in the dropshipping space. However, if you find a supplier who is allowing you to dropship their products in which they have their brand name, you can definitely dropship their products.
Even though this isn't a frequent problem among dropshippers, it's worth noting. Some suppliers aren't as trustworthy as they seem and you’ll never often know where your product comes from.
Even more dishonest are vendors that, on a regular basis, use a trademarked logo or another company's intellectual property without permission.
A strong Dropshipping Agreement Contract can solve this possible risk, however not every dropshipping newbie is aware of this.
It's something to bear in mind when making supplier selections.
How to find success in dropshipping?
If you want to find success in the E-commerce space, I would recommend you to sell products under your own brand name.
You can also sell something that's unbranded, but the packing material has your logo or branding. That's the best way I would recommend you to take it forward.
Whenever someone's drop shipping, the supplier is the one who's going to be taking care of the delivery and the delivery address definitely goes on the package. So, even if the product isn't delivered, it returns back to the warehouse.
This is something that you cannot really control, but you could ask your supplier not to add their branding or logo on the package. Whatever the courier partner asks for will go there.
The courier partner will definitely ask the address in case of returns and have the same address, which can’t be controlled.
However, you can control that within the order, so that they don't add anything related to the address or brand or whatsoever.
Get your own products drop shipped
You can also get other people to drop ship your products. It's a very good business model.
In fact, this is one thing that we've been considering in the last couple of months for our brand, as well. Now the question is how can you do it?
First of all you must publicly announce to the world that you allow drop shipping of your products. You can create a page called white label on your website.
Now, white labelling simply means that you're allowing other people to sell your products or that you are offering services wherein people can add their own brand to your product, and then you ship it for them. That's one way to do that.
Otherwise, you can add drop shipping or a partner program, wherein you sell products that either don't have any branding, or products that have your branding.
Let’s say that the products have your branding and you create the partners page, which you've set up and you've made it very clear that you do provide such services.
Now, the second step is to find drop shippers. The easiest way to find drop shippers is to list the products by yourself on the websites where the dropshippers can find products to drop ship.
You can get in touch with product research apps and tools, and do some research and based on that you could start being active on dropshipping Facebook groups.
You can also start creating some YouTube videos around this. There are a lot of these product research tools and apps to do this.
When used appropriately, dropshipping can be a very effective strategy.
However, as a firm grows larger, the reasons why it doesn't work for new enterprises is due to the inappropriate approaches followed.
A well-established company already has a steady stream of customers and doesn't have to worry as much about building a brand.
Dropshipping is a fantastic addition for most seasoned ecommerce businesses, but if you use the wrong strategies, don't count on it to perform all of the heavy lifting.
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Nishkarsh Sharma
Nishkarsh Sharma has helped generate sales worth 20+ Crores across different e-commerce stores.
