Meet Greg. He isn’t a coin collector. He isn’t much of a techie. Greg just picked on a suggestion, decided to built an ecommerce site backed up by dropshipping into a niche that most people would not have thought about.
The result: Greg Laptevsky, founder of Coin Supply Planet, built a dropshipping business for niche products putting in just about 10–15 hours each week.
Does passion contribute to success even if you didn’t understand technology or if you were never an expert in whatever you sold online?
Say hello to Brain Lim. In an interview with Jun Loayza at Ecommerce Rules, Brain stands out as an entrepreneur who built a globally successful ecommerce company without expertise but pure passion for EDM (Electric Dance Music).
Maybe expertise helps and technology can be bolted on to the business later? That’s just what Anthony did after several years of working with Kitchen Cabinets.
Anthony Saladino of Kitchen Cabinet Kings built a drop shopping business in the Kitchen Cabinets Vertical.
What are we trying to drive at here?
According to eMarketer, total worldwide retail ecommerce sales reached $22 trillion (with a T) by the end of 2016.
By the end of 2020, it’s set to reach $27 trillion.
If you’d like to ride the enormous opportunity that ecommerce represents, you very well can. If you have an idea, passion, undying energy, unwavering dedication, and the ability to take action, you can ride the massive Tsunami of the eCommerce Wave.
There are three broad ways to start an ecommerce business:
- Source products (create them or find them cheaper), setup an ecommerce site, and sell.
- Setup an ecommerce site and use Dropshipping as your main business model. You sell products and others will ship products out for you.
- A combination model of point 1 and point 2.
In the case of your own ecommerce site, you’d have to setup an ecommerce site to help you sell products, process payments, keep track of your inventory, ship products, and more. Plus, you’d have to do everything to do do marketing and get customers.
If you choose the dropshipping option, you’d only have to worry about choosing the right dropshipping partner, setup an ecommerce enabled website, and only focus on marketing instead of inventory, products, shipping, and logistics.
Don’t like dealing with platforms, hosting, web design, ecommerce integrations, etc.?
Large and popular ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerceallow you to build out fully-equipped ecommerce sites based off templates giving you everything you need to start your ecommerce business — whether you choose dropshipping or the traditional ecommerce route.
In fact, dropshipping is so popular that both Shopify and BigCommerce provide you with direct drop shipping integration with some well-known dropshipping companies to make it even easier for you to start your dropshipping business.
Because running an ecommerce store is just as strenuous and demanding as a normal retailing business minus some, the best route for non-techies for a slightly less demanding business model would be dropshipping.
Dropshipping allows you to:
- Start a business quickly and with less risk.
- Setup a store and not have to worry about.
- Test out markets and products and to validate your business model with spending too much
- Not worry about large capital requirements for space, inventory, overheads, staff, and equipment.
- Never having to take up the work for warehousing and managing stock
- Run an ecommerce business without the hassle of shipping, logistics, and product returns.
- Leave customer support and other critical aspects of your business to your dropshipping partners.
- Run a location independent business
- Get an opportunity to scale up
- Focus on marketing, customer acquisition.
- Automate parts of your business with available technology, tools, and services.
Dropshipping gives you all the benefits of ecommerce without any of the risks. It allows you to be an entrepreneur, run businesses with the potential of global scale, and gives you a practical, proven, and systematic business to run.
Convinced yet? Have you dabbled with ecommerce before? Shoot us a message in the Medium comments. We’re always happy to open up a dialogue to chat with others about ecommerce and dropshipping!
