Data is Indispensable to Dropshipping. Here’s Why
Take your dropshipping business to new heights with actionable insights derived from up-to-date high-quality data.
Dropshipping is a business model where you sell goods on the internet without owning a brick-and-mortar store.
In this order-fulfillment method, most hurdles faced by your typical online e-commerce store are remedied by freeing the seller from the hassle of stocking up on inventory.
A Dopshipper acts as a mediator between the buyer and seller. They sell items directly from the supplier’s well-endowed inventory.
Dropshipping enables adventurous entrepreneurs to sell online without focusing on mass production, booking warehouse space, or even maintaining a delivery process.
For reference, you can check out the sites of Inspire Uplift and Meowington. They are great examples of successful dropshipping businesses.
Why Dropshipping
Dropshipping is most suitable for people looking to start a business with low investment. All you really need to start a dropshipping business is a computer and a stable internet connection! Here are some reasons you ought to at least think about giving dropshipping a try:
1. Limited investments
Dropshipping might be the only business you can start with almost no investment. Just collaborate with a few reliable vendors and you are good to go. Of course, you will require an attractive website, and targeted messaging that’ll help your prospects convert to being loyal customers. As product demands increase and you begin selling more, you can think of investing more, but it is solely your choice.
2. Almost no expenses
You don’t really have much to lose if your dropshipping business goes under. Not to kill the fire of entrepreneurship in you, but dropshipping allows you to run your business from any part of the world with virtually no operational cost.
3. Wide variety of products to sell
Like in most online businesses, you are not beholden to certain products in dropshipping. You can sell anything you want. You might want to focus on the kind of brand you want to build. Whether you envision your brand as a general store or a boutique store, you have the full say in the products you want to sell.
Meowington for instance is a dropshipping cat store. It is a niche product offering dedicated to people who adore furry friends of the feline kind.
4. No limit to growth
Since third-party vendors will be responsible for stocking your supplies, all you need to worry about is building your brand and growing your business. Just find a product or a range of products you are passionate about and go from there. As your brand equity grows, you can begin to charge your suppliers for the top slots on your website.
Data Extraction: The backbone of your dropshipping business
What looks pleasant on the surface generally has a few contrivances beneath. Managing data is a big problem for Dropshippers especially when they begin to scale. From ensuring a steady supply of products to automating lead generation, data extraction has a big part to play in the success of your dropshipping business.
Let’s take a look at some of the best use cases of web data extraction in dropshipping:
1. Gathering data from reliable dropshipping suppliers
Leveraging Grepsr’s data extraction infrastructure, ambitious dropshippers can scrape thousands of websites to discover hot products, onboard trustworthy partners and suppliers, and regularly track inventory to check the availability of particular products.
Dropshipping.com is one of the major dropshipping enablers in the world that provide extensive resources, including but not limited to dropshipping lessons, step-by-step mentorship, and online tools to help you make hustle-free and cost-effective decisions. Here, in one of their articles, they list out the top 100 e-commerce suppliers for sourcing dropshipping products.
You may be tempted to think that the hard part is done. Now that you have a general idea of how a dropshipping business functions, what’s there stopping you? But is anything that easy?
You are bound to come across more than one hiccup if you don’t have a system in place to collect supplier data. To stay competitive alone, a dropshipping business needs to have the data of multiple suppliers at any given time. So, your customers get access to the best products, not to mention, at the best prices.
Grepsr automates the data extraction process and enables you to take quick and profitable decisions.
2. Gaining a competitive advantage over other Dropshippers with the right pricing strategy
Pricing is almost always the deciding factor when it comes to sales. Analyzing data from a host of data sources on the internet gives you a clear-cut direction when it comes to drafting an apt pricing strategy.
We’ve talked at length about basic e-commerce data monitoring strategies like MAP monitoring and Share of Voice in our previous blogs. To re-emphasize those points, many resellers critically analyze the datasets from different resellers to set their pricing strategies, some going way below and some blowing it out of proportion. To succeed in this frontier, you need data, and that is where Grepsr comes in.
By collecting data from multiple suppliers, you’ll get a general idea of the prevalent market dynamics which will help you set product prices that most resonate with the customers.
3. Identifying and cashing in on market trends
Capitalizing on market trends may be the single most important factor for a dropshipping business. One of Grepsr’s most important offerings has been data for customer sentiment analysis.
Reviews and Q&A data are the cornerstones of the process. It allows you to gauge customer sentiments and detect patterns and recurring themes among consumers. You can leverage this data to define shortcomings in particular products and discover room for improvement.
Furthermore, with the insights obtained from this data you can go on to look for better products online, again with the help of Grepsr by searching and tabulating data for particular keywords for a certain product category.
4. Running effective marketing campaigns for your dropshipping business
The rule of thumb for any marketing campaign is to design relevant ad creatives directed to a target audience that we know they will resonate with.
Data-driven marketing campaigns utilize customer data to derive accurate predictions leading to better performance on various KPIs such as reach, ROI, conversion, traffic, awareness, engagement, etc.
Data offers a more vivid picture of the customer when analyzed and utilized properly.
To get started
You can immediately start collecting data from unlimited sources, thanks to Grepsr. To give you a rundown of the process, this is how you can get started:
- Configure a crawler on the supplier website that you want to extract data from.
- The crawler is set up based on your requirements. The data is monitored 24/7 to detect any changes on the website.
- We extract the data and ensure that data is of high quality with our manual and automated QA processes.
- We send the data over to you in the asked-for format, be it in JSON or a CSV file. Since the data we provide is ready-made for deployment, you can choose to plug the dropshipping data feed directly into your system.
So long Dropshippers!
We sincerely hope you have a full-fledged understanding of the dropshipping business model and why you need data extraction to scale your dropshipping venture. This new exciting online retail fulfilment method can be a surefire way to financial freedom, but only when you have solid growth enablers by your side.
Partner with Grepsr and scale your modest business into a force to reckon with.
