Day 24: Slight Pivot. Adding Drop shipping as well. Why?
A Quick recap: In our previous post, I talked about the Essentials of an eCommerce store, where we explored the essential features to setup an eCommerce site.
Day 24, I slightly changed my mind about my business model.
Over the weekend, at a party I was telling my friends about ‘The Symbol’ (It’s always important to tell people what you do, otherwise how will your business grow?). A good friend of mine who is a Chemical Engineer-turned-businessman, has been using various online outlets to sell his products was sharing his experience about selling online and how the market has changed over the years… Yada Yada Yada.
While he told me that it is quite hard for him to reach his audience while competing with his competitors trying to give customers the best offers, he shared his thoughts on how the practice of giving steep discount to customers was in fact spoiling the economy ( I personally disagree with that, as I assume it is one of the proven marketing strategy)
He also told me about this concept called Drop Shipping. Where you are just like a retailer, except you don’t handle the warehousing and shipping. You list the products in your online store with your desired margin, when a listed product is bought, you take your margin and transfer the order to the seller. He takes care of the rest of it. He advised me to change my business model entirely and run a drop shipping portal.
Seemed like a great idea, I did my research on it when I got home (As always).
Here are some things I found,
- He was right about the getting started with less money, no warehousing, part.
- Your revenue is lesser compared to being a direct seller. It’s not substantial enough if you have very less products in your inventory.
- When you have no control over the inventory, you can’t really take up a high volume order. It may be delayed from the seller’s end.
If I were to consider drop shipping, It could be because I won’t have to worry about the space to stack up the products and somebody else will be fulfilling the order on my behalf. But considering the margin, I’ll have to give it a deep thought. Or maybe I could create a separate curated section for drop shipped products, where my user’s can find hand-picked goods that are available with other sellers on my site. I still have to figure out a way to bring drop shipping into the-symbol’s site. That’s where I am at, now.
These were the key points that i wanted to highlight. What do you guys think?
Will I change The-Symbol.net’s entire business model to become a drop ship site? Maybe not. Will I include drop shipping in the business model? Maybe.
There’s so much confusion and it’s exhausting. I need a cup of coffee.
