People do businesses with other people all the time. People trade by buying some products and then quickly re-selling them, and make profit out of the trade. This buying / selling and profit making process happens offline and online. This is how people in the world do business all the time.
But how do you buy online and then sell online again? And the hardest part is when you sell, you mustn’t sell for a price lower than when you bought that product. There must be some ways to trade with profits while all of these being done through online.
To set up yourself to sell online, you’ll need an online store.
- You can open a store on some ecommerce platforms such as eBay or Amazon.
- You may choose not to rely on platforms, and launch your own store on your own website. With this option, you can use one of the website builders out there including WordPress, Shopify, Magento, etc.
The traditional way of selling a product requires you to have the following process in place:
- Find the product.
- Buy the product from your supplier.
- Receive the product from your supplier.
- Store the product in your warehouse. Imagine when you are selling a few hundred products or items, and you’ll need a warehouse to first store your inventory.
- Take an order from a customer and get a payment.
- Ship out the product to your customer.
But there is an alternative approach. One simple answer is dropshipping. Dropshipping means you still buy and sell, but you are never going to physically “touch” the product. You don’t have to take care of the inventory and shipping of your product. With dropping, inventory and shipping steps are being taken care by your supplier.
To start with a new dropshipping business, follow the steps below.
Choose a niche. These days, it isn’t practical to sell everything online. Selling a few products from within one single will allow you to run your business. Think about the time you will have to spend running your online business.
Go to Aliexpress. From the hundreds and thousands of suppliers and manufacturers, look for products that you would like to sell online.
A quick way to launch your own website store is to sign up and use Shopify. Now run the Shopify name generator tool for your new business or domain name suggestions. You won’t have to take care of website hosting, as Shopify is a website builder that takes care of your hosting. The rest is to import the product information on to your Shopify store.
Another solution involves you registering a new domain name, and building a website. Get a web hosting solution to host your website. For hosting services, choose from one of the many such as Godaddy, Hostgator, etc, and you can put up your website on website builders such as WordPress, Magento, etc.
