Dropshipping for suppliers: what you need to know

The number of online shops using the strategy of dropshipping has increased. Consequently, this business model has become increasingly popular. This development offers great opportunities for suppliers and wholesalers. As a supplier, you are keen on developments in the market and want to know where the opportunities lie. Dropshipping can be a great opportunity for your company to expand your sales market and introduce more consumers to your products. In this article, we will introduce you to the benefits and concerns of dropshipping for suppliers. We also show you how to start offering dropshipping to your customers in just a few steps.

The benefits

Before you start offering dropshipping to your customers as a supplier, you obviously want to know what the benefits are for you. We’ve briefly listed these benefits for you.

Scalability

As a company, it is important that you can easily adapt your activities to the demand. Here you can think of sales and order processing. When scaling up production, you would prefer to still offer your customers good quality. With dropshipping this is easy to achieve, as the processes are automated. In this way, product (data) and in addition the order (data) can be sent more easily.

Accessibility

Several e-commerce partners have made connecting online stores to suppliers a lot easier. This makes it easier for you as a supplier to do business with webshops and to coordinate the logistical process together. Starting your own dropshipping webshop is a lot easier and it makes the choice to start a webshop easier. Because it makes starting a web shop more accessible, these new web shops are more likely to come to you as a supplier. The supplier can also use dropshipping to boost sales without having to make large investments.

Larger range

By offering dropshipping as a supplier as well, you increase your sales market. You give more companies and at the same time more consumers the chance to get to know your products.
This will expand your reach. This can result in more sales.

New business

There are opportunities to work with the dropshipping partner(s) you work with to bring new products to the market, adding value to the customer. For example, you can create something innovative or release a product under your own brand name.

Spreading risks

As an entrepreneur, it is never smart to bet on one horse, this creates dependency and is therefore a big risk. If your only customer goes bankrupt or looks elsewhere, you’ve lost your entire revenue stream in one fell swoop. Dropshipping allows you as a supplier to scale in individual numbers. By supplying dropshippers, you create small financial flows per store. You can deliver to as many stores as you want, and so all those small financial streams soon add up to a large total revenue.

A calculation example:

1 web store sells 3 orders per day at 15 euros per product. That’s 1350 euros of turnover per month. Suppose you have 10 shops connected, then you already come to 13,500 euros per month. Go figure if you have 100 shops!

Customer satisfaction

If you, as a wholesaler, offer a variety of services to your customers, there is a greater chance that some of the offerings will resonate with them. So by adding dropshipment to the services provided, you can better meet the needs of customers.

The focal points

In addition to benefits, dropshipping also has some concerns. If you know what things to be alert for, you can better anticipate them and increase your chances of success with dropshipping.

Standardization

Standardization has numerous advantages. It makes work processes measurable and improves their speed and quality. In addition, it enables you to maintain a continuous level of quality
guarantee. So make sure you map out your work processes and set them up to ensure continuous quality. Consider, for example, standardization of logistics,
sales, marketing or automation. But support or customer service can also be standardized.

Logistics in order

This is where the importance of standardization comes in. When your work processes are standardized, you guarantee their quality. This also applies to the logistical work processes. If your logistics are not up to standard and orders, for example, arrive at the consumer too late or not at all, this damages the reputation of the web store. Chances are that the web store would rather go with another supplier if this happens more often.

Reliable support

It is important for both suppliers and dropshippers to have good customer service as this contributes to the customer experience. So make sure you can be easily reached and employees
understanding of business. See for yourself if you have the right capacity to answer questions or if setting up a support team would be more convenient. With a support team, standardization is also important. If the customer gets different answers from employees, it does not improve reliability. Make sure employees are well informed. A training course for your employees can help with this.

Getting started in 3,2,1…

Would you like to start offering dropshipping as a supplier, but don’t know where and how to start? Webshopimporter helps you on your way. You can register with us in two steps so that you can start offering your products to webshops. But first of all, it is important to have a few things in place.

Preparation

1. Logistics and data feeds.

To keep data up-to-date, it is important that products and orders are synchronized daily to all dropshipping customers. A data feed must be made available for this automatic synchronization.

2. Platform support

Make sure you have an online store platform. Webshopimporter supports the following platforms: Magento, Lightspeed, CCV shop, Woocommerce and Shopify. Should you have another platform
use, then we can connect you to 1 of these platforms at an additional cost.

3. Access or submit CSV, XML, or API data.

CSV/XML/API data can come from an ERP system or from a web shop. Ensure that Webshopimporter is supplied with the technical documentation from the ERP system or has access to the data.

4. Discuss offer

Before we get to work on making offering dropshipping to your customers possible, we will discuss the quote. We agree on the financial terms during an online meeting. We charge a commission rate for infrastructure set-up and one-time implementation costs.

5. Exchanging materials.

For the purpose of cooperation, it is desirable that we exchange supporting materials with each other and to name each other on their own websites.

Sign up at Webshopimporter

Are the above issues in order? Then you can easily register with Webshopimporter in two steps and start offering your products to various web stores. It involves the following steps:

Step 1: Make a product data feed available

An important basis for dropshipment is providing a good data feed. This can then be offered to dropshippers and used by them for their online store. In a
data feed contain product data (for example, an item number, title, price or description). The file may be supplied in CSV or XML format. If a web service is available,
Webshopimporter can link them over API.

Step 2: Sign up at Webshopimporter

To be able to offer products to webshops you will first have to register with Webshopimporter. We read a product data feed so that it can be distributed to various web store platforms. Then the dropshipper can easily import the feed using our apps. The result is that the products are in his or her shop and inventories,
prices, images and other data are automatically updated in the shops.

More information?

Following this article, do you have questions about offering dropshipping as a supplier? For this you can always contact us, we are happy to help! If you leave your information below, we will contact you as soon as possible.