Why Dropshipping Proves More Profitable Than Other Online Business Models
Nobody starts a home-based business to work just as hard as they did in their boring, old 9-5, do they?
For even the most dedicated and conscientious of entrepreneurs, the overall goal with any new enterprise is always the same:
Generate maximum profits for minimal effort.
Whether it’s selling gourmet cuisine, starting an online clothing business, or making money from selling handcrafted goods, many of us dream about turning our passion into profit, creating a money making machine that cranks out the cash and leaves us free to explore new opportunities, develop new businesses, Â or go forth on the adventure of a lifetime.
Then, reality kicks in, and that dream quickly turns into a harsh, unavoidable reality.
Rather than enjoying the freedom and flexibility a home-based business is supposed to provide, we’re instead handcuffed to a laptop, spending hour after hour pounding at the keyboard in a desperate attempt to generate a profit in what turned out to be a highly competitive market.
Rather than living the life of abundant wealth promised to us by certain home-based business models, Â we instead recall in horror when it turns out that any profits we do make still aren’t enough to recoup that huge capital investment we made in the early days.
Sound familiar?
Then there’s one question that’s no doubt been on your mind for some time:
What went wrong?
Don’t worry, there is some good news:
It’s unlikely to be your fault.
The fact is that you -and scores of other entrepreneurs before you- have done everything you could have possibly done.
You’ve invested capital, you’ve invested time, and you’ve followed your chosen business model to the letter.
Yet therein lies the problem:
It’s your business model that’s ineffective.
Don’t blame yourself – most sites that promise to show you how to start your own online store talk of untold riches and a wealth of passive income streams. So the whole thing seems like a good idea at first glance, when you look a little closer, and you’ll discover that most of those online business models are riddled with flaws.
With some, it’s the huge initial investment required to produce any kind of return. With others, it’s the sheer length of time needed to start turning profit.
Either way, the majority of online business models, from affiliate marketing to traditional eCommerce, are simply not designed to generate the kind of success most home-based entrepreneurs are striving for.
As with all rules, however, there is an exception:
Start a Dropshipping Business
For the uninitiated, dropshipping is a simple-yet-effective model of generating a significant passive income stream via an online business.
In its most basic sense, starting a dropshipping business essentially means running an eCommerce store without actually stocking any of the products you sell.
When a customer buys a product from you, you order that product from one of many dropship wholesalers, who then pick, pack, and ship that product directly to your customer.
As you can imagine, this eliminates any need to deal with inventory, storage, order fulfilment or logistics, but there’s still work to be done in setting up your new venture, attracting customers, and getting those vital orders in.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for the secret to how to start your own online store that doesn’t require a lot of time, money, and effort to set up, there is another approach to drop shipping that delivers a fully-formed business right out of the bo:
Buying an Existing Dropship Website
Rather than going through the hard work of creating a website, investing in marketing, and partnering with wholesalers, you can dive right into the profit-generation side of things by buying one of a number of turnkey dropship websites available online.
Why go down this route towards realising your dreams of starting your own successful online business?
I’m glad you asked.
Here are just a few reasons why drop shipping triumphs over other online business models every single time.
Minimal cash investment
Make no mistake about it – whether you’re starting an online clothing store or selling pots and pans, you’re going to need some serious capital investment to start a traditional eCommerce store.
From legal fees to website creation and marketing, any number of factors can add up to the true cost of starting an online business, not least of which being the cost of your products themselves.
Think about it:
After investing heavily in inventory, you now need a place to store that inventory that’s dry, safe, and accessible. As you’ve already guessed, those kinds of places don’t come cheap.Â
Nor are they only costs you’ll have to factor into your overall startup budget.Â
Consider the cost of security to protect your valuable stock, and the cost of keeping your storage space at exactly the right temperature to avoid damaging that stock.
Then consider the cost of shipping, advertising, an SSL certificate to ensure your website can process orders securely.
Trust me, we aren’t talking small change here.
Yet that’s exactly why starting a dropshipping business holds such lofty appeal for so many home-based business owners:
You don’t need to worry about storing and protecting inventory and shipping is none of your concern, so the actual capital investment needed to get started is minimal.
All you need is the funds to develop your online store and attract customers.
Opt to go down the route of purchasing turnkey dropship websites, and those startup costs are reduced even further since everything is ready to go right out of the proverbial box.
Of course, it’s easy to argue that dropshipping isn’t the only online business model that -on the surface at least- appears to do away with the need for a high capital investment.
Take affiliate marketing for example.
The True Cost of Affiliate Marketing
Yes, it’s true that -much like drop shipping itself- setting up an affiliate marketing business means you don’t have to pay for inventory and storage – you simply drive customers to another business’ website and reap the rewards when they make a purchase.
Simple, right?
Sure, but there’s one thing that most new entrepreneurs overlook when opting for affiliate marketing over dropshipping:
The cost of content.
To be truly successful with an affiliate marketing business means investing heavily in producing and optimising content in order to attract visitors and drive them to a sales website.
Pay a content marketing specialist or SEO expert to help with that, and for the sheer volume of premium quality content that you’re going to need, you should expect to pay a pretty penny.
Opt to make all that content yourself, however, and you’re looking at months of hard work, taking away precious time that could be better spent on growing your business.
Which brings us neatly to our next point:
Zero Startup Time
They say that time is money, and that’s certainly true when it comes to starting your own online store.
The longer it takes to grow from those early ideas to a fully-functioning online store, the longer it takes to start generating a return on your initial investment, and the longer that takes, the longer you’re going to have to wait before you begin generating actual profit.
We’ll talk about the time it takes to generate an actual profit in just a moment, but first, let’s consider how long it might realistically take you to get your new home-based business off the ground.
In this example, we’ll say you’re starting an online clothing business.
Let’s say it takes you a month to finalise your business plan, gather your funding together, and register your domain name.
It’s another two months to develop a website, source suppliers, and rent suitable premises from which to base your operations.
Two more months gets all your stock delivered, product photography taken care of, images uploaded to your website, and initial marketing done.
Another month irons out any last minute kinks, and finally, six months after you started, you’re finally ready to open your virtual doors and start making an income.
That’s essentially six months of your life that you’ll be working for free.
I’ll give you a few moments to let that sink in.
Ready to keep going?
Let’s now compare that six months of working for free to get a standard eCommerce store off the ground to the near-immediate turnaround time that comes with purchasing a turnkey dropship website.
Since everything is pre-built and ready to go, you can start generating income from your new online business no more than 24 hours after you buy that website.
Instant Profits
With some business models, it can take as much as two to three years (yes, years!) before you start to reach profitability with your business, but let’s face it:
Who can afford to wait that long?
Certainly not you, which is no doubt why you’ve been looking at online business models in the first place – convinced that the mass availability of the web and the quick-and-easy process digital transactions is a surefire way to guarantee rapid income generation.
The truth, however, is things aren’t always so easy.
Take the example of an affiliate marketing business.
After spending months creating a wealth of compelling content, you’re likely to face another six or seven month waiting for that content to take hold and start driving some serious traffic, whilst even the most effective of Search Engine Optimisation campaigns can take between six to 12 months to start producing significant results.
Now, let’s compare this to what happens when you start a dropshipping business:
As we’ve already established, if you go down the route of finding a drop shipping business for sale and snapping it up, you’re ready to start making a profit immediately – or at least the following day.
Start from scratch by creating your own website, and you’re still ready to start making a profit from day one.
Think about it:
Your buyer pays you, you pay your dropship wholesaler, and the rest is up to you, leaving you with instant profit which you can then immediately reinvest and take your business to the next level.
Speaking of which…
Easily Create Multiple Passive Income Streams
Let’s be honest – even the most modest entrepreneurs among us dream of doing more with our online businesses than simply setting up and selling a few products.
Part of what draws us to most home-based business models in the first place is the unprecedented opportunities it affords us to grow, evolve, and develop multiple passive income streams.
Unless, of course, we find ourselves in a traditional eCommerce model, where opportunities to grow our business stagnate the moment we look at the practicalities.
Try introducing a new product range on your existing website, and you’ll soon run into two challenges:
The need to invest capital in order to buy the stock
The need to wait whilst said stock is shipped, photographed, and finally added to your website.
Decide that you’re going to launch an entirely new website dedicated to an entirely different niche, and you can pretty much treble the amount of time and money that’s going to take.
Likewise with an affiliate or online advertising model using tools like Google Adsense.
OK, so the large capital outlay may not be required, but we’re still running into the same fundamental problem with all affiliate or Adsense-based businesses:
The long wait time for content to gain traction and start driving enough traffic to make your new business worth the investment.
So, yes, it may be possible to generate multiple income streams via other online business models, but let’s be honest, it’s hardly the easiest -or most affordable- way to go about it, is it?
When you start your own online store using a dropship model, on the other hand, creating multiple passive income streams couldn’t be easier.
Whilst those running other home-based businesses are still struggling to come up with more capital or waiting around for new product lines to be delivered, the simple no-stock-needed approach employed by drop shipping means you’ve got far more time to research potential markets.
Once you’ve found one that appears profitable, it’s simply a case of partnering with a dropship wholesaler in that niche, adding their products to your website, and promoting them.
Meanwhile, the readily-available income you generate via selling your initial products can even serve as readily-available capital so that you can build many brand new drop shipping websites, each one serving a different niche.
The best part?
There’s practically no risk involved.
Risk-Free Testing With Immediate Results
Experimenting with a new product line or marketing campaign can prove risky at the best of times.
Yet when you consider the upfront investment required to even test out a new range of products, a new promotional campaign, or even a whole new niche market with traditional online stores, those risks are seriously increased.
Need an example?
Let’s go back to our online clothing store, and say that we try to run a new range of outfits that simply don’t hit a chord with our audience.
What happens now? Not only are we down the original amount that we paid to bring the stock in, but we can’t even shift that stock to recoup our losses.
Switch to affiliate marketing or generating income through Google Adsense, and again, it’s all about the waiting game; months could well pass before you even get any indication as to whether your niche has taken off.
With drop shipping, however, neither of those are an issue. Simply upload new products or -at most- develop a small, low-cost, low-risk website for a brand new niche.
Before we finish, it’s also worth noting that any good drop shipping website -especially those that are purchased as a turnkey solution- should include in-depth analytics tools which count everything from incoming web traffic to ongoing sales, meaning you can get instant access to a wealth of reports which tell you exactly which of your experiments in new products and new niches are paying off, and which ones aren’t.
With that information immediately available to you, there’s absolutely no need to wait any longer to start making a profit. Simply follow what works, and before you know it, you’ll have achieved the one thing we all really want to achieve when we set out to create our own home-based business:
Maximum profits for minimal effort, and minimal investment.
Looking for the easy way to make money from an online business? At Bebiggy, you’ll find a diverse range of turnkey drop shipping websites for sale covering every imaginable niche, with up-to-the-minute analytics, secure order processing and a diverse range of products at industry-leading prices.
To find out more about how you can turn your passion into profit with drop shipping, or to arrange a demonstration of any of our existing products, please contact us online today.