This article covers three types of online selling that gives small businesses more control over stock and budget.
Drop shipping
Dropshipping is a type of ecommerce where your supplier ‘drops’ shipments directly to your customer, in effect you are the middle man with no need to handle packing or delivery – an aspect for small businesses that can be time consuming and costly.
To break it down further it is an order fulfilment method where as a business you don't own or keep the products in stock, instead purchasing them from your drop ship supplier once they have been ordered on your website. The product is then sent directly to your customer by this 3rd party provider, either white labelled or with your branding, packaging and message.
Dropshipping is a $15 billion industry in the US and a growing and profitable industry in the UK. It is worth reading this article about Making money from dropshipping.
Platforms
Shopify is the leader in drop shipping integration making it very easy to sell from a large selection of drop shippers integrating them simply into your website. The drop shipping process is automated, so once an order has been placed on your website, it is automatically sent through to and fulfilled by your drop shipper.
Why drop ship?
Perhaps you want to test the market before crafting your own products, or import items from a certain region or sector to compliment what you already sell. For example there are country related drop shipping options to source say French or Indian products, AnkorStore is an interiors drop shipper and Automizely offers integration with many sectors such as fashion, beauty and trending products.
Another reason you may look to drop ship is cost, if your shop or premises is not large enough to store all the products you know your customers want to buy and you would like to cut back on warehousing costs, or purchasing upfront stock in an uncertain climate is something you are looking to avoid. Drop shippers, like fulfilment houses, also take care of packing and delivery.
Print on Demand
Print-on-demand (or POD) is a slightly different order fulfilment method from drop shipping where items are printed with your designs before being shipped, a great personalised option for artists, designers and makers.
Providers such as Printful and Printify offer high quality merchandise from art to clothing and accessories, you just set up your account, upload your designs and once an order comes in via your website it is automatically processed by your POD provider and sent to your customer, no minimum order number required.
While this does mean production takes place entirely after an order is placed, state-of-the-art technologies are now able to complete that end-to-end order-to-shipment process very quickly.
Platforms
● Squarespace has Printful directly integrated into their ecommerce offering.
However, setting up a POD account gives you the opportunity to offer this service on Market Places such as Amazon, Etsy, Ebay or TikTok Shop as well as integrating with your WooCommerce (Wordpress) or Shopify store.
Subscription selling
A subscription business is a recurring revenue model in which customers pay a weekly, monthly, or yearly fee in exchange for your products or services. Customers can manage their subscription, pausing, changing or cancelling via their admin dashboard on your website.
The benefits of subscription selling is budget forecasting and repeating custom from one sale. Subscription selling can be for:
Products
Such as florist bouquets, pamper or wellbeing sets, dog treats, food hampers, the options are boundless, to get an idea of what is out there you can check out CrateJoy
Services
Subscriptions can also be for services offered, perhaps cleaning services, IT support, dog walking as a few, but it is likely that if you are a service business you can think of clever ways to install a recurring routine with your clients.
Digital
Subscription selling also works well for recurring payments such as clubs or memberships where you find you are constantly chasing clients for payment.
Platforms
For the right product, brand and industry, a subscription model can be a very effective and lucrative approach to running your business.
● Squarespace has a simple integrated subscription offering
Shopify has various options but RechargeApps is a good option
● Wordpress offers many plug-in options depending the type of subscription you are looking for
NOTE: If you feel that you will need to update pricing on your subscriptions regularly check that your chosen solutions caters for this feature, as often it is a process of moving your clients to a new subscription which can be disruptive.
Check out this Success with Subscription Selling guide by Recharge. - link to document provided.
This article was written for the Digital Springboard