Dropshipping is a form of eCommerce where you, as the retailer you are essentially selling a wholesaler’s products on their behalf. In a dropshipping arrangement, as you place new orders in your WooCommerce store, your wholesaler get email on packaging instructions and they put the products into your customer’s hands.

With dropshipping, you only “buy” your stock after a successful sale. This means the upfront cost is minimum and the risk is also minimal.

The key to any successful dropshipping store is finding the right products to sell. You’re free to experiment with a number of different products to find out what to sells and what not to.

Benefits Of Using Dropshipping

The main reasons to like the dropshipping.

• Low investment and overhead: you don’t need to purchase inventory up front or find a place to store it. Your upfront investment and ongoing overhead costs are minimum.
• Easy to get started: there is no complexity to get start. You don’t need to go through lease agreements, shipping providers, inventory management etc.
• Not tied to location: since someone else can handle your location – dependent parts for you, you’re free to move around as you want.
• Scalability: it eliminates much of the complexities involved with scaling your business. You don’t need to hire new warehouse staff, find a bigger warehouse, etc. Just one thing you’ll need to scale is your ability to offer customer support.

Downsides To Dropshipping

The main downside is the effect on your margins.

• Since your supplier is handling fulfillment, you’ll lose some of your margins there because your supplier will charge a higher price for performing that particular service.
• If you sell all your products that are easy to dropship, you’ll face competition from other stores that are taking advantage of the low barriers to entry, which can push prices down and hurt your margins.

How To Install WooCommerce Dropshipping

Once you buy WooCommerce Dropshipping Plugin, now it’s time to Install it.

1. Click on the plugins option in the left-hand navigation column and click on Add New
2. Select Upload Plugin button to upload Dropshipping
3. Hit on Choose File button to select the plugin zip file from your computer
4. Now click on the Install Now button
5. When you see the message that the Plugin was installed successfully, click the blue Activate Plugin button to activate
6. You will see a message: Plugin activated

Add Your Dropshipping Supplier

1. Explore Products and click on Suppliers
2. Add the name of your supplier
3. Add slug – the specified URL minus(-) the domain
4. Describe the supplier relationship or any other offering
5. Enter your account number with your supplier or leave blank if not
6. Enter your email address(es) to be notified when this supplier’s products sell in your store
7. Now click on the blue Add New Dropshipping Supplier button

Inventory CSV Button

1. When your supplier provides you with a CSV file for importing their product(s) into your store, then you can click on the inventory CSV button to import their products.
2. If no CSV file is provided, you will need to create the Supplier’s product(s) and assign each product to the dropshipping supplier as you create the product.

Setup Packing Slip

When an order is paid in your WooCommerce store by your customer and WooCommerce marks the order as processing, then this plugin emails each supplier whose products were ordered to notify them to ship the products.

1. From WooCommerce menu click Settings
2. Then click the emails tab
3. Next click on Dropshipping Notifications link
4. The email message to the dropshipping supplier, with the PDF packing slip attachment
5. Upload your logo to your Media library and copy and paste the file’s URL. Just below that, Input the width of your logo, in pixels
6. Enter your company name and address
7. Put your customer service email address and phone number
8. Type a thank you message for the packing slip
9. Configure your Inventory pad with inventory pad option to protect you from selling products that the supplier has limited in stock.
10. Now click the Save changes button
11. You will see a message that your settings have been changed

That’s it. Now your Dropshipping is all set to go.

Read More: WooCommerce Dropshipping

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Editorial Team