Dropshipping: Driving Sales with Digital Marketing

I came across the term “dropshipping” about a year ago when I was considering starting an online store to earn some side income. Dropshipping is defined as selling of goods directly from the manufacturer to the customer. Essentially, you act as the middle man between the manufacturer and the customer, and the manufacturer handles all production, inventories, returns and the delivery while you handle only marketing and selling. Oberlo, a dropshipping tool by Shopify, has a great video on what dropshipping is all about.

There are many dropshippers around us, some great examples would be Shopee, Qoo10 and Wish. How do you tell if a store is a dropshipping retailer and does not produce their own products? A tell-tale sign would be: your product takes more than 15 days to reach you. Contrast that with Zalora, who has a physical inventory, that allows for items to reach you within 1 week. Also, if you search “Selfie Ring Light” on dropshipping websites such as Shopee, you get tons of the same product being sold at different prices by different retailers, with varying user ratings and sales. 

So how do you stay competitive when there are so many retailers selling the same thing? Through digital marketing. Popular methods by dropshipping marketers are to utilize Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube Influencer Marketing as well as Reddit, Pinterest, SEO, Product Hunt, Twitter and Content Marketing on blogs and forums to raise awareness and generate visits to their website. 

These retailers also build their own branding through their own website, Instagram or Facebook, creating the illusion that they produce and sell a unique product that can’t be purchased anywhere else. 

http://flii.store/

To the untrained eye, a product with their own branding may seem like they did actually produce it, but the product is actually available on AliExpress at much cheaper rates.

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1. Hello Matcha

Created by Shopify as part of a content marketing effort to encourage people to use Oberlo and start dropshipping, Hello Matcha is a dropshipping store that utilizes various digital marketing methods such as Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit along with branding of their product which helped them to make a profit (!) within 3 days. You may read the entire process here: https://www.shopify.com/blog/34526469-how-we-built-an-ecommerce-business-from-scratch-and-generated-922-16-in-revenue-in-3-days

2. Wish

A large player in the dropshipping industry, Wish boasts a global user base of over 100 million users. and is one of the success stories arising from only digital marketing. Today, they are worth USD $8.5 billiion, the same as Macy’s, J.C. Penney and Sears combined, simply through digital marketing such as Facebook Advertisements, YouTube Influencer Marketing, Instagram Advertisements as well as participating in Affiliate Marketing from AliExpress and various other digital methods. 

Wish's Homepage

YouTube Influencer Marketing

Are you tempted to create your own dropshipping store? I could go on and on sharing many more successful dropshipping stores but this blog post will get too long! PM me on Facebook or Twitter, or simply comment below if you are interested to find out more or share your thoughts on dropshipping :)