One of the functionality options that you have complete within your Shopify store implementation is the ability to use third-party drop shipping companies for your products online. This works very much in much the same manner as the Amazon affiliate program. You list products on your website and you do the promotion, and when someone buys one of those products you get a margin cut vigorish but you don’t actually have to do any of the fulfillments for the ordered items because it is all taken care of by the drop shipping company. So, how do you configure your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store to use drop shipping and is it a profitable venture?
What is Drop Shipping?
Drop shipping, a concept as old as the mail order catalog industry, is when an eCommerce company like yours purchases a product from a company that will then ship the product to the customer. Your company doesn’t actually buy the product until the customer buys it from you. This makes for lower overhead and removes the need to warehouse and ship products. However, the disadvantage of drop shipping, is that you aren’t able to mark up the product very much (typically) before customers decide that they don’t want to buy from you because your prices are becoming too high.
What Drop Shipping is offered through Shopify?
One of the drop shipping options offered through Shopify or Shopify Plus is Amazon itself. Amazon has a long history of allowing people to make a profit from selling their products on your website. This is a great deal because Amazon has amazing customer service and as a vendor that is selling their products you’ll benefit from that customer service reputation as well. Amazon is the biggest drop shipping company that is offered as part of the Shopify platform as well as the most reliable. Other Shopify or Shopify Plus integrations include enabling Amazon Pay on your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store as well as the ability to host products on the Amazon Marketplace. The Wal-Mart Marketplace has also recently been added as a drop-shipping partner, and Shopify agencies such as the Seibert Consulting Group are able to integrate your Shopify store’s products to Wal-Mart Marketplace, Amazon Marketplace, and other online ecosystems.
Shipwire
Shipwire is another drop shipping service that is integrated into Shopify. Shipwire allows you to store and ship your products from their warehouses that are located all over the world, specifically: The United States, Australia, China and the United Kingdom. There are many application-based drop shipping solutions available within the Shopify App store. To save valuable time and money, many online eCommerce retailers
Rakuten
Rakuten, which was previously called Webgistix, is the other drop shipping platform that is integrated into Shopify and Shopify Plus. They have a solid reputation and quite a few different shipping options which is super if you want to offer to your customers the widest choice available of shipping methods. Rakuten has a reputation for delivering items fast and keeping up with modern fulfillment and tracking technology, which you can integrate into your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store. They also have great customer service according to the people that have reviewed them online.
Dropified
Another super option for supporting all manner of drop shipping use cases on your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store is the excellent Dropified application and integration that is available from the Seibert Consulting Group’s Shopify Engineering team. This application provides your Shopify operations team (the SCG team can contract out a dedicated Shopify or Shopify Plus Operations Team to your site or organization if you need to augment your current staffing) with a portal and integration to the products listed on your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store. The integration allows you to list products from a number of different online marketplaces, including all of the marketplaces listed above as well as eBay among many dozens of others. The app features integrated tracking and order notifications, and seamlessly updates order information and details into your Shopify or Shopify Plus web store.
To find out more about Shopify or Shopify Plus solutions for your business, find out more about the Private Shopify & Shopify Plus Apps offered by the Seibert Consulting Group like Dropified, Celigo, Optimize Upsell, or to set up a free demo of the Shopify or Shopify Plus eCommerce platform, please contact the Seibert Consulting Group at 760-205-5251 or email the SCG team at hello@seibertconsulting.com.
