Case Study On Dropshipping

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22-year-old Melvin Chee from Melbourne, Australia went from experimenting with e-commerce dropshipping during his semester break to a 6-figure business in just 3 months. He had previously started several different businesses, many of which failed spectacularly. Some of his efforts were featured on BBC News and StartupDaily, but his biggest hit so far was started largely by accident. It was a discussion he saw about dropshipping with Oberlo in a Facebook group that got the wheels turning. As he explains it:

I decided to give it a go after coming across Oberlo in a Facebook Group back in December. I thought, why not give it a shot as an experiment during my semester break, and that’s how it got started.
What’s dropshipping?
With dropshipping, …show more content…

All he put in was his time, a domain name, and a Shopify + Oberlo subscription. “Dropshipping allowed me to focus on what I do best; bringing in traffic and converting customers” he says.

Picking a product idea
Given the access to thousand of dropshipped products, Melvin started off by picking his store category — clothing. He then narrowed that very broad category down by testing a constant stream of ideas, retaining the ones that gained traction and removing the ones that didn’t work.

As a tiny startup, he knew he needed to find a niche to inhabit. The challenge in a clothing niche is the difficulty of gaining attention with a simple daily use product like basic T-Shirt, even if it’s competitively priced. The key for him was adding value to the T-Shirt through what’s printed on it. When you sell shirts with messages like “I speak fluent sarcasm,” suddenly you have something that will appeal to a specific audience, and you can use that to your …show more content…

What you really need as a small startup is a simple approach to selling your products, and a basic online store serves this goal perfectly well.

You can go to Shopify or another hosted e-commerce platform, register a store, pick a ready-to-use store theme, and you’re ready to roll. Don’t invest a lot of time in customizing it or designing the perfect logo; that can all happen later as your ideas gain traction. If you lack confidence in your e-commerce skills, search for free e-commerce courses that can lead you through the entire launch process.

Keep in mind, however, that “building something nobody wants is the ultimate form of waste.” Making sales is the only proof of your store’s utility, so that needs to be your first and primary focus.

Marketing

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