How To Choose The Best Dropshipping Software For Your eCommerce BusinessPosted by Multi Programming Solutions on February 28th, 2022 Dropshipping is a retail business model that has an easily graspable working principle. This is one of the reasons why the dropshipping market has been sustainably growing over the recent few years. In contrast to many other business segments, dropshipping stores seem to benefit from recurrent lockdowns when people have to explore opportunities of doing business “from home”. Stats show 8 billion of the global dropshipping market size in 2020 while the expected CAGR is to reach 32% by 2026. Everyone who considers establishing a dropshipping business has to face one insidious question sooner or later: is it worth trying to save time and money when using either almost free social media or cheap template-based websites instead of building a fully-fledged dropshipping ecommerce store? A straight answer to this question is tough since each variant has its own pros and cons. A lot depends on a preferable business strategy. At the same time, convincing arguments in favor of building custom dropshipping websites are available. A set of compulsory functions of an automated dropshipping store are worth observing, therefore. Confident knowledge of such features helps find the most appropriate dropshipping software for a successful ecommerce business. Pros and cons of a dropshipping business modelInteractions of sellers, buyers, and product vendors have many advantages if being based on a dropshipping business model. Shortcomings of the model are available as well since nothing is a silver bullet in retail. Let’s begin with the pros while keeping in mind that the pros appear with fully functional dropshipping software only:
The easy-to-start dropshipping business model is not entirely without flows. Newcomers should pay their attention to the following:
Utilizing dropshipping advantages while minimizing the model’s flows is what the wisely selected dropshipping software is aimed at. What types of dropshipping stores can be created? Public profiles vs mono-product pages vs fully-functional dropshipping e-storesThe fastest and easiest way to start a dropshipping activity is to register a dedicated public profile/channel on social media. Nothing but an intention is enough to spend a couple of hours to create such a dropshipping solution. At the same time, some critical restrictions make this type of dropshipping store poorly functional:
Creating a mono-product webpage takes not much longer. Product description & advantages, customer feedback/testimonials, and payment data comprise the content of such a website. Visitors have only two options to choose from: either purchasing the product or leaving the website. The main drawbacks of this approach are the following:
All the above-mentioned shortcomings of both public profiles and single-page websites are fading away from fully functional dropshipping e-stores almost by default. Of course, building such dropshipping websites requires much more time and money, but the advanced options of dropshipping software represent business opportunities inaccessible to any cheaper alternative. Must-have features of dropshipping softwareSeemingly worthy dropshipping software can appear palliative if its functionality lacks one or another critical option. Like features for POD providers, the dropshipping software options have critical importance for doing successful ecommerce business. The following list of features shows what is compulsory for any decent dropshipping e-store. Product search & importThe feature can be available in the form of either a native function or a third-party plugin. The latter variant is inherent in the majority of dropshipping SaaS solutions. An easy search across the entire product range can keep visitors on a website for quite a while. The longer the time dropshippers spend surfing across a vendor marketplace the larger the chance they decide not to leave it for other websites. The dropship vendor management software available on respectable marketplaces reflects their intention to retain visitors with properly arranged customer care. Any product view should provide visitors with minimum stats including ratings, reviews, comments, price history, and the like. This is especially critical for dropshipping merchants who have to update their catalogs continuously. A quick import in bulk significantly adds efficiency to interactions between large marketplaces and dropshipping stores. Poor importing capabilities can discourage dropshippers due to pricing mismatch, wrong values, and other possible frustrating factors. Listing management softwareAs soon as imported items appear in a dropshipper’s catalog their accurate listing should be performed with a corresponding function. Placing things in order implies their categorization, right? This is about highly optimized SEO-friendly content including comprehensive descriptions, properly processed images, thoroughly selected comments, etc. No matter whether the listing management option is in the form of either a web app or a plugin. The following features should be available in worthwhile dropshipping listing software:
Order automationThis is one of the most useful functions for contemporary e-merchants. They can hardly expect any business success without the ability to automate dropshipping orders. Manual order fulfillment is a matter of the past. The following features should be inherent in any up-to-date dropshipping automation software:
A lack of such automation features makes any dropshipping software solution unworthy of your attention. Inventory managementThe function contributes a lot to your reputation: your ability to deliver anything available in your catalog makes your customers believe in your credibility. Dropshipping inventory software should provide automated (or semi-automated at least) real-time management of stock balances. It can be arranged via some sort of subscription when dropshipping vendor portals regularly share their inventory updates. The best scenario, however, implies a direct integration of an automated dropshipping store with a vendor’s inventory management system. This is when real-time changes of stock balances happen simultaneously in both catalogs. Automated price trackingSuch a feature facilitates dropshipping store activities in terms of meeting customer expectations. Since price remains one of the basic selective factors for the majority of consumer goods, tracking price variations is critical for any dropshipper. A lack of automated price updates leads to removing a dropshipping store from the list of actual offers. Tracking price changes manually is as time-consuming as ineffective. Vendors can change pricing more frequently than a dropshipper visits their marketplaces. Only an automated price-tracking feature can provide dropshipping software with sufficient dynamics to keep a dropshipping store always “fresh” in terms of a market situation... Like it? Share it!More by this author |