Webshop + dropshipping = HELP!

[kyrre]

Hello guys,

Working on my first webshop here. Terribly excited!

Got everything set, a clean design, a great coder, and a lot of companies willing to dropship for me. I do, however, lack some common knowledge, especially when it comes to dropshipping. Maybe some of you guys can give me some advice?

1) These dropshippers will be from all over the world, and so will my customers hopefully. What's the best way to do the shipping, what solutions are there, and how do I reduce cost and ensure timely delivery?

2) And also, what about returns/exchanges? What if a customer wants a smaller/bigger size, will they be willing to ship the package back to my dropshipper? Anybody got any thoughts on that?

3) As a web- and interface designer, I'm trying to create an affiliate control panel that will make life for my dropshippers as easy as possible, where they can just log in and bam! have full control over all of their business with me. How would the perfect dropshippers control panel look like to you? What input forms and options would it have? (help me and I'll share the code with you once it's done)

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

All the best,
Kyrre

 

[usabn]

kyrre:

To answer some of your questions:

In regards to shipping from various vendors, it will be difficult to get accurate shipping quotes to present your customers, especially if you are trying to interface with UPS, FedEx or any of the other shipping providers. You could go several routes with this such as:

a: Present a table of shipping quotes based on total order price (e.g. $10 - 50 order total would cost $7.95 in shipping, $50 - 99 would cost $10.95, etc.), the downside of this is that this quote will be under your shipping cost for some of your orders, but over for other. It may even out, it may not.

b: Present the table of shipping quotes based on the total weight of the order (same as above only say 1-5 pounds is $7.95, 5-10 pounds is $10.95). The downside is also the same as above.

c: If your shipping estimator is interfacing with UPS (or whoever), you could try to have it bring in the zip code from each of your dropshippers for each of your products in the shopping cart, get a quote, then do a running total. Downside of this is that what gets presented to the customer may be well more than what they want to pay.

d: You could base the shipping estimates from your zip code. The downside of that is the same as in option a.

In regards to returns. Some, if not most, companies require the customer to ship the return at their expense. You can also charge a restock fee if you feel it's necessary (or if your dropshippers charge you one)

For your last question, then only thing that I can think of off the top of my head would be to have the dropshipper plug their tracking number into a field, so the customer can track their order through your site, thus encouraging return visits and the possibility of more sales.

Hope this helps,

John

 

[kyrre]

John thanks a lot man, your info means the world to me!

1) So basically I can estimate shipping charges based on price, weight and zip? What about after customer provides her full address, won't I then be able to present her with the exact charges? You mention UPS and FedEx -- can I reach the entire world with these?

2) Brilliant. Brilliant!

3) Great idea! So customers first get an order confirmation, then a shipping confirmation later on when the dropshipper is done? Maybe I could make my own tracking system that wraps around the actual tracking system, so I can provide customers with a tracking number immediately after their orders are confirmed?

Other stuff for my interface would be the usual settings, like Company name, Description, Address, Registration number and maybe some product/inventory management if I wish to leave that up to them. But still it feels like something is missing...

Basically I want to gather a lot of smalltime suppliers in under one professional website and make it easy for them to sell their stuff through it. Kind of like a specialized eBay, where I'll be branding and otherwise marketing their stuff in exchange for a small commission.

Which brings me to another question, I hope you don't mind, but what's the standard commission dropshippers usually give?

Thanks again man, I really appreciate this. I'll definitely let you know when my site is up and running. Actually I plan on launching several different sites. As Wikipedia describes multi-branding:

In a market that is fragmented amongst a number of brands a supplier can choose deliberately to launch totally new brands in apparent competition with its own existing strong brand (and often with identical product characteristics); simply to soak up some of the share of the market which will in any case go to minor brands. The rationale is that having 3 out of 12 brands in such a market will give a greater overall share than having 1 out of 10 (even if much of the share of these new brands is taken from the existing one). In its most extreme manifestation, a supplier pioneering a new market which it believes will be particularly attractive may choose immediately to launch a second brand in competition with its first, in order to pre-empt others entering the market.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Kyrre

 

[usabn]

kyrre:

If you have individual weights for your products, and have the customers zip code that should be all you would need to give an estimate. Obviously, when the customer places an order you'd have the full address and could quote shipping during the checkout process. However, as the customer puts items in your shopping cart, you could have an "estimator" on the shopping cart page that the customer could put their zip code in and get a quick and dirty estimate of the shipping costs. FedEx and UPS ship to most parts of the world, but it'll cost A LOT!

In regard to the site, I would think that suppliers would have their own site already and would leave the selling of their products to their customers, which would be the retail stores/companies. I thought that's what we were talking about. My mistake.

If you are going to do the "specialized ebay" thing, I would just concentrate on charging fees for product listings or shop hosting. I wouldn't get into dropshipping unless you were going to handle all of the customer service inquiries and sales questions. If the suppliers are going to be the ones handling the customers, then it would make more sense to me to just charge fees for them to be "shopkeepers" in your system.

If instead you are going to be a retailer for different suppliers, then the answer to your margin/commission question is the old fall back position "it depends". I've never really looked at a large range of product offerings so I can't give an honest appraisal. Having said that, what you need to consider is how much of whatever margin you get is going to be eaten up with customer service inquiries, presales questions. Whether you handle that yourself or hire someone/outsource it, it will cost you. So make sure you'll have enough of a margin to handle all of that and still profit. On products with a low price, that usually means thin margins, so you'll need to make more sales and depending on the products and competition, that might not work. If you have a product that has say 30-40% margin, then you'll need fewer sales as these products would generally have a larger per sale price.

Ideally, you could find replenishable products to sell, that way you could keep in touch with the existing customers and sell to them again, which is easier than constantly having to find new customers or even selling new products to existing customers.

Anyway, I'm starting to fade, so I'll close here.

Good luck.

 

[kyrre]

Hello again,

I'm going to be a retailer for different suppliers.

You mention UPS, FedEx and zip codes. But that's for the U.S. My business and the majority of its customers will be non-U.S., so I'm really looking for a more international solution here whose costs will not put me out of business.

Thanks,
Kyrre

 

[kyrre]

Maybe I should start a new thread entitled "International shipping"...

Kyrre

 

[halfpc]

Maybe I should start a new thread entitled "International shipping"...

Kyrre

Start a different business. Seriously, I did import/export wark for years and my advice to you is to NOT sell ANY tangible items, EVER.
because items:

get broken in transit
are not what the customer wanted
are the wrong colour
are the wrong size
are the wrong language
are incomplete
don't fit
get lost
get wet
get returned for no reason
get held at the customs
get stolen
get eaten by dogs
fall off trucks
are illegal in some countries
are not what the idiot wanted
etc etc

Besides... you don't need to sell tangible items nowadays. Nowadays you got the internet.

Sell clicks, bytes, downloads, services, whatevers but do not sell any tangible things, at THE MOST you COULD send data CDS and DVDS but nothing else.
Trust me, I know.
I still dream of torturing customs and doganeers people and their stupid dogs.