5 easy steps to Running a Drop shipping Business

Drop shipping.

Drop-shipping is a form of business that allows you to list products that you don’t have but know where to find, you are kind of like the middleman who knows how to source for products and knows how to deliver it to the person who needs it, while you make a nice profit after your cost of sales.

In the product industry you have the following as the supply chain from: Product manufacture———–Wholesaler ————-Retailer ——–Consumer

Drop-shipping does not appear here because it’s a service, not a role, a drop-shipper can also be the manufacturer of a product, meaning that when you manufacture your own products and sell to the final consumer you are also drop shipping for your own products. A drop shipping merchant is that person that acts as a go-between, between the Manufacturer or Wholesaler and the final consumer.

A drop-shipping merchant, in this case, is responsible for finding the products, listing it on his site and selling to the final consumer. The manufacturer or wholesaler then ships it to the person who bought it.

HOW DROP SHIPPING WORKS

-Mr. Bon wants to purchase a new battery for his phone, he goes to Mr. Dav’s Ecommerce shop and places an order and makes a payment.

-Mr. Dav receives the order and payment and then, in turn, places an order with his suppliers which could either be the manufacturer or a wholesaler.

-When the supplier receives the order, he processes and fulfills and ships to the buyer. He then gives a tracking number to the Drop shipping Merchant who owns the eCommerce store

-The Drop-shipping merchant then informs the buyer that his order is on the way.

-When the buyer receives the goods, it’s only the logo of the drop shipping merchant he is aware of, the manufacturers or wholesaler, in this case, is invisible to him.

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April 7, 2017December 16, 2018

You don’t need a 100 page Business plan to start one

One page business Plan modified. (1)

The One-page Business Plan Part B

Today I will be concluding the second part of this post, the one-page business plan, if you did not read the first post, you can get it Here .

I hope you have taken time to implement what you have learned in the first part of this post, writing this post has also helped me to go back to the drawing board to re-tweak my business plan.

The link for the one-page business plan is displayed above.

Now to the business of the day, we will be talking about the remaining 3 parts of this plan.

The Hustle.

How will customers learn about your business: In this area, we talk about your marketing plan, how do you intend to invite customers to your business? one of the key questions you need to ask yourself is where do my customers congregate?

This is the reason you must define your target market before setting out. When you know what your target market is, then you can begin to define where they are likely to congregate, thereby targeting your advertising to such places.

For example, my niche is stay at home moms who want to launch a business,.

One of the likely places I will find such women are baby forums, forums where women discuss money making ventures, I might also target my Facebook ads to women in their childbearing age because I know they will more likely be there. Thanks to Facebook targeted advertising features, you can do a lot to find your customers.

How will you encourage referrals: By giving away free samples and asking people to refer others to your business if they liked your product. You can also conduct contests for price points to encourage people to refer a certain number of people to win the price. Finally, you can give discounts for referrals to your point of sale.

Success

How will you rate the success of your Business: This part deals with figures How will you know that your business is successful? is it by the number of customers you have served or by the annual net income you intend to make. These figures will enable you to plan properly on how you intend to achieve it. It will force you to think of ways of dimensioning your resources to ensure you meet your targeted goals whether in customer numbers or in revenue. This part is where you also itemize your income streams and apportion how much you want to make from each stream. A multiple stream income strategy is always the best.

Challenges/ Obstacles; Finally this is the portion where you will write down obstacles that will mitigate against your business and how you intend to overcome them. Listing out your challenges is not to discourage you but to help you become aware of the risks involved in starting your business, and to show you also have a strategy to reduce those risks. Call it your mini risk analysis and you may not be far from the truth.

Proposed solution to your challenges: Here is where you list the steps you intend to take to mitigate such challenges and if possible eliminate it.

Your comments and suggestions are also welcome.

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April 6, 2017December 16, 2018

One Page Business Plan

The One Page Business Plan.

Today I will be talking about the one-page business plan, a document that will guide you and serve as your reference point in starting a Home Based Business. Most people will say it doesn’t matter, why write a business plan? after all it’s a small business, a home-based one at that here is why it matters

Why you need a Business Plan:

-It helps you concretize your ideas and gives a big picture of where you want to go.

-Assists you to itemize what you need to be doing per time.

-The business plan gives you the opportunity to identify who your customers are and how you intend to reach them hence helping you define your niche.

-It gives you an idea of your market size and how many portions of that market you can get, thereby determining your market size.

– Helps you to determine your startup costs and your breakeven point thereby indicating when you start turning a profit.

-Finally, it helps give you a sense of what you expect your income to be and what to price your products.

Having listed the above reasons, here is a description of the one-page business plan and what it contains;

Before I go ahead, a disclosure, I got this template from another Blog the 100startup.com by Chris Guillebeau who is the author of the $100 dollar startup a book that chronicles interviews on people who started a business with 100 dollars or less.

I am acknowledging what the owner did by allowing me to download from his site. I will only modify some aspects of the template and use it. Having said that let’s get to it.

The one-page business plan is a simple template that makes it easy for anyone willing to start up a home business to jump right in and start. If you want the template you will get it right after the post series finishes.

The template requires that you write whatever you need in the business plan in two short sentences, it’s like the elevator pitch of your Home Business. It’s often said that if you can’t summarize your business plan to an investor in the time it takes for you to ride an elevator from one floor to another then you haven’t figured out what you should be doing. In other words, cut the crap out and get to the meat of the Matter.

The one-page business plan is divided into 5 different parts namely: The overview, Ka-ching, hustle, success and obstacles/ challenges. I will start by treating the first 2 in this post, in my next post I will deal with the remaining 3.

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