Have you ever thought about embracing the dropshipping business? How hard can it be to build a website and have others stock and ship the goods you sell online? Well, maybe the headache and the financial burden of storing and moving the physical items will be gone, but you still have to make the effort of building a comprehensive product catalogue, with a wealth of information about the stuff that you want to sell. Because dropshipping or not, nobody can succeed selling online in today's world without the rich product data the customer expects.
Definitions first
According to the specialized website https://dodropshipping.com, dropshipping can be described as follows:
“Dropshipping is an online business model where you got an online store where you sell products, but you don’t have any of them in your storage or your house. When someone places an order on your dropshipping store, then you place that same order directly with your dropshipping supplier. Don’t worry. There are a lot of apps out there that help you with automating this part of the order fulfillment. For example, Oberlo [...]. Then your dropshipping supplier will handle the rest. Think about preparing the package and sending the order straight to your customer. Now your customer will receive the package straight from your dropshipping supplier, and you never touched the product in between!”
To have an even clearer idea about the whole process, see the picture below:
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Pros and cons of dropshipping
According to the abovementioned website, here are a few pros and cons of this business model:
Of course, you are the only one who can assess if this business model is good for you or not, but at least you now have the basic facts. For a wealth of information about this topic, please visit https://dodropshipping.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-dropshipping/.
How can Pimics help?
Running a successful online business involves being able to handle a great volume of product data in an effective and timely manner. Manually entering large sets of product data is both inefficient and error-prone.
With Pimics you can set up a products catalogue that is easy to use and easy to update, all within your NAV/Business Central ERP. Want to sell to several eCommerce platforms at once? Pimics supports as many sales channels as you need and can automate product data updates to these channels.
A particular trait of running a dropshipping business is that you need to import a lot of product data from your vendors to your electronic catalogue, and this is where Pimics with its Vendor Catalog module becomes a must-have. It will handle data in a variety of formats, beginning with Excel which is probably the most widely used file format for data exchange between companies. But besides Excel, Pimics will import vendor product data from many other sources, including industry-standard BMECat and DataNorm. As described in our previous article about The BMECat advantage of Pimics, our PIM solution makes it very easy for you to import or update rich product data from vendors for large sets of SKUs, bringing BMECat catalogues within reach and making them a viable addition to your dropshipping eCommerce strategy.