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If you’ve ever taken the brave step of venturing to a sketchy website without an ad-blocker enabled, you’ll have some idea of how massive a market there is for get-rich-quick schemes. Mysterious smiling figures appear holding wads of cash, ready to tell you all about how you can make $5000 per day working from home — and all you need to do is click.
We all know that’s fake, of course, and all you’re going to get from clicking on that type of ad is a keylogger and the embarrassment of being scammed. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make money online in a manner that’s relatively easy, because there are some legitimate methods.
You’ll have to put the work in (and you’ll be facing a lot of competition), but if you’re looking for convenience and consistency, the easiest way to make money online is to use dropshipping. Not convinced? Here are 5 reasons why:
It requires no experience
All the practical elements of the retail world take experience to get right. Negotiating rates with suppliers is extremely tough unless you know exactly how hard to push back on offers. Finding the right balance of cost and speed for shipping options is a huge headache. In dropshipping, you don’t need any experience, because you’re not getting involved with those things.
Your role is simply to present the products and tempt people to buy them. Everything prior to your listings (finding and securing products) and everything following them (packaging and shipping products) is beyond your control. And because it doesn’t cost anything to list dropshipping items, there’s no reason not to experiment and learn as you go.
It builds up valuable assets
Within a year or so of running dropshipping stores, you could have a full-time income from it (on the low end, realistically, but that’s still solid), but that isn’t all it has to offer. This is because every store counts as an asset you can sell down the line should you decide that you no longer need it and would rather get a lump sum now than keep working on modest profits.
This is very useful because it means that you can shift gears whenever you want. Bored of your niche? Ready to try something new? Just offload your store (or stores). Sure, you can sell a regular business, but it generally takes time to figure out — whereas dropshipping stores are bought and sold quickly on account of their straightforwardness.
It can be done 100% remotely
There’s no need for an office for a dropshipping operation, and no need to ever leave your kitchen if you’re absolutely determined to work from a single location. It’s all handled online. Any issues that come up with the practical side of the process are for your suppliers to deal with. This is great because it saves time and money on travel, and lets you work flexible hours.
It’s cheap and simple to set up
Any mainstream CMS (or ecommerce platform) you can think of will support myriad dropshipping suppliers, so you don’t need a special type of site or a costly plugin to get started — and, as noted, you also don’t need any stock to sell. The setup process is extremely simple: choose your preferred supplier (here’s a solid lineup), find an app or plugin for your CMS, install it, and you’re ready to go.
You do need a site capable of handling ecommerce-level traffic, yes, but any online business you run will need a capable website, and it isn’t that hard to manage. If you really focus, you can have your store up and running within a day.
It needs almost no maintenance
If you set up a dropshipping store (or many stores) and get them working as they should, do you need to rush around keeping all the plates spinning? Not really, no. Beyond the occasional product or pricing adjustment, you can simply let a dropshipping store keep going without paying too much attention to it.
This makes it perfect as a side gig, or simply an income stream that requires almost no effort. You can continue to focus on your regular career, and simply benefit from the additional money in your bank account at the end of each month.
Dropshipping is a hard-fought world for all the reasons we’ve looked at here, but it isn’t saturated, and there’s still room to get ahead if you know how to approach it correctly. Why not give it a try? Get creative and experiment as you go, and don’t worry if your first store is a miserable failure. Failure is an opportunity to learn.
This is a guest post
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