E-commerce businesses widely use the drop surfing technique. It involves looking for the cheapest vendor each time, saving money by increasing profit margins on sales. With it, they can effectively reduce their management and overhead costs. If you are curious to know more about this platform, this guide will be your best bet!
In it, we will take you through everything you should know about drop surfing e-commerce. From its product pricing to trends and comparison with drop shipping, we have explained everything in-depth. So, hop on below to give this comprehensive guide a quick read!
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Part 1. What is Drop Surfing?
Drop surfing e-commerce implies a different approach toward drop shipping. Owing to it, drop surfing sellers look for the cheapest price products to maximize their profit costs. Another technique of drop surfing demands looking for in-trend products to increase your sales. Here is a detailed description of these two techniques:
Drop Surfing Product Pricing
Let us clarify the concept with the help of an example. Imagine you have received a makeup kit order from a client. As a drop shipping e-commerce seller, you will browse different platforms, including Amazon, and AliExpress, to spot the supplier offering premium quality products at lower prices.
Proceeding with drop shipping the order with that supplier, you will make more revenue from your sales. For instance, if you have $5 on one makeup kit and have sold hundreds of such kits in a week. You have increased your profit by $500, which corresponds to becoming $2000 in one month.
Drop Surfing Product Trends
This technique involves profiting from products’ popularity for increasing sales. For this purpose, you will need to rely on specialized software and system to figure out the trends beforehand and make preparations accordingly.
You must operate multiple stores in different niches to acquire increased revenue over a long span. Also, your trend-spotting system should be smart enough to highlight new trends before the fading of the previous ones.
Pros of Drop Surfing
Drop surfing offers a plethora of benefits opt the e-commerce businesses, sellers, or entrepreneurs. Below, we have mentioned a few of these; let’s have a look!
Minimal Startup Cost – As drop surfing doesn’t require you to stock for products, you won’t have to spend bucks on inventory management or stock control. Moreover, you can acquire the desired products at competitive pricing when dealing directly with suppliers.
More Sales, More Revenue – By carefully observing the market trends, you can make more sales, targeting trending products and selling them. In-trend product means more and more people are looking for the product; in turn, there are more and more chances of your business being explored by customers.
Leading a Scalable Business – Drop surfing e-commerce demands exploring a plethora of vendors and working with the cheapest one each time; you can develop connections with multiple vendors at a time. With an extended vendor partners list, you will have more opportunities to sell products at better prices.
Increase Your Product Variety – As you no longer need to stock up on products, indulging in inventory management, you can sell whichever product is in-trend. This leads to increasing your products’ variety to a great extent.
Risks Associated with Drop Surfing
Hop on below to discover the risks associated with drop surfing; like with every other technique, it’s not all about perks.
Need for Researching Well about the Product – When drop surfing, you may come across a trending product you haven’t ever sold before. In such a case, you must research the quality standards, reliability, and possible pros and cons of that product. But, before all that, ensure that the product is legally permitted to be drop shipped.
Reliability Issues with the Supplier – When you work consistently with a few vendors, you develop trust and reliability standards. Moreover, in long-term partnerships, contracts are signed to ensure quality standards, on-time delivery of goods, and more of such core product values. However, you will have minimal knowledge about the supplier in drop surfing e-commerce. What if they refuse to deliver the order at the last minute?
Complicated Order Tracking and Delivery Process – When working with a few vendors, you can align them with your standard delivery process, making things much easier. However, during browser vendors in drop surfing, you can come across different vendors, and each of them might have different delivery strategies and order tracking methods, making the entire process pretty complicated. Moreover, it can be time-consuming.
Part 2. What Is Drop Shipping?
Dropshipping is more like a generalized term; drop surfing is an advanced version. When dropshipping, your only purpose is to sell the goods you haven’t stocked up. Drop shippers work by ordering cheap yet premium products and then shipping them to their buyers directly. Being a bridge or middleman, these sellers charge more and earn significant revenue.
Owing to this strategy, you can earn money without needing to spend on a warehouse or stock managing platforms. It can be a great business approach for those who want to work on a startup with minimal investments.
Tip: If you need a dropshipping fulfillment partner, you can rely on China 3pl services like NextSmartShip.
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Part 3. Drop Surfing vs Drop Shipping
Drop surfing can be considered a type of drop shipping or a smarter version. In drop surfing, you look for in-trend products or the cheapest vendor when drop shipping. However, it might seem like a limelight initially, as for most businesses, the sole goal is to generate more and more revenue. But, in the long run, you may find it a complex strategy.
Drop surfing demands spending loads of time and energy on finding the right products to sell and the right vendors to source them from. Moreover, if you hire someone to analyze market trends, you will waste loads of money, too, without even knowing about the expected revenue, as it always depends on your system and how much you can earn when drop surfing.
Wrapping It Up!
In short, drop surfing is more like an advanced form of drop shipping with more sales and better revenue generation opportunities. Whether you run a business or are an entrepreneur, you can rely on this strategy to improve your growth. However, before opting for it, weigh the pros and cons for making an informed decision.
Moreover, you can also rely on 3pl services like NSS to save on shipping costs. With it, you can offer your customers order tracking opportunities to increase their satisfaction. Hope you found this info worth reading; stay tuned for more!
