Drop surfing vs DropShipping: What is Drop Surfing Ecommerce?

If you have ventured into the world of DropShipping, or recently you have been researching into the prospects of starting a drop shipping business, you must have heard a new term that is much talked about in the industry – the Drop Surfing.

Yes, you must have come through various drop surfing vs dropshipping comparisons or gone through various drop surfing reviews, where people talked about what makes it a great new prospects for entrepreneurs and startups.

But what the heck is drop surfing ecommerce exactly?

Well, before we discuss drop surfing in greater detail, let’s discuss what’s drop shipping is, so those of you who aren’t familiar with the word maybe with us as well.

What’s Drop Shipping?

In the simplest terms, the drop shipping enables sellers to make sales, without having to worry about buying or stocking products. Great, huh?

As a dropshipping entrepreneur, you won’t even have to think about all the money and hassle in buying and storing the products, rather all of it would be taken care of by the suppliers; who will handle all aspects of products from packaging to warehousing and shipping of orders.

Here’s a simplified dropshipping process for better understanding:

– An order is placed by the customer

– The payment is received by the seller

– The sends the order to the supplier

– The supplier locates, package and send the items to the customers

The entire process runs smoothly, as the seller won’t have to worry about anything other than keeping up with the marketing of the items to attract more traffic and sell more items.

But what’s the customer perspective of dropshipping?

Well, honestly in most cases customers won’t even know or care who or from where the order is being shipped; as long as they receive a valid product which they paid for and the time of delivery is kept as communicated to them during the ordering process.

Read Also How to Change Shipping Label Format on Shopify

Why do sellers do DropShipping?

Well, there are various benefits of starting a dropshipping business as a seller. First and foremost it is easy to start a business and doesn’t require much capital to get started. There is absolutely no risk of loss involved in the business; if you follow each step closely and have contacts with reliable suppliers. Not to forget, it’s an absolutely easy business model to manage, which most of the tech-savvy youngsters can pursue alongside their professional careers or their families. Lastly, it’s a great way to earn some big bucks for your savings or your next holiday.

For most sellers, dropshipping is the perfect startup venture to create their own business without having to worry about the initial capital required upfront. Since they don’t have to buy or stock products with drop shipping, rather they will only pay for the orders which have already being paid by the customers. So, if you are successful in creating a smart strategy and establish some credible links with the suppliers; drop shipping is great to immediately start earning profit. All you need is the right platform for the business – initially you can go with various free plans available for beginners, and as your sales scale, you can always switch to advance paid subscriptions to easily manage the store.

Read Also “How to Have Shopify Calculate Shipping“

What is drop Surfing Ecommerce?

Drop surfing is essentially looking for the best price for a drop shipping order to maximize your profit. Let’s explain drop surfing with an example. Imagine you are a drop shipping seller and receive an order for jeans. Now, as you received the order you start exploring the online suppliers offering similar jeans. You may want to surf various websites like AliExpress or Amazon to see where you can find the lowest price for the same shirt.

Once you have found the lowest price offered by the supplier, you simply drop ship the order with that supplier; which enables you to maximize your profit margin. The better profit margins you can keep on orders the more money you will be making from your dropshipping business.

So, let’s say that you are able to save $4 on the sale of the jeans and if you are able to sell 250 products in a month, you are essentially making $1000 monthly from just one product. Add other products to it and the numbers will add up pretty fast.

Read Also  “How to Have Shopify Calculate Shipping“

A Second Definition

Ok, that was the easy and encouraging explanation of the drop surfing, but if you read the drop surfing reviews or ask drop surfing what is it, you will see that people don’t always talk high about the service.

That’s because the drop surfing business is also often referred to as “Surfing the wave” for the online trends of different products in order to earn a profit.

A major limitation of the drop surfing business is the fact that you need extensive research for the market. You should be able to monitor and manage the maximum numbers of platforms (eBay, Amazon, Ali Express) to keep up with the trends, which unfortunately may change at any time.

So, yeah you can essentially call drop surfing as surfing the hottest trend or cheapest price wave.

Read Also How To Start Dropshipping In Canada

Drop Surfing Vs DropShipping – What’s The Difference?

By now you must have understood the basic difference between drop shopping vs drop surfing.

In the simplest equation; Surfing the trends for cheapest products + Drop Shipping = Drop Surfing.

However, before you choose drop surfing instead of drop shipping as your preferred business model; let’s do a quick comparison between the two and see which the better approach for your needs is. By simply looking at the technique behind drop surfing, we can easily say that there is a massive potential for you to maximize the profit margin using their approach – which is honestly one thing most businesses are always chasing.

However, as said before there is a catch here.

It’s the number of hours you are willing to dedicate to the business. Remember, when at the beginning we said that drop shipping is great for tech-savvy people who are looking to earn extra cash while keeping up with their personal and professional commitments? Well, with drop surfing you may have to compromise on those personal or professional commitments because this will be your full-time job.

If you think hiring someone to do the job for you, then you are losing money, provided you aren’t able to find the right technological solution or drop surfing software to do the job for you.

To we can conclude our drop surfing vs dropshipping comparison by looking at some of the pros and cons of the dropshipping ecommerce method:

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– A low start-up cost

The obvious advantage of drop surfing ecommerce business is that it doesn’t require a lot of capital to get started. You can easily start building your business right from your house. All you need your laptop with an internet connection and your ability to build some strong connections with third-party sellers. Remember, ordering products directly from third-party inventory is often the most competitively priced, whereas, you also don’t have to take the pains of maintaining the stock. All you need is to pay for the ecommerce website development, perhaps purchase a drop surfing software (you can go with the free plan in the beginning) and you are ready to go.

– Build Business Faster

Since you don’t actually have to purchase any inventory for the store, rather you can just upload the products from contracted vendors, it’s easier to set up the drop surfing ecommerce store as compared to a traditional ecommerce store. Not to forget, since you won’t be buying stock or maintaining the warehouse, take pains for packaging or delivery your operational cost will be significantly lower and streamlined as compared to ecommerce stores.

– Overhead Savings

Apart from cutting upfront and management costs, drop surfing also allows you to significantly reduce overhead costs, since you won’t be paying anything to workers or renting a warehouse, or paying for packaging parts, etc.

– Sell Anywhere

Last but not least, drop surfing opens up the global market for you. Since you won’t have to manage any warehouse in a physical location there are no geographical barriers in your business. You can choose any third-party vendor in the country of your choice and start selling goods in that market through the vendor.

The trick:

As we already mentioned, the only catch in the drop surfing business is that it may be difficult to manage as part-time, which means you probably have to drop out of any other professional career you are currently pursuing.

But there must be a way out?

Well, luckily there is.

There is various drop surfing software that can help you to easily manage your store in a limited time. The software will automatically compare the various options for a product available with different vendors and manage sales efficiently.

How to Building a Drop Surfing Store with Folio3 Ecommerce Development Company

Now, whether you are looking to start drop surfing amazon, or drop surfing on Shopify ecommerce development platform, or simply looking to create your own drop surfing store, you would want to have some sort of drop surfing software that can help you automate the process of searching for the right products for ordering.

Honestly, manual drop surfing can be a too tedious and time-consuming process, which not only takes up a lot of your time but actually significantly lowers your capacity to process more orders; translating into lower monthly sales.

The best practice for drop surfing activity is to have detailed research for different suppliers offering your products with the price comparison, so at the end of the day, you don’t have to waste time searching for the best price.

Again, since manually completing all these tasks may take a lot of time, it’s only rational to partner up with some ecommerce solution provider that can help you set up a drop surfing store and give you the tools required to automate various processes involved in the business.

Folio3 has remained a key technology player in the ecommerce industry for over a decade. We have been offering entrepreneurs with the right tools and technologies they need to efficiently handle their businesses and up their game at a global level.

If you are also looking for professional tools to start your drop surfing business, explore drop surfing ecommerce solutions by Folio3 Shopify Plus partners and get started to up the ante for our business.

Why You Should Use a Drop Surfing Software

Well, apart from decreasing the operational time on your business, a drop surfing software also help you to;

Guaranteed shipping and timelines

In drop surfing, you will be dealing with various vendors and suppliers for order delivery. This leaves you at their mercy and any glitch in the delivery process will only bring harm to your business reputation.

With the right drop surfing tools, you can be sure of the credibility of the vendors/suppliers and rest assured that the orders will be delivered to customers on time.

Notifications if product prices change

Similarly, another great benefit of going with a reliable and powerful drop surfing software is that it will automatically send notifications for price updates for the listed products.

Most of the sellers in the drop surfing business find it extremely annoying as the suppliers change the pricing abruptly without any prior intimidation, making it a challenge for sellers to quote the right price to customers and may lead up to the loss of profit or even end up paying from your pocket.

With the automatic notifications for the price changes, a drop surfing software gives you the peace of mind to remain at top of the business at all times.

Fulfill orders manually

The file you may be able to fulfill the orders manually at the initial stage of business, where you may receive 10 or more orders. However, what if you start getting 100+ orders per day? How would you be able to manually surf the cheapest price across the internet and fulfill the order?

If you go with hiring staff, it will cost you a lot of money, right?

With a powerful drop surfing software that updates you with the price comparisons from different platforms and vendors, you can automate the processing of the orders, relieving you of the time and efforts required to keep pace with business scaling.

The Pros and Cons

Just like all businesses, drop surfing also comes with its pros and cons. And the very purpose of this detailed drop surfing ecommerce guide is to help you understand the complete process, so you may be able to decide the best route for yourself.

Here are some of the pros and cons of the drop surfing business:

Drop Surfing Ecommerce Pros

– Easy to start a business with low cost of entry

– Multiple suppliers/vendors to choose from

– Maximize the profit by choosing the cheapest offer

– With the right drop surfing software, you can automate the order fulfillment without having to surf the cheapest products

– With automatic tools, surf thousands of manufacturers and suppliers from across the world to drop ship the order

– Keep focused on marketing without having to worry about buying the stock or packaging or delivering the order

Drop Surfing Ecommerce CONS

– Without the software, it can be a mess and next to impossible to scale the drop surfing business

– May have to subscribe to a monthly paid package for the drop surfing software when you are looking to scale

– Drop surfing app may not work with all the websites

What Sites Let You Drop Surf?

Honestly, if you know how to use drop surfing or are willing to hire professional drop surfing ecommerce agencies like Folio3, you literally have endless options to choose the vendors/suppliers from across the world.

Nonetheless, some of the most prominent and widely acclaimed platforms for drop surfing includes;

– Amazon

– eBay

– AliExpress

– Etsy

– Ali Baba

– Walmart

Drop Surfing Ecommerce Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it, everything you would want to know about the DropShipping vs drop surfing ecommerce. Honestly, drop surfing is a great business model to maximize profits and minimize operational costs; provided you have the right tools or technical expertise to guide you through the process.

If you are just starting to venture into the drop surfing industry, we would recommend starting with the winning products that may help you to start getting profit immediately, and once you are ready to scale get in touch with Folio3 experts to help you get maximum out of your business!

Drop Surfing Shopify: what is the drop surfing business with Shopify?

Shopify is a popular platform for drop surfing as there are a variety of tools and plugins that can help businesses to add products to their inventory. This is also the reason why Shopify is becoming a popular choice for drop surfing and drop shipping businesses.

What do you mean by the death of DropShipping and the rise of drop surfing?

First of all, DropShipping isn’t dead. However, the rise of various tools that automate the order fulfillment for drop surfing business has certainly increased the charm of drop surfing against DropShipping amongst businesses; because they are able to maximize their profits through Drop Surfing ecommerce.

 How to Start Drop Surfing?

You can start drop surfing ecommerce business by following these simple steps:

– Build an ecommerce platform (Woocommerce development, Shopify, or any other ecommerce development platform)

– Choose your market and niche products

– Get a drop surfing software/tool (free plan for beginner) to help you with store management

– You are all set to start your drop surfing ecommerce business

How to find the best product to drop surfing?

There are various online tools and platforms that can help you choose the top-selling drop surfing products. As a general rule, high-utility and daily use products under $10 are some of the best drop surfing products to get started with.