Redefine Dropshipping With Domestic Brands, Fast Delivery, and High-Quality Products

Dropshipping businesses must redefine themselves by putting forth a pleasurable experience for customers with domestic, high-quality brands, quick delivery, low inventory risk, and excellent customer service. Here’s how to get dropshipping right.

With rising consumer awareness, the ever-growing cost of advertising, the death of cookies, and a burning need for customer retention rather than acquisition, it no longer makes sense for small and medium businesses or individual entrepreneurs to follow the traditional, failed dropshipping model. And the reality of traditional dropshipping is pretty painful and brittle. Don’t get me started on 5-week deliveries, the low quality of products, and bad user experiences.

A new wave of dropshipping businesses is coming, and it will be BIG: quality products from the most loved and respected domestic brands shipped within days. Out with the bad, in with the good!

How To Redefine Dropshipping 

In essence, it’s really quite simple. Instead of sourcing vendors from the likes of AliExpress, find reputable, domestic brands on Shopify, WooCommerce, or similar, and invite them to your dropshipping marketplace running on Vendo. 

Once the brands are onboarded, all that’s left to do is curate the product catalog to your standards (i.e., merchandising) and then start selling while maintaining full control of every step of the customer journey and building a strong brand identity that people trust.

It’s not the core principles of dropshipping that need to be altered. It’s the business decisions made by drop shippers that need to change.

Now there is an opportunity to turn this around with Vendo by working with domestic brands, high-quality products, fast delivery, and margins that make sense.

What Dropshipping Apps To Avoid

There is a multitude of apps that allow you to access a database of vendors located overseas and have them listed in your product catalog at a marked-up price. This gives rise to the issues we all know first-hand or read about - low-quality products not resembling the originally described merchandise, long shipping times, and bad customer service.

On the other hand, you have apps that allow you to more selectively onboard vendors (e.g., domestic brands), sync their products with your platform, and sell them while earning a percentage commission fee. Sounds not bad, right? Well, not entirely.

I’ve taken part in many client calls (too many to count) and have been fortunate enough to gain incredibly valuable insights into the pain points surrounding these apps. 

Here are a few of the most common issues I’ve come across:

• Vendors being paid incorrectly, whether too much or too little.
• Vendors being paid seemingly at random, i.e., not according to any schedule set by the admin.
• Potential vendors refusing to onboard to the platform due to negative past experiences of using that particular dropshipping app.
• Too many manual processes make it impossible to scale the business.
• Non-synced inventory levels cause overselling issues.
• Generally, non-intuitive UI adds unnecessary complexity.

These apps may suffice in the short term and on a small scale. 

Clearly, though, if the goal is to build something bigger, a more automated, reliable, and scalable eCommerce solution is nothing short of necessary.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what Vendo provides. 

How Vendo Dropshipping Works

Vendo, unlike your typical dropshipping app setup, is a dedicated dropshipping marketplace solution that has been specifically designed to make setting up and running successful dropshipping businesses as straightforward as can be for both drop shippers and, more importantly, customers.

Below is a comparison table between a typical dropshipping business and Vendo-powered dropshipping marketplace:

Vendo Dropshipping Experiences

With Vendo, it’s clear to see that the experience is night and day better on all sides:

Admin-facing side:

1. Intuitive admin dashboard to manage orders, products, suppliers, and more.
2. Invite as many brands/vendors/suppliers as you want.
3. Set commission rates per brand, category, or individual product.
4. A configurable built-in storefront that doesn’t require developers and a tech budget.
5. Automations and integrations that take care of all complex marketplace operations.
6. Choice of monthly pricing plans that fit your business size and goals.

Seller-facing side:

1. Connect their Shopify or Woo Commerce stores directly to Vendo in minutes
2. Product updates, stock level updates, and shipping methods are all automatically synced
3. Orders are sent directly to their existing Shopify or Woo Commerce dashboard fulfillment
4. Once the initial connection is made, it’s business as usual. No need to use the Vendo partner portal to manage products, orders, etc.
5. Automated invoicing and payouts

Buyer-facing side:

1. Higher quality products from mostly domestic vendors
2. Delivery times, returns policy, and customer service as expected from any domestic eCommerce business
3. Ability to buy from multiple suppliers in a single order with a single payment
4. Fewer issues and drama around returns, refunds, and exchanges (not possible in a traditional dropshipping model)

It’s a different experience entirely for the marketplace operator (i.e., dropshipper), the suppliers, and the customers. 

To be honest, at Vendo, we aren't interested in selling goods from AliExpress. We don’t think of Vendo as competing with traditional dropshipping, but rather as an entirely different business model that merely utilizes the principles of dropshipping.

Interested in starting your own dropshipping marketplace business with virtual inventory sourced from domestic brands?

Try our 14 day Free Trial or feel free to book a demo call