If you'd like to launch an online store but do not have your own inventory, dropshipping can be a good way out - you can sell products without ever having to stock any inventory. You can connect your store to Syncee and Printful to start dropshipping.
With dropshipping, a third-party company (usually, it’s a manufacturer or a wholesaler or a fulfillment company) takes care of producing, storing, packing and shipping products to buyers, while all you have to do is marketing and selling their products as if they were your own.
What is dropshipping
In a nutshell, dropshipping works as follows:
- The customer places an order for a product in your online store.
- You forward the order and customer details to the dropship supplier (either manually or automatically).
- The dropship supplier packages and ships the order to the customer in your name.
The following types of dropshipping are popular:
Acting as a reseller of products. For example, you can resell learning toys of a supplier if you are an expert in child education, and thus you can market them wisely. The orders will be fulfilled by the dropship supplier.
Using a dropshipping print-on-demand service. For example, you are from a music band that wants to sell merchandise to fans, or you are an artist that wants to sell their artworks in the form of canvas prints or framed posters. A print-on-demand service like Printful can produce and store these products, print your designs on them once they are notified of an order, then pack and send the ordered print products to buyers in your name.
To start selling dropshipped products, you should partner with a preferred dropship supplier and list their products in your online store. When you receive an order, forward the order details to your supplier, and they will ship it to the buyer for you.
We have ready integration with Syncee and Printful dropshipping services. You can connect your store to them by installing their apps from the App market. After that, you will be able to quickly import their products to your store and automatically notify them of new orders that they should fulfill.
Connecting your store to Printify
Printify is a print-on-demand and dropshipping platform. With Printify, you can create items with your custom design such as hoodies, phone cases, pillows, etc., and add products to your online store to sell online. Pritify will manage orders fulfillment and shipping so you don’t have to.
To start selling products with custom design in your store, you will first need to connect your online store to your Printify account by using the Printify app. Then, you sync items with custom design from Printify to your store. If you don’t have any items just yet, you can simply craft them in your Printify account. After syncing products, you can adjust their price or any other product details, and then enable them so that they appear in your store and customers can make a purchase.
Once your customers place a paid order in your store, you’ll need to submit that order in your Printify account. After that, the Printify team will process and ship the order for you. The order status will be updated automatically, and your customers will receive an email about their order.
The Printify app costs $8,49 per month.
For detailed instructions on how to set up Printify, read the Connecting store with Printify print-on-demand service article →
Connecting your store to Printful
Printful is a print-on-demand dropshipping service that can be used by designers, artists, sports teams, musicians and others who want to sell branded products or merchandise. It is integrated with your store via the Printful app.
After installing the app you can choose from a range of products in Printful such as t-shirts, hoodies, hats (embroidery), posters, photo prints, canvas, mugs, etc. You can apply your graphics to the chosen products, set your margin on top of Printful prices and publish the products in your store.
When a customer places an order for such a product, Printful will be automatically notified of a new order. It will print your graphics on the ordered product, pack it and send it to the customer in your name.
The app is free to sign up and you only pay when an order is made.
Connecting your store to Syncee
Syncee is a service that provides ready-to-sell products for big and small retail businesses.
You can connect your store to Syncee by using the Syncee app. After installing the app and creating a Syncee account, you can start searching for products or suppliers. Once you pick the item, you can choose a name for the product and add any margin you want. Then you can add it to your Syncee catalog and then sync this catalog with your store. All products from your Syncee catalog will be added to your store.
After a customer places a paid order in your store, it will appear in your Syncee account on the Manage orders page. From your Manage orders page, you can pay the product directly to the Syncee’s supplier with PayPal or credit card. This payment will be sent to the supplier directly. Once the supplier receives your payment, they will fulfill the order. You can learn more about processing orders with Syncee in their help center.
The Syncee app is free to $129 per month. You can also choose one of the Syncee paid plans depending on how many products from the suppliers you want to sell in your store.
Selling products of another dropship supplier
If you want to use another supplier that is not integrated, you can add their products to your store and notify the supplier of the to-be-fulfilled orders. Here is how this can be done:
- Get a list of products from your supplier (ideally, in the form of CSV file or a spreadsheet) and add them to your store in bulk using CSV import.
- Send emails to the supplier about orders that should be fulfilled by them.
You can include the email address of your dropship supplier in the list of the recipients of admin notifications. Or you can use the tools of your mailing service to automatically resend the New Order Placed notifications from your mailbox to your supplier’s address - here is how you can set up forwarding in Gmail, for example.
To make your store ready for accepting orders, you can start with the initial setup guide however take into account the following things:
Use your own product descriptions. Instead of the default texts provided by the supplier, write your own. Unique content is highly rated by search engines, so it will help you to get your store indexed and it will be easier for customers to find you.
Set the supplier’s address as the origin address. If you are going to use real-time shipping quotes in your store, specify your supplier’s address as the Origin address in your store. As a result, it will be used as the ship-from address to calculate shipping costs that shoppers see at checkout.