Statista projects that in 2022 the market for dropshipping will be 196.78 billion U.S. dollars globally; this is a whopping amount the beauty products industry cannot afford to ignore. The same report estimates that by 2026, the market will hit 276.1 billion U.S. dollars.
The report that out of the $1.7 billion estimated net worth of Rihanna, $1.4 billion comes from her line of beauty products, Fenty Beauty cosmetics, shows that the beauty product industry is thriving very well. The apt question is, how will drop shippers feature in such big moves, and what will they contribute to ensuring that users get quality beauty products?
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a method retailers use to fulfill their customers’ requirements without actually keeping the products the customers wish to purchase in stock. What businesses do in dropshipping is to get the orders from customers, seek out third parties such as manufacturers, wholesalers, or retailers who have such products, purchase, and ship to customers.
A drop shipper acts as a storefront that customers can visit and place orders for products. After a customer places an order, the drop shipper charges the consumer, while the retailer, manufacturer, or wholesaler charges the drop shipper.
The drop shipper does not in any way handle the actual products. Though you may have organizations in the dropshipping business such as HyperSKU that is a one-stop-dropshipping platform that offers a full portfolio of services right from sourcing to tracking shipments and can also decide to pick and pack your products.
Why do you need dropshipping in the entertainment industry?
The beauty products industry is very big globally, and operators in the industry will need to have large funds to ensure that customers who are scattered around the world get value for their money. Some benefits you can accrue as a drop shipper include:
1. Lower startup costs
If you want to venture into the dropshipping business, you don’t need to invest heavily into inventory and office space; storage is from the wholesaler or manufacturer of the products you want to sell to consumers. A drop shipper does not need to create time for organizing inventory and the labor that must take care of or handle the avalanche of orders.
You can go into dropshipping business in the beauty products industry even with minimal funds and a low barrier for entry. This is quite unlike any traditional business, where you need a lot of funds to hire space and pass the cost on to consumers.
The joy of the dropshipping business is that it saves consumers stress and extra cost the drop shipper adds for the acquisition of space to store products.
2. Scalability
If you are a drop shipper, it’s easy for you to scale rapidly because you don’t need to have a large office space, and you don’t need to have all the employees in this world to ship out orders from consumers. For retailers in the beauty products industry, dropshipping will be of immense benefit since the products their consumers demand are readily available globally.
3. Lower inventory management
Since you don’t need to have any form of physical inventory, you greatly reduce the management overhead you should incur with dropshipping. You also will not expend time and other resources tracking inventory, you don’t need to manage the infrastructure that houses it, or manage to ship; though there are some drop shippers like HyperSKU that have decided to add picking, packing, and shipping to ensure consumers are satisfied.
4. Broad product offerings
With dropshipping, you have the opportunity to have a wide range of products since you don’t require storage. Especially, as a startup, you can easily and readily sell a broad selection of beauty products from different parts of the world.
5. Flexibility
Dropshipping is the nature of business you can operate from any part of the world, as well as offer different types of products. You have the opportunity to capitalize on the internet and do most of your operations online. While some incidents may affect your operations, you can easily change your offerings based on what your consumers demand at any point in time.
Planning for your dropshipping growth in the beauty products industry
The beauty products industry is very wide, so you must first identify the right market opportunity. Knowing that it’s relatively easy for anybody to go into the dropshipping business, you must realize it will be highly competitive.
You need to focus on the area that people have not saturated, and that means you must identify products from the beauty products industry that other sellers have not delved into so much. There must be some products in the industry that retailers may be unwilling to maintain in their physical inventory, these are the type of products you need to focus on.
It’s not every product in the industry that consumers will readily get off the shelf of stores; where these products may not be exactly costly, you can leverage the fact that they are not common in the market to fashion your dropshipping strategy and make your returns. If you focus on these types of products, you can offer them for dropshipping profitably.
One area you must have within your grasp is how to ensure your suppliers, as well as the third party that oversees the actual shipping, do not disappoint you. Customer experience is very critical in the growth of your business, and once your customers are satisfied with your service, you have stabilized your dropshipping business.
This will also give you an advantage over traditional retailers who may not want to go into such products, and your customers can even because of the satisfaction they derive from doing business with you ask you to drop ship other items and products they purchase from regular stores.
Conclusion
Dropshipping may sound odd to operators in the beauty products industry, but once you have done proper research to master the art, it will work out like any other industry. The most important thing about any business venture is to know your target audience and what they want.