Starting an eCommerce business calls up for the most planned and effective business strategies with which you can see your online business running at a pace. Out of so many eCommerce strategies, providing a reliable and effective shipping delivery is one with which you can grow your business speedily.

You might have heard of the term “virtual inventory” or “drop shipping”. It is one of the cost-effective and easy ways to get started selling merchandise online. Drop shipping occurs when the merchandise ordered from your eCommerce site is sent directly from a supplier to your customer. This means that you never have to order, store or handle that merchandise. This process minimizes the risk to store owners because they need not to buy the product until it has sold. Suppliers take care of warehousing, packaging and shipping of products. This in turns saves the store owner a great deal of money and it is very convenient.

Drop shipping is much more convenient as no storage cost is incurred and if some product does not sell then there is no loss to website as it does not store products but only acts as a promoter. Thus this promotes a positive cash flow where a site gets paid when a product is sold. Drop shipping acts as an intermediary platform between wholesalers, manufacturers and retailers. It is more reliable and very low investment is required. Even if you don’t sell anything, you don’t lose anything as well.

It has numerous advantages. It helps allocate time, energy and money by outsourcing. It is designed to cut costs, increase sales, save time and reduce risks by being a very attractive model for both beginning and established merchants. Secondly, with drop shipping merchants don’t have to worry about tracking inventory, handling returns, inbound shipments, continually ordering products and managing stock level. Further if you don’t have to deal with purchasing inventory, your overhead expenses will automatically get lowered.

On the other hand if a drop shipper takes care of product fulfillment for you, you are automating the process of shipping the products and you can focus on your core competency- marketing your business to bring in more customers. This is another great advantage of using drop shipping as your business model.

With drop shipping, you have choice of promoting any number of products you want on your website catalogue. Since you do not need to make upfront capital investments, you have the flexibility of promoting as many products as you want, as long as all products are related to the category of products you sell.

In conclusion, drop shipping is definitely an option you should consider if you are planning to start an online retail business without the hassles of inventory and product delivery. If you evaluate the above advantages carefully, you will realize that drop shipping is undoubtedly a viable option for online retailers.