What is dropshipping/drop shipping and who uses it?

Dropshipping, also known as drop shipping, offers you as a retailer the opportunity to offer products without building up your own warehouse. With this business model, the complete warehousing and logistics to your customer is taken over by your supplier. Dropshipping is used by many online shops; whether small companies who want to start online trading or established eCommerce’ler who want to expand their range using dropshipping without wanting to invest a lot of capital in products.

Process of a drop shipping order

1. You make the supplier’s products available to the end customer in your online shop or on the marketplaces
2. The end customer orders a product and pays for it directly to you
3. You order the product from your supplier using the dropshipping method and enter your customer’s delivery address
4. Your supplier packs your order neutrally and sends it to your customer on your behalf

Challenges involved in drop shipping

After you have registered with your desired dropshipping supplier, you are already faced with the first problem; How do I automatically get the items for dropshipping in the shop?

The wholesaler often supports you here with a data feed such as e.g. b. CSV, API interface, XML or in TXT format.

Each shop system requires the data in a different format, unfortunately there is no uniform “dropshipping format”. Now you are forced to manually bring the wholesale data into a format that you can import into the shop.

In addition, you have to update your shop with the dropshipper data several times a day so that you always offer the correct stocks and prices in the store.

Automate Dropshipping – Drop Shipping Made Easy

Import2Shop creates the interface between your supplier and your online shop.

If you wish, our software can import all of the wholesaler’s products into your shop fully automatically. All categories, images and product descriptions provided by the supplier are imported. However, you also have the option of determining which articles, manufacturers or categories you would like to import into your shop.

It is possible to map your own shop categories with wholesaler categories. In this way, the products are imported directly into the correct shop category. Import2Shop also calculates the product sales price based on the purchase price or the RRP (if the wholesaler provides this). We do this using price templates, which you can easily create in our web interface.

Price templates can be created globally for the wholesaler or for specific manufacturers, categories or individual items.

Inventory and price reconciliation can occur up to 3 times an hour, 24 hours a day. New products are imported once a day.

It is possible to send orders to the wholesaler directly from our web interface. If this supports the Import2Shop order automation, you can automatically send the order to the wholesaler with just a few clicks. You or your employees do not have to enter the order data. Import2Shop recognizes in your dropshipping orders whether they are items from your stock and to which supplier the order has to be handed over. Third-party items are ignored so that you are spared problems when transferring the order. You can order these third-party items manually from the relevant wholesaler.

We currently offer you an interface to the following shop systems:

1. Shopware 5 and 6
2. Gambia
3. WooCommerce
4. Shopify

Import2Shop is a modular system that consists of a basic module that includes all of the above points.

Additional modules are constantly being made available to you, some of which are free of charge. You can easily add these if required. Some of our modules (including those under development):

1. Attributes module for fully automatic filter creation in Shopware and WooCommerce shops
2. Own storage module for maintaining your own products
3. Name customization module: remove words from product names or add descriptions
4. Automatic order transmission: Orders can be automatically transmitted to the wholesaler

If you have any questions or need help with your dropshipping automation, please call us on 03574/8693342 so we can answer your questions.