As a retailer, launching a dropship program can help your company in numerous ways. You can increase your number of SKUs, infinitely add to your inventory, and expand product assortment. What’s more, dropshipping drastically mitigates the inventory risk and overhead costs associated with traditional wholesale ecommerce models. All that is a direct benefit to your bottom line and by itself could be reason enough to implement a dropship model. However, another valuable aspect of dropshipping, one that’s less immediately obvious, is how beneficial it is for your customers.
While immediate profit is certainly important, customer satisfaction and loyalty is what ultimately determines a company’s long-term success. A dropship program helps guarantee that satisfaction and loyalty.
Dropship programs benefit customers in that they allow retailers to offer them the best possible assortment of products from the best possible brands. Retailers, especially specialized, mid-to-high-end retailers rather than big-box stores, have a voice and a totally unique point of view that consumers embrace and base their purchases off of. A customer might go to Opening Ceremony because she expects to find a certain curation with brands that speak to the Opening Ceremony voice. Alternatively, she might go to Nordstrom for an entirely different, unique point of view. An extended aisle dropship program enables the retailer to extend that point of view, offering consumers a broader selection of brands and products they could not otherwise carry in their stores. The consumer is treated to a much richer shopping experience in this case, one that is not limited from a product assortment or inventory standpoint and is fully representative of the retailer’s voice.
Take, for example, RevCascade client Maisonette, a retailer whose recently-launched online marketplace features the top boutiques and brands in kids’ clothing and furniture. Co-founders and fashion industry veterans Sylvana Durrett and Luisana Mendoza Roccia went with a dropship model for their company because they knew it was the best way to get their customers access to thousands of products from around the globe. Sylvana and Luisana, who are moms themselves, launched Maisonette because they wanted to help parents shop the most fashionable kids’ boutiques from cities around the world—Paris, London, Los Angeles, New York, etc. With a dropship program, they could do exactly that, giving their consumers a far more expansive product mix to choose from than would ever be possible under a traditional wholesale model.
This is why dropshipping is the ultimate win-win-win when it comes to retail. It’s a win for both retailers and brands in that they can increase product mix and sales with no additional inventory or overhead, and it’s a win for customers, who get access to more unique products from the retailers they love. If it’s executed properly, and with the right technology, dropshipping can be a game-changing strategy that radically boosts retailers’ revenue and strengthens their identity and standing in customers’ minds.
