Dropshipping South Africa

Disadvantages

• Hosting $2.88 a month with Namecheap. Hosting is the servers where your site can be accessed, similar to the building you would rent in conventional business for you to run your shop out of. 
• Woocommerce Dropship plugin $49 (Free With Tee Print) more on this below. Allows you to set up your own dropshipers
• Payfast – ranges from 3.5% plus R 2.00 to 4.5% plus R 5.00 per transaction. This is the payment gateway used by most South African companies it allows you to receive payment over the internet.
• Domain name a .co.za – Afrihost R 197  This is the name of your website as well as it’s location on the web much like a physical store with a name and street address. 
• Then any additional themes and plugins can cost extra if you choose to add functionality. This is all dependent on your individual requirements as there are many free as well as paid plugins. You can get away without spending any extra though. Same as Shopify. 
• Marketing is all dependent on how you market and the model you use, organic traffic ( where you reach people through blogging, podcasting, making YouTube videos, Instagram, etc. is free but costs you on time unless you already have an audience. Paid marketing ( e.g., Facebook ads Google ads, etc.) this varies depending on what platform you are using the niche audience you are going after your how well your ad performs and so on so would be hard to put a specific number
•  

C. Shopify

•  Starts at $29 dollars a month and can integrate nativity with 3rd party suppliers of your choosing, more on this below. This is an alternative eCommerce platform for building your site on
• Same as above for WordPress
• Payfast – ranges from 3.5% plus R 2.00 to 4.5% plus R 5.00 per transaction. This is the payment gateway used by most South African companies it allows you to receive payment over the internet.
• Domain name .co.za – Afrihost R 197  – This is the name of your website as well as it’s location on the web much like a physical store with a name and street address.  

Flexibility 

Location freedom you can run your business single-handed or with help from freelancers or virtual assistants from a laptop from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. It also gives you the advantage of still selling a physical product, by which you are selling a product where people understand the tangible value opposed to trying to sell perceived value as you have to do with digital products. 

3. Dropship suppliers -Finding/Creating Suppliers In South Africa 

This can be tricky as there is not a large variety of Dropshippers in South Africa although this is growing. Below I explain how you can set up your shop to be able to use and automate any supplier for Dropshipping as long as they can fulfill orders directly and can allow ordering through email. Regardless if they have an eCommerce integration or not. “Give a man Dropshiper he will sell few products teach a man to Dropship he will sell for a lifetime”.Or something to that effect.

4. Dropshipping Clothing/custom merchandise

Dropshipping custom clothing aka ‘Print On Demand’. What is “Print On Demand” This term in South Africa is normally associated with books but overseas it is commonly associated with custom clothing. What is it? It is basically Dropshipping of custom-designed merchandise, it is where you sell a t-shirt, hoodie, etc. with your design on it and then the 3rd party company produces the product for you and sends it to your customer under your brand. 

You can get yours set up today with TeePrint. 

E.g Influencer – you have a large Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube following, etc. you tell your customers checkout my new t-shirt with a design unique to your brand, then when your followers go buy the product, it is automatically made and sent to your customer under your brand. You make money on the price difference, buying for less than you sell.

Designer – Another easy way to sell your designs.

Marketer- Easy to set up and test your own niche eCommerce store.

Why print on demand instead of conventional dropshipping

The fact that you are able to create your own custom product serves you in multiple ways. 

• competition.- You are no longer competing directly against the next guy like in conventional dropshipping where you are selling the exact same product. you can create products totally unique to you and your niche.
• price war – you are not competing on price eg if I am selling a toaster what stops the customer from shopping around and finding that same toaster cheaper on another site? Nothing so you end up competing on price
• Branding – if you are dropshipping a toaster from company Xyz normally you have no branding options to put your brand on instead it will be from company Xyz pod offers to customize the product entirely to your brand as if your company made it themselves. 

5. Dropshipping With Shopify

Adding your own dropshippers on Shopify

Dropshipping can easily be set up natively on the Shopify platform for third party fulfillment.

Some people automatically integrate with Shopify otherwise you may follow the steps below to add any supplier of your choosing.

1. First, log into your Shopify Account.

2. Then select settings in the bottom left corner of your screen, then click on shipping which you will find between checkout and taxes.

3. Click “Add Dropshipping Service”. 

4. In the shipping details screen, scroll down till you find “Dropshipping and Fulfilment Services”, then click “Add Dropshipping Service”. If you have already done this and wish to add more, click the “Manage Services” button instead. 

5. In the “Fulfillment and Dropshipping” screen, when scrolling down to the bottom of the page, you will see the “Custom Order Fulfillment” section. Click on the “Add Custom Fulfillment Service” which is on the left side of the screen.

6. Then follow the steps provided. Once you have added a fulfillment partner you can now start Dropshipping with Shopify. When sales are made the third party will handle fulfillment.

6. Dropshipping With WordPress

After you have set up your domain and hosting and installed WordPress and Woocommerce. I am going to explain how you can Integrate Dropshippers with your site.

 Some people offer an automatic integration via a plugin, alternatively, you may set up your own plugin to integrate with whoever you choose.

For Woocommerce the plugin I recommend is  ‘Woocommerce Dropshipping’, which allows you to add your own 3rd party fulfillment, you can assign specific products to the supplier. It will automatically send all the product details via email to your supplier once confirming an order, it also gives the supplier an admin area where they are able to go in and update order status, get details, etc.

Here at Tee Print, this is how we offer fulfillment. We give you this plugin for FREE so when merch is sold on your site, we can automatically fulfill it for you. We also offer instructions on how to set it all up