Introduction

With a multitude of options to begin a new online career, today I’m going to focus on how to dropship watches through your own online store. This is a common choice when starting your own web store, so you can expect the competition to be fairly fierce.

Having said that, there’s no harm in attempting to beat everyone else at their own game. Maybe you can come from a different angle, or think smarter. The opportunity is there for anyone intent on creating their own online asset. If watches are your passion, then there’s no reason why you cannot compete with everyone else.

So let’s see what it’s going to take to dropship watches through your own online store.

Quick Navigation

Which Store Platform Is Best
Why Dropshipping Is Ideal
Dropshipping Watch Suppliers
Using AliExpress For Dropshipping
Finding The Right Product For Shipping
Types of Watches You Can Sell
Promoting Your Watches
This is a Business
I Can’t Teach You Everything

Which Store Platform Is Best

If you’re considering selling watches online then you’ve probably heard of these eCommerce platforms:

• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• Volusion
• Lemonstand
• 3dcart

There’s several other good eCommerce platforms, as well as dedicated CMS’s that can integrate with eCommerce plugins. For instance, you can use a WordPress website to begin an eCommerce store by installing WooCommerce.

If you’re going to be doing this, you want to make sure your WordPress website is built with an SSL certificate. This is a security layer that visitors can identify, by searching in the domain address bar. If the site visited begins with ‘http’, it’s not secure. If it starts with ‘https’, and has a closed padlock at the beginning, the site has SSL (Secure Socket layer).

The reason you want this is twofold. Firstly, it encrypts information. So if you’re sending sensitive or critically personal information to somebody, you know it’s safe when being transported from one computer to another.

Secondly, if a visitor is going to make a purchase using a credit card, don’t you think they’ll notice if you’re using this security measure. Trust me, a large percentage will notice this. You don’t want to lose sales by not having this in place. For a more thorough explanation on SSL certificates, watch the video below.

Dedicated eCommerce Platforms

My preferred platform would undoubtedly be a platform specifically designed for online store setup. This includes the listed store platforms above, along with a number of others. The most well known and widely used of all these, would be Shopify. These platforms come with a built in payment gateway, making payments security a non issue.

There are several plan options with Shopify, each with their own pros and cons. If you’re going to set up a store on the Shopify platform, your web hosting will be included in the monthly fee. You’ll also be paying Shopify a small commission when each sale is made. All the other platform alternatives will have this also, but fees will vary.

I do like the fact you can start a Shopify store for free, and begin a 14 month trial before making a commitment.

Shopify is my preferred platform for online store creation

Okay, enough about creating a store. Here, you can check out the Shopify pricing plans and see which one suits your situation. Keep in mind that it’s cheaper to pay annually, and you may get extra additions. When I ran my store, I contacted Shopify to ask about ‘real time carrier shipping’, which I needed to be able to activate a particular plugin. They said I’d get it free with the annual membership. It never hurts to ask.

Why Dropshipping Is Ideal

I really like the idea of selling watches online, but it could become a lot more work if you store your own inventory. This is where dropshipping has become one of the most popular selling methods for online store owners.

Dropshipping offers you the ability to sell products on your website, without you having to bulk purchase beforehand. The traditional method of selling involves buying in bulk so you get a much cheaper price, getting the sale online, then sending the product to the customer.

With dropshipping, you work with the manufacturer and have THEM ship the product directly to the customer. This way, you’re free to keep your online store active, and deal with other day to day issues, such as product promotion.

Cutting out some of the chores such as packaging, mailing and inventory storage saves a lot of time. Time that can be much better spent on your business.

Dropshipping Watch Suppliers

Did you know that over 1.2 billion watches are sold every year. Don’t ask me who’s buying them all, I’ve had my watch over 20 years! But it does show you the potential that’s out there.

So where do you find watches to sell in the first place, and who will dropship the items for you? The great thing is, there are places that will do exactly this. Let’s get into the most popular and common dropshipping place online. It’s called AliExpress.

AliExpress is a Asian company, which is also aligned with Alibaba. If you need to purchase cheap products in bulk, head over to Alibaba. Purchasing here means you’ll have to place a minimum order amount, usually 100 – 200 pieces.

But as dropshippers, you don’t sell that many at once, you usually only sell 1-5 items. Enter…AliExpress. You will pay slightly more than buying from Alibaba, but so much cheaper than from Western countries.

AliExpress encompasses hundreds of retailers/manufacturers, and you can buy on their website anytime, even as an individual. Many people just don’t know about this, instead, heading out to shopping centres to get what they need.

But just about everything can be bought from AliExpress, and at a fraction of the price. So how do you use AliExpress to dropship?

Using AliExpress For Dropshipping

The idea is to find the products that suit your niche, and advertise them on your website. You don’t actually buy the product yet, but you do want to get sales.

As far as cost goes, let’s say you see a watch for sale on AliExpress for $15. You advertise it on your online store with a good markup, let’s make it $35. You can even add shipping costs to this, but I’ll get to that shortly.

So, when someone comes to your website and buys this watch, the money goes into YOUR account. You are now responsible for getting the product to the customer. Simply get onto AliExpress, and buy the product at the cheaper price. Fill out your shipping details (which will be your customers address), and leave a message for the AliExpress retail owner NOT to include an invoice.

This is because you don’t want your customer knowing it’s come from AliExpress. Instead, you’ll email them an invoice as part of your online store process.

Finding The Right Product For Shipping

As I mentioned above, you can add shipping to your order. This will be setup inside your Shopify store settings. Ideally though, you want to find products with very cheap shipping, or even no shipping fee.

When searching through AliExpress, each product will have different shipping options depending on the retailer. Many of these shipping options can cost a lot, and also take up to 5-7 weeks to be delivered. This is unacceptable, so what do you look for.

The ideal shipping option you want to find is called ePacket. This is extremely cheap, or even free shipping, and usually very quick delivery. ePacket is the magic behind dropshipping.

Types of Watches You Can Sell

The watch market has become even more diverse due to the recent addition of smartwatches and fitness watches. But what’s also going to help your diversity, is the popularity of traditional watches from years past.

This is what makes dropshipping watches a popular and successful venture. And once you’ve established your brand as a watch seller, you can expand into other associated items.

This is especially true when it comes to smartwatches, because they connect to various devices. So once a visitor adds a smartwatch to their cart, you can suggest connectable devices also.

Promoting Your Watches

So you have an online store, but how are your visitors going to find you. Attracting websites visitors is the toughest part of any online business, and you need to get sales to stay afloat. So what are the alternatives?

Ideally, free traffic is going to be the most beneficial, but also the hardest. By free traffic, you can use SEO on your website to rank in the search engines. Even though this will take time to work in your initial stages of setup, I’d recommend implementing it so Google will recognise your site and rank it when the time is right. It can take a while to get traction in the search engines.

In the meantime, you can use social media as your free traffic source. Simply set up a FanPage (Facebook) or bio page on Instagram or other social channels. Then get busy promoting.

The good courses that can teach you how eCom works, generally recommend Facebook advertising. They’ll show you how to setup advert campaigns, get your targeting spot on and the best budgeting options.

This is the ideal method of traffic generation to begin with, but you still need to get a good handle on how it all works, and how to test various campaigns. You don’t want to waste money by experimenting without educating yourself, so make sure you learn as you progress.

I’ll give you a few recommendations of eCommerce courses shortly.

This is a Business

If you venture down the path of dropshipping watches, I’d like to remind you that this is a business, and there’s more to it than just selling watches or other jewellery. You really need to understand what you’re getting into, and how some of the available plugins will be able to help automate aspects of your business.

Here’s a list of what else you need to be aware of when beginning a dropshipping store.

• Email Marketing – There’s a way to capture the email address of each customer that purchases through your online store. Once you have a decent list of email addresses, you can promote new deals from your store, even with discount codes. These discounts can all be setup inside of Shopify. I can’t emphasise enough, the benefits of leveraging an email list.
• Plugins – There’s hundreds, if not thousands of plugins available for Shopify. Some of these can help automate invoices and emails, retarget customers that didn’t follow through with a purchase, help with real time shipping, add a currency converter or even export bulk order details.
• Customer Service – As an online store owner, you’re not only responsible for the good parts of your business, but there’s always going to be some disgruntled customers. This is where you’ll have to deal with customer service, refunds and returned items.

I’m mentioning all this because I want you to go into dropshipping watches with your eyes wide open. The great part about this kind of business is that when you’re up and about, you can make some really great profits.

These days I do affiliate marketing, which only makes a fraction of the cost (but enough NOT to work a day job), and comes with a lot less responsibility. The more in control of your own store asset, the bigger profits you can make. There’s also the possibility that you can sell your store down the track, and people can pay millions for a profitable online store with proven success.

I Can’t Teach You Everything

Not everything can be taught in one article, and to be honest, I’m no expert. I’ve begun an online store in the past with limited success, but I wasn’t fully committed. This is something you need to put a lot of effort into to be successful, and I believe that anyone can do it. However, I’m not the Shopify guru.

However, I do know who is an expert, because I followed his course. Adrian Morrison’s eCom Success Academy is the best course I’ve come across that not only teaches store setup, but everything else I’ve mentioned in this article regarding management of an online store.

This course encompasses over 160 videos of super informative advice and tips, and covers everything required to be successful. This is your go to guide to dropship any product. You can read my full review of eCom Success Academy here, which covers what’s in each module. I’ve also written an more thorough article on how dropshipping really works.

As an alternative to Adrian Morrison’s course, I’ve recently reviewed a course by Ricky Hayes called eCom Lifestyle University. This comes at a fraction of the cost, and is a brilliant course to get started in eCommerce.

Wrapping Up

Beginning an online dropshipping store can be so fulfilling, especially when you start making big profits. It’s an opportunity that can allow you to leave that office job, and ultimately offer you more freedom. But you will need to do some hard yards in the beginning.

I certainly recommend getting yourself educated. There’s just so much of this type of business that you could miss, and experts like Adrian Morrison have already figured out the best pathway ahead. 

I hope I’ve offered some decent advice on how to dropship watches as an online business.

If you have any questions or thoughts on how to dropship watches or other jewellery, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment below. I will reply as soon as I can!